Got down to the allotment around 11 ish and started on the winter digging right away.  I dug a trench four spade widths across and three spits down.  I wanted to bury some of the shredded laylandii.  It is not just laylandii; it is also other woody material however it is mostly laylandii.

Dug the trench out fairly quickly now that I have a system for putting the soil where I know which spit it has come from.  Topmost in front of me on the dug soil, next spit on the left side on undug soil and the final spit gets put on the end on the left too. Even at this depth the soil did not really look any different to the top soil so I have to be careful to replace the soil in the correct order. The bottom of the trench got a good forking over.  I got four barrow loads of shreddings and put them at the bottom of the trench.  I make sure that I meet up with the shreddings that I put into previous trenches by cutting the soil right back to the previous trench.

I covered this with the third spit soil using the cone piles method of mixing.  I build up a cone of soil when I am replacing soil in the trench.  It was the way that I was taught to mix soils at the Glasshouse and Crops Research Institute when I was working in the glasshouses there.  The main reason for digging like this is to mix the soil completely so that nutrients are fairly well distributed throughout the soil.

I leveled out the mixing cones of soil in the trench and then went to get some leaves.  Two barrow fulls of leaves were put into the trench and then covered first with second spit soil and then with first spit soil.  It left a bit of bump in the soil and I have taken my rake home to make some new lawns so I could not level it out very well.  I could have used the claw but I wanted to carry on with the digging.  I did the same procedure three times which I felt was quite good going particularly as the shreddings and leaves were so far away and I had to wheel barrow them up the hill.

Yesterday, I picked some Brussel sprouts, dug up some leeks and parsnips, took them home, washed them and had them cooked for tea.  They tasted really good.

I really do not know how people can eat Brussel sprouts any other way.  They taste foul if left for even one or two days.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 7th, 2010 at 7:33 pm and is filed under digging, Montezuma method. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.