There have been changes in the climate since the Earth formed. Ice ages are a good example. They were probably caused by fluctuations in greenhouse gases and radiation from the Sun. Just like today.
Science does not prove things one way or the other. Scientists leave proof to mathematicians. Science does not deal in facts although lots of scientists would argue with that. Good scientists go with the data, their measurements and try to interpret them as reasonably as possible.
Let me give you an example. I could grow a row of peas measure their height and the weight of peas I got from them. I could measure the amount of nutrient added to the soil. I could relate that to the weight of peas obtained. Yet you could come along and say you don’t believe in my peas and you are not going to look at the measurements because the peas do not exist. Your belief does not alter the existence of the peas one way or the other. The problem comes when your belief makes you walk across my allotment as if the peas were not there and destroy them all.
Science does not prove things; it just interprets data, hopefully reasonably.
Bad data produces bad interpretation. Any scientist worth their salt would have questioned, and did question, the Himalaya assertions. I don’t think that they based their report on any scientific data whatsoever. They just believed it to be so.
But it was basic physics that enabled us to question those assertions. Questioning data is a fundamental part of science and is going on all the time not just with silly assertions about Himalayan glaciers. That’s what they were doing in the leaked emails. They were talking about how they were going to challenge someone’s data. Very legitimate part of science.
How could you do it any other way without waiting until 2030? You cannot use science to shoot science down.
Fiddling the facts is not part of science. It may be part of corporate business, government spin, and people’s financial gain. Again, though just because they are doing this does not change the data. The measurements are the measurements. People are wrong to do it and there are a lot of scientists out there that are much cleverer than I am that will shout their objections very loudly; just as they did with cold fusion. To say that things are not happening because you believe a tabloid newspaper or Jeremy Clarkson does not alter the data either. The truth will out…
The most reasonable interpretation of the data is that the climate is warming. Don’t take my word for it just look at the graphs on http://www.realclimate.org/ for yourself. I would wish a lot more people looked at the data for themselves rather than rely on a television presenter for their views. There is also increasing evidence that human activity has caused this temperature increase. There is further evidence that this increase in global temperatures is affecting low lying ocean islands due to rise in sea levels. Expansion of the Sahara desert in Africa is a lot more serious than whether you have to pay more tax for your lawn mower petrol.
This is just the beginning. As Jesus said: there is none so blind as those that cannot see.

Potatoes straight from the ground are beautiful. With a little freshly picked mint and sometimes with a little butter you will rarely taste anything more wonderful. If you can serve them up with a few carrots and freshly podded peas, you could want for nothing more.

As for breaking up the ground - potatoes don’t break up the ground - you do; digging in manure, digging trenches, and hoeing them up. However all this exercise produces some lovely vegetables.

I never water my potatoes and get some fairly big ones. The RHS did some research a few years back and found that watering vegetables did increase their weight and size. If you can I would water them at least twice a week, however this depends on how many you have. It would be impractical for me to water because I have so many. We cannot use hoses or sprinklers.

I have rubbed off all the eyes in past years and got a really good crop. I only do it if the shoots become drawn - I left my seed potatoes in the dark one year and they produced long white stems. I have also reduced the number of eyes to two or three in the past. I think that this helps to produce larger spuds but that might just be me whishfully thinking. I wouldn’t rub them off if they are the small,dark green ones.
I always put my late potatoes in before my earlies . That way they get a good long maturing period. I try to plant when there is less chance of frost. Early April maybe.

 There is  a difference between humus and dead organic matter in the soil.  Humus is a dark coloured amorphous colloidal liquidy material that leeches out of a compost heap.  It seems to have a very complicated chemical make up and is formed when dead plants and animals decay.  Animal excrement also seems to be important in its formation.  By animals I mean all the mini beasts that live in the litter.  It is a colloid and this enables it to retain water and this helps to improve the water holding capacity of the soil.  A colloid is a mixture but not exactly a solution of one finely divided material suspended within another material.  Humus is usually a colloidal solution.  Humus also increases soil fertility and makes it more friable.  Humus that is made from more acidic materials such as coniferous trees is called mor.  This type of compost is made mainly by fungi decomposing the material.  Humus that is more akaline is called mull and is the type that is more likely to be found in allotment soil.  Mull is much more likely to encourage earthworms and other small soil organisms.

Really this is what we want to obtain from the compost heap. When  the heap goes that friable black soil like material it contains a lot of humus.  Putting it on the soil allows microorganisms to  finish off the decomposition and turn the humus into nutrients.  However, this is a very long process and some material will spend years if not centuries locked up in the soil.

Why would anyone want to go to the trouble of making raised beds if they don’t need to?  The only reasons that I can come up with is to help to drain the allotment or for people who cannot bend down easily.

I have raised the whole of my allotment to get running water off it.  Being near the top of a hill means that springs emerge in several places.  I have burried two 6 inch diameter pipes across the allotment to drain them and with 3 soak aways under the paths this is coping with the water and the top is rarely too wet to walk on.

In the past I have sunk up to the top of my wellingtons, if not more, at this time of year.   Eric suggested a long time ago that I should raise the allotment with upright slabs.  They were more than adequate.  The only downside of them is that they allow little trickles of soil to escape through the joins.  This really is skirting around the fact that they are blooming heavy and take a lot of heaving about to get them planted in into the soil with any kind of asthetic effect.  I would not advise you to do this particulary around a 30 by90 allotment.

At its lowest the allotment is about 18 inches above the trackway.  At its highest it is about 2ft above the trackway,  although where I have burried the brushwood it is much higher in the middle of the allotment.  It looks quite dome shaped.  The streams bubble out under the slabs and onto the path so you can imagine the state of the path at the moment.  Still it keeps the nutters off the allotments because they don’t like walking through quagmire.

One of my next jobs is to take all the slabs out along the path to the tap and make sure that this bed is square.  It is really irritating that, when planting rows of vegetables there is a triangle of soil that is useless to plant in effectively and  is left to the weeds.  I just need to straighten up this bed and then I will move the path over a little.  This old path was laid on top soil so I am going to take a spit out where the path is going to go and replace it with stones removed from the Council soil.  Both Don and Tony, who got the Council soil too, have been removing stones avidly and leaving them by my allotment.   I will have plenty especially as I am going to bury the old greenhouse concrete foundations too.   I will use the topsoil to raise where the greenhouse used to be because it is a little low.  I might put slabs along the other side of the path too because this soil is getting high and falling onto the path in places.  It will get even worse when I take out the apple mint and the raspberries.

I have got to find somewhere good for the apple mint.  I planted it here because, when I walk up to the tap, I crush some of the mint leaves and it smells really good.

Aromatherapy  - gardeners had this a long time before it got fashionable.

Which brings me back to raised beds - as opposed to raised allotments.  Is this just a fashion too or is there some good horticultural reason for using them.  There are too many paths for me to be doing with.  If I am paying for the ground I want the maximum to be for growing.  I have three paths.  One to the tap and used to be to the greenhouse before I took it down.  Another is to the new shed.  The third is to two big water buts and along the raspberry row.

So why raised beds?  Has anyone done any comparison of yeild from raised verses ground level gardening?  Is there a relationship between the hight off the ground and the yeild you get from the raised bed?  Should we be building 8ft, 12ft or higher beds?  Should we be putting vegetables into a large wooden box and raise it up into the air with a tower crane?  Should we be suspending raised bed boxes from hot air balloons.  Maybe the best effects would be on the Space Station… What do I know?  I’m just a simple allotment gardener.  Keep talking bull shit - it is good for the allotment, Tone.

I woudl suggest, and I only have anecdotal evidence for ths, that gardeners that go to all the trouble of making wooden skirts for their beds are also those that have a lot of time on their hands and spend it carefully cultivating their works of art.   If you are going to all the trouble of making easy access beds then you are going to make sure that you easily access them as often as you possibly can.  This is what produces large yeilds of beautiful vegetables.

In my opinion yeild is all down to the enthusiasm of the gardener.  Those that put the hard work in will reap the rewards of a good harvest. And this will be regarless of elevation.

Which brings me to Roundup…

New allotmenteers are sometimes discouraged because their allotments are covered in brambles, nettles and couch grass.

There seems to be three camps for allotment clearing.

•  Spray, slash and burn
• Cover with black plastic and wait for a couple of years.
• Do a bit of gardening and dig the weeds out.  It is harder work but far more satisfying.

So, what do we have an allotment for?  Do we put in that much work for chemical covered vegetables that we could easily buy down at the nearest supermarket?  Do we go down to the allotment to breath in noxious chemicals that we can easily breath in down by the nearest main road?

I would rather put my hands in good rich soil that is not contaminated by man made chemicals.  I would rather eat vegetables that do not have to grow in contaminated soil.

I am in the hard work camp.  Get your spade and fork out and do some graft.

Now some will moan that they do not have time to dig out all the weeds.  Well if that is so, why are you cultivating an allotment in the first place because it does not get easier.

If you have no time to clear, you have no time to maintain.  They are equally time consuming.  Chemicals will do things sooner but why not cut out the middle man and go direct to the supermarket because you will get the same…

To  all you chemical fiends - not near my allotment please.

Snow has all gone  now.  The water hasn’t  though.  Very wet.

This blog has been read by 100,200 people.  Now come on folks you don’t think I have read my blog that many times…

Sometimes I despair about the way that misconceptions are readily passed on in education.   I look  at quite a few gardening sites and it is remarkable how many of them just repeat the same advice without any reference to where it originally came from.  I think that a lot of this is self perpetuating and feeds off itself.  I have just found  this again on  crop rotation.  AHHHHHHHH! I have rotated crops every which way but loose and have never found any difference in the way that the vegetables grow.  Just don’t grow the same crop in the same area year after year if you can help it.  I have a six year rotation and I am fairly strict about not planting brassicas in the same place for at least 6 years.

Too many so  called scientific facts are based on little empirical data or evidence.   Don’t just repeat: make sure that you do  it yourself or at least  look at the data and make up your own mind.  Science is not  the recalling of facts.  It is the interpretation of data and evidence.  While anecdotal evidence is anecdotal at  least it is evidence which can be interpreted.  Repeating facts unquestioningly means that you are not making a judgement about their worth.  This is the problem with the public understanding  of science.  People do not understand that science  is not a body of facts.  It is a body of best interpretation of data.   And that interpretation will change as more data is obtained.  The most sensible interpretation of the data is that Jeremy Clarkson, TV presenter, is wrong.  Global  warming is happening and human augmentation is significant.

I hear that nowadays you can become a master composter.  My word, I don’t know how I could possibly have successfully gardened for fifty years without this accolade.  I have been piling up vegetable matter into a heap, leaving it for a while and digging it in every year since I started gardening, when I was eight years old.  Some compost was better than others and I must admit, if the layer technique; which I learnt from the old Victorian books, was used I got fairly good friable compost.  However, just piling it in a heap did more or less the same job with much less time and effort needed.

Who makes up these awards and what authority do they have  to  hand out these qualifications?

The layer technique was:

• Put a good layer of brush wood at the bottom for drainage.
• Start  the  compost off with a 1 foot layer of difficult to decompose material like straw, hedge cuttings,  woody perennial  material, leaves and  woody weeds etc.
• Next put on  a 1 foot layer of easily decomposable material like annual weeds, lawn  grass cuttings, vegetable  peelings,  cow, pig, chicken and pigeon manure etc.
• After that put 1 foot of sieved garden top soil.
• Dust the topsoil with a couple of handfuls of lime.
• Then  put  a new layer of difficult to decompose material maybe shredded  paper this time and then repeat the process  again

There were several reasons why I never was able to do this kind of composting.  You never have the right kind of material at the right time.   During  the autumn and winter  I  have lots of difficult  to  decompose material and in the summer I have tons of the  readily decomposable material.  Secondly, where am I going to get good top soil to put on a compost heap?  Digging holes in the allotment and using precious top soil was never an option for me.  I have used poorer soil and subsoil on the compost to try and improve the soil and use it on the allotment. It  has worked to some extent but it made the compost very stony.

Now I have made the heretical assertion that you should put leaves on a compost heap.  Shock and horror.  By leaves in this context I do mean tree leaves.   For some unknown reason they should not be added to the normal compost heap but should always be composted on their own.

I think that this is because in the Victorian age  the  estate gardeners would use rotted tree leaves as  a potting compost.  It does make a really good friable medium for seed compost and when mixed with sieved topsoil and grit will make a very acceptable potting compost. Yet there  is  no law  that states that  you cannot put tree leaves on  an ordinary compost heap.  I have heard people say that tree  leaves are rotted down by fungi.  That’s true, but so  is virtually all the other things  that you put onto  a compost  heap.  If you don’t believe me look  at grass cuttings  after  they have been on the compost for a while.  They have  the  tale, tale signs  of white threads running  through them.

There are few composts that  will add appreciable amounts of nutrient  to the soil.  However, plants do not necessarily need an  awful lot of nutrient.  Just as  long as you put back what you took  out you can’t go  wrong.   In  addition to compost from the compost heap,  I  add cow,  horse,  pigeon,  sheep and goat  manure when I can get it.  It’s all  grist  to the mill.

For  many years I did  not have a compost heap at all.  Now I  have  three that I put up last year.   Before, I liked  to bury all the compost material directly into a trench between the comfrey plants and I may continue to do this this year now that the comfrey has established itself again.  I was always cautious about adding grass cuttings that people had left near the  gate because you never knew what  noxious substances they had been putting on their lawns.  Allowing it to first  be processed by comfrey plants seemed the best thing to do.

I was up the allotment today for the first time  in  about three  weeks  to  do some serious work.  I  have  been harvesting  the Brussel,  parsnips  and leeks but doing nothing  else.   The bloke with the shire  horses on the common brought some horse muck over and when he was tipping it out got the trailer stuck in the mud.  The amount of  running water on the surface is phenomenal although I have seen this before when  there has  been  a thaw.   I said that I would help by taking off as much of the horse muck  as I could to lighten the trailer.

Well he tried several times to get the trailer out and it was stuck fast.    He went off to get a four wheel drive big tractor while I and two other blokes from the allotment tried to offload as much as we could.

We must have emptied about a third of the trailer before he came back and it took  a couple of seconds for the big tractor to extract the trailer.  The rest of the manure was dropped off and he left.

I think  that the new concrete bins are  far too far back from  the trackway and this means that the trailers need to cross the soft ground before they can be off loaded.

Still I got some  manure and put it around  the black current bushes.   I  had a good look at the bushes because I thought that I had some big bud. (Eriophyes ribis).  Now I don’t think I have.  They are  just good big plump buds.

I think that a lot of people  dig out a runner bean trench and put peelings, lawn  mowings and other composty things at  the bottom  of it then  backfill.   I have done  that with impunity for years, never having  any problems with the beans. I may not have time  to  do this this year because I still have not transplanted the raspberries yet and this is where I have decided to put the runners.   Having said this,  I will dig a trench if I have the  time.   I don’t know if it makes any difference to  the crop  you get and I have never compared trenched with untrenched.

Some people  line their trench  with newspaper.  I don’t  do this mainly because I never  remember to take newspaper up the allotment at the appropriate time.

I  am sure that while the newspaper will inevitably cause nitrogen  to be removed from  the  soil for a while, (while the bacteria are decomposing the paper) at this depth it would not adversely affect the runner beans.

What amuses me is, although these people do  this for their beans,  they criticise me for doing it with the whole allotment.  If it is good enough for beans why is it any different for the other vegetables? I don’t use newspaper.  I use brushwood.  I expect it does a similar job.

My runner beans this year will be “Aintree”.   It cropped really well last year and the year before.  Although I do have a soft spot for “Scarlet Emperor” and grew if for a great number of years, it does not do as well as Aintree.

At about 12 o’clock today I harvested several parsnips,  leeks and  some brussel sprouts.  They were washed and cooked by 4 this afternoon and  eaten for dinner.   By jove the taste was wonderful…

Makes it all worth while.

Beetroot seems to have gone over.  They  were affected by the snow.

You know I  really do have a great respect for the agricultural and horticultural knowledge of the ancient South  American  indian civilizations.    I think that  the jury is out as to whether the terra preta soils were deliberately produced or just resulted from  humans throwing out their waste materials.  I would  like to think that they were making these soils consciously.

There seems to be some  advantage to  adding composted activated charcoal to the soil.  Looking at the  properties  of activated charcoal, it  seems to be able to adsorb large amounts of organic compounds and this  characteristic seems to allow it  to  contribute to the fertility of the soil - for  hundreds if not thousands of years.  This interests me because apart from contributing  to the fertility of my allotment it would also help to sequester carbon in the soil.

Now previously in these blogs I have berated people for  lighting smoky fires  and  allowing  the  smoke to  blow over my allotment.   However, do I have to modify my opinion of fires now?  I don’t think  so.   Charcoal burning  may well be a good way of increasing  and  sustaining  the fertility of the soil but not near my allotment.

I am told there are charcoal producers that prevent noxious fumes from  venting  to the atmosphere.   I  am dubious… However, in the spirit of scientific or at the least horticultural exploration I will indeed try composting some activated charcoal  and see  if  it adds to the fertility  of the allotment when I dig it in.  Maybe  I  will also  put some under the peas because it  seems to help with the nitrogen fixing bacteria.

Snow  has gone now and I am looking forward to  digging on the allotment again.  I will continue with my Montezuma method because I think that this will also help to sequester carbon in the soil.

Charcoal and compost I can cope with.   I doubt very much if I will make my own especially if it involves burning fish and  bones.  How about mixing it with blood fish  and bone?  Worth thinking  about Tone…

Well  this  is  interesting.  We  have not had  a winter  like  this for  years in  England.  When I started to  garden  seriously - when I was about eight years old,  winters were like this.  The soil was like iron  and water froze  solid  in the butts.

Well I cannot get the leeks or the parsnips out of the ground at the moment.   During the Christmas  break, however,  we had fresh  parsnips,  a few leeks, brussel sprouts, beetroot and  brocolli.  We also  used  frozen  peas, maize, beans,  carrots and stored  pumpkin,  onion and potatoes.    That  is twelve  vegetables for Christmas  lunch…

Some nutter has  been  pulling  out my winter cauliflowers  for  some reason  and  I  have  lost  about  a  row of them.   Not  to  worry because I  have another two  rows.

What  can  you say?

All  the winter digging has  stopped.

The  four large silver birch were taken down by friends in November.   There was a large amount of brushwood and branches which I took down to the allotment.  I also  took down  the  large 5-8 cm branches.  I  would  have taken the  trunks  as  well  but they wanted them for their  log fires.  I took  out a line of gooseberry bushes and buried them as  well.  They keep on getting American mildew and I want to buy some resistant ones.  I love gooseberries.  I took out several of the blackcurrents as well and buried them with the gooseberries.  They were very old varieties that I was given ages ago when I first got the allotment.  They were not really producing very many fruit so I have replaced them with cuttings I took  of the new varieties.

I dug pits three spits  down carefully making sure that the layers of soil were not mixed.  Now  you can believe this or  not  but  I still had  top soil at this depth.  The top spit was  exceptionally fine  and  friable because  I  had  sieved it  several times over the  years.   I put quite a layer of  brushwood,  leaves and  compost in the bottom of the  pit.  The  larger branches  at the very bottom and the finer  pieces  nearer the  surface.   My son had cut the smaller pieces into approximately  5cm pieces so  a  lot  would fit into a small  area. I replace  the soil carefully mixing each  layer using the conical pile method.  If you make a pile of soil into a cone  shape  then each time  you put another spade full of soil on the top of it, it  mixes down the sides.  This  is how I used to mix potting composts when I worked  in tomato glasshouses.  Each  layer  was  mixed  like  this when  I  put the soil back  into the pit.   I did not mix the layers though.

Now the conventional  wisdom  is that this  addition of high carbon to nitrogen material  will  deplete  the soil  of nutrients.  After doing this  for  many  years,  I  question whether  this  is true in  all circumstances.   My new stainless  steel  spade  has a blade about 12 inches which means  that I am  going down about 3 feet.  At this level would  decomposition cause nutrient loss?  Nitrogen  is used both by bacteria  and  fungi to make their bodies.  This  nitrogen must be  obtained  from the  soil  some how or other.

The bacteria  could only get the  nitrogen from  the decomposing  material  itself.  The  fungi on  the other  hand  could stretch out mycelium into  the surrounding soil in  search of nitrogen.  The most  likely  place  that  they would find  it is  in the top 6 inches of topsoil.  Would  this be  feasable for  fungi  to  grow  mycelium  this  long.  Well in  this  though experiment,  I  have to say there  is evidence that mycelium do  grow remarkably long and this would not be unusual.  So,  I  want  to  find  out  next  year if the onions  suffer  with  nitrogen  depletion - although  I  have been  given  some  free  blood,  fish  and  bone and have already put it on the winter  onions,  shallots  and  garlic.   I  don’t really think that burying brushwood this deep will affect the plants growing in the top soil significantly. I would like a harvest of onions that is  not affected by Napomyhza gymnostoma, the onion miner fly, which  is a much more pressing problem than  worrying about nutrient depletion.  To that end I will be covering the  winter onions  with enviromesh  as soon as the cold whether has gone.

The effect  of burying brush wood  like this is to raise the allotment soil up at least 6 inches or so.  The theory is  that the brushwood would keep the subsoil  open and porous to  excess water.   Where the soil has  not been able  to fall through the brushwood, there would be  voids which water could pass through with little obstruction.   This would cause  the ground to be  much better drained.   There has not really been a water problem on this part of the allotment since just after I took it over,  however I would like to make sure that  the  water that  is on the rest of the allotment has  an  easy route off, and this  route will also include this  area now.

Another  reason  I  think that this  is will be  advantagous  is  that the decomposition  will produce heat  and  warm  the soil.  This is the theory behind the  ridge  for  ridge  cucumbers.   I must admit that when I went up and tried to dig this  area at the start of  the very cold weather it was just as hard as any other part of the allotment.  Maybe the heat had not penetrated across to the area that I was digging in.   Maybe I need to wait until  the  spring  before the bacterial and fungi start doing their job.

I must admit that the  pumpkins  did  well  on the  manure pile (that  I  left because  it was contaminated  with  aminopyuralid herbicide) possibly because of  the heat the manure  generated .

Moreover, a layer  of decomposing organic  matter like this could also  help   to  prevent  water loss during  the  summer. Evaporation from the  top of  the  soil  would cause water to  rise during  periods  of hot  dry  weather due  to  capillary action.   A thick layer of  brush  like  this  would  slow this process  down with  any luck.  Whether  this  is  infact  what  will  happen  remains to  be  seen, although I  think  that  this  is  the  theory  behind  digging  a  bean  trench and  putting  lots  of compost at  the  bottom  of it.

I am  encouraged  by finding  out that the South American early civilisations used this as a method to make terraced fields and also to  drain  fields  around  lakes.  These  are the  peoples that bred  potatoes, beans, tomatoes, maize,  cucumber,  marrow,  squashes,  and many more  food  plants.  Respect…

As my back  has  improved a lot,  I  will probably be down at the allotment as soon as the  weather improves.  I really hope that this cold  weather will have seen off a lot  of  pests on the allotment.   With that  in mind the only reason that  I  want to  go  to  the allotment at the moment is to replenish  the bird feeders.

The sweet peas seem to be holding up in the greenhouse.  I would have liked to transplant them  into their opend ended  pots before  the cold weather  really set in but I  haven’t so we will just have  to  wait and hope they will  survive.   There is  no  heat  in the greenhouse.

I am looking  at catalogues and  websites at the moment because I will have  to order my seeds soon especially if I want the  varieties that work on the allotment.   I am going to go for kestrel and Sante potatoes again.  They worked fairly  well even though they had the contaminated horse manure on them.   They have decided to use aminopyuralid again after banning it last year.  I cannot see how they can keep it out of the manure.  Still I  will get some  horse manure  from  Tony in the next few weeks.  I have left a space on  the  allotment to pile it  on.  I will  put it under the potatoes again because  I  see little benefit  to  leaving  it  to  rot  down  for  a year on a pile.   I have  always dug in manure fresh  or not -  it  might as well rot down in the soil as on a heap.  By the time  I get around to planting the potatoes in this area the manure will have had  at least threee  or  four months to decompose.   I  never find that it is so hot that it  damages the  plants.  The only manure that I would be  very careful with is pigeon  because that can seriously damage  the  soil if  put on  neat.   Pigeon  manure  will  be  put onto the compost heap  as an accelerator - not that I  have a  compost heap for any lenght  of time.   I  like  to dig stuff in  straight  away if I have a space on the allotment.  I  dig  it in at least two  spits deep  so  that it  does not affect the top soil.

I will put most of  the compost that  I  have collected this year onto the bottom plot.   It still needs to be raised up a lot - it has still got running water on the surface.   With the very poor new soil that the council have given me, there is a big need for  organic matter to be incorporated into it.  It will be the area for the peas this year and this will give me the opportunity to add lots of manure and compost into the trenches before planting.  I doubt that I will get such good peas this year as  last.  We will  see…

Other jobs that I would be doing if the weather was a little more clement would be to move all the raspberries to their new home and to straighten the old path.  As the  allotment has been raised up, where I am going to straighen the path is about 2 feet below the soil surface.  I will have to dig away some of this bed,  move the  soil retaining  paving slabs across and  then replace the  soil.  There may be some soil  left over so I will use it to raise the  ground where I took the old greenhouse down.