It was snowing today so, apart from picking some brussel sprouts and leeks, I did not do anything on the allotment.

I’ve seen on a website that a so called expert said that adding animal manures to the soil was dangerous because  bacteria like E. coli could infect the soil.  Splashes of soil onto plants would then infect the plants causing illness when they are eaten.  Well, I should have died years ago then.  I have been eating vegetables from soil fertilised by animal manure since I was weaned.  I am sure that there are a lot of perfectly healthy people  that have lived in the eons before me that have eaten vegetables grown in this way too.

The problem is that people used to the sterilised, vacuum packed, plastic coated vegetables from  supermarkets are not used to washing their food thoroughly -or cooking it properly.  One of the best ways of adding organic matter, that is in a form readily available to be mineralised (changed into nutrients), is in the form of cow, horse, pig, goat and sheep manure.  While I am a vegetarian, I am not a vegan.  Which is a bit like saying that you support the liberal democrat party -sitting on the fence between labour and conservative. So I do not object to using animal manures.

I am not sure of why vegans do not like to use animal manure.  The animals were not harmed when they were producing it.

You can see I have put fresh horse manure around the blackcurrent bushes.

The heap of soil indicates  where I am doing the Montezuma digging. There is also annual grazing rye and tares green manure ready to be dug in in the Spring.  This is where I am going to grow the runner beans and the sweet peas.  As you can see the garlic and the winter onions have suffered a little with this hard winter.  Particularly up here on the top of the hill.  The slope is north facing too and I always say anyone who can garden successfully on Wakey Hill is a blooming good gardener.

So the next question is: “Can you put fresh manure on the soil and can you dig fresh manure in?”  Well I have as you can see here.  I have used it around the blackcurrents, like this, for over 15 years now.  So much so that the blackcurrents have roots growing out of their branches and these are exposed when the manure has rotted away.  So frankly, I think that this is another of the great misconceptions about gardening.  I have always dug in fresh manure this time of the year.  Leaving manure in a pile to leach out all the nutrients seems completely ridiculous to me.  However, what works for me will not necessarily work for anyone else.  Therefore, I will be digging in fresh manure for the potatoes and last year when I did this I got a good crop regardless of the aminopyuralid herbicide contamination.

In the above photograph you can see the laylandii that we cut back last year because it was growing throught the fence.   This is the laylandii that I burried in the bottom allotment.

 

It is somewhere underneath the grass green manure on this plot. It grew some really good peas last year.    I am getting a really good crop of tight brussel sprouts off the plants in the background.  The plants are about half the size they  are on the rest of the allotment but why should  I bother.  You might not be able to see that the soil is completely different colour to that of the rest of the allotment.  This was were the council replaced the original soil contaminated with benzo(a)pyrene with soil that seemed to us to be subsoil.  Evidently soil that farmers and council employees think is top soil, allotmenteers would regard as subsoil.  Still I added a lot of organic matter and sieved topsoil and removed about ten barrow loads of big stone and is now amost acceptable.  It is quite a large area to try to improve particularly as it is so infertile.  The brussel sprouts seem to have liked the heaviness of this soil and I hope that the winter cauliflowers do half as well.

The allotment looks very untidy this time of year. Particularly so because of the weather.  It is preventing me from getting on.

I saved that trellising from the bonfire.  I am going to pin it to the shed and grow black berries up it.   That will be the job after I finish off squaring up the top bed.

 

You can just about see the slabs along the path on the left hand side.  This is the task I am on now.  I need to square up this bed.  I will take out all the upright slabs and move them over towards the bay tree.  This will make a 14 ft wide bed.  The corner with the bay tree in is where Bill’s, Beryl’s and my allotments meet.   I grew that bay tree from a cutting!!  I will try an take off the suckers and grow them on to make new plants.  This is the rye grass that I am experimenting with to see if it is an effective green manure.  I put the seed in very late last year so it has not grown very much.  It will be dug in at the end of March probably during the Easter holidays.  I don’t want to dig this plot very much this year because I will be putting the brassicas here.  I will just fork in the green manure.

 

 I have used slabs to retain the soil on the allotment.  I don’t do raised beds - I do raised allotments.  You can see my mixing cone of soil where I am doing the Montezuma digging.  That is finished now and I have levelled it out.  The plot in the foreground will be for potatoes.  I may double dig this plot too.  The pile of soil in the foreground is some turf “top soil” that Phil has left me.  I have put most of this on the bottom plot around the brussel sprouts.  It is all grist to the mill…  The allotment does look untidy but it always does at this time of the year.  What can I say.  It would look a lot better if it would stop snowing so that I could get on and tidy it up a bit more.

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.

I have started to prepare the ground for the garlic and the winter onions.  Now you should know my feelings about bonfires.  People are gathering wood brush for November the  5th and leaving it on the car park by my allotment.  I am using this to make my Montezuma beds.  I dig down at least two spits and bury as much woody material as I can.  The subsoil is replaced and then compost, manure or lawn mowings are  put on top of that and finally the topsoil covers this.  It raises up the soil and makes a kind of hot bed for the onions.  I will have to cover the onions with enviromesh because last year they were very affected by the onion fly that infects the allotment.  It does not worry me but it is extra work.  Who ever thought that we would have to cover onions and leeks to keep insects off?The sweet peas were a disaster this year.  Every time they bloomed it would rain and damage the flowers.   I think that some of the seed had been infected with virus and this was then transferred to the other plants.  All the plants started to yellow at the bottoms and it slowly traveled up the stem.   I eventually took the lot out and put them in the green bin at home.

I will be planting new sweet pea seed  in a couple of weeks.  I am planting in plastic trays with compartments.  When they have germinated I will transfer them to those fabric pots with no bottoms.  When I do this I will add mychorrhizal fungi to the roots.

Blooming good year for runner beans.  The Aintree was spectacular again but the white runner  Desiree did not do quite so well.  The crop is starting to get a lot less now thank heavens.  All the summer onions were lifted last month and put onto strings in the shed.  I will take them home as and when we need them.  Spuds did reasonably well although not as well as last year.  A lot of the allotment gardens were affected by this weed killer aminopyuralid and my allotment was no exception.  I thought that I was going to be lucky because I got my muck from a friend that has horses.  It must have been in the bedding straw for the horses.

It did not affect the potatoes too much but it was not what I wanted.

Lovely crop of carrots this year.  Big ones too.  I left the enviromesh on them and did not take it off  this month like I did last year.  I did not think that the carrot fly would still be laying eggs at this time of the year but they are.  It helps to keep the slugs off them as well.

The foliage of the parsnips is very big; however, as I said to Don, it is not the tops we eat.  I just hope that this is a symptom of what is growing underground.

I have moved all my strawberries into one place on the allotment now.  All the new ones were given mychorrhizal fungi and they seem to be growing well.  I put a line of American land cress and rocket in for leaves during the winter.  I finished off the packet of spinach but there were only a few so I finished off the row with green manure.  I have bought a mixture of green manure this year.  Nevertheless, I am experimenting with just using normal rye grass for green manure.  It is coming up well so will be dug in next spring.

I spent a few hours in the last few weeks taking all  the cabbage white caterpillars off the brassicas.  I doubt if I got them all but I think that I made a big dent in the population so that they will not totally devastate them like they did last year.  I took the nets off them because they restrict access and I wanted to weed, feed and take off the yellow leaves.  I may have to put them back on because the pigeons start to eat them  if they get hugry during the winter.  I have been picking calabrese and purple sprouting for all of August and they are still coming now.  I will leave the purple sprouting in until next year because it should be coming next spring.  The new soil that they are in is very poor in nutrient so I was thinking of moving my grapes there.  Grapes like a very poor soil.  The leeks are here as well and they are growing very well considering the state of the soil.    I will buy a couple more stakes and put wire across like I have for the new raspberries.  I am in two minds whether to keep the old raspberries or throw them away.   I was given them about 30 years ago when I first had the allotment.  They are not the biggest cropping raspberries but they did do very well this year.  I think that every one of them is a differnent variety and some are very small almost like wild ones.  Their flavour is exquisite though.  I did not take any raspberries home this year because I ate them all at the allotment.

Now that I have my new shed, I am becoming much more domesticated.  I have a kettle and a little primus stove.   Now,  I keep  forgetting to take milk down to the allotment - I have tea - so I have taken to picking off the flowers of the chamomile and brewing up chamomile flower tea.  It is a mild sedative and keeps sending me to sleep. The comfy chair I have does not help either.  Fresh chamomile tea is perfection though.

Tomorrow I will continue to dig the onion and garlic bed.  I will probably find a lot of other things to do as well but I cannot think of them now.

My friends came down and inspected the allotment and were suitably impressed.  We sat by the sweet peas, drank wine and ate nibbles in a very civilised way. 

They went home and I continued to cut sweet pea flowers and put them into the bucket.  Got another bucket off them and they are now being put around the house.  I have been gleaning the rest of the peas from the Kelvedon Wonder row.  They will need to come out soon because they are very weedy and the weeds are going to seed.  It is very easy to hoe the whole area and rake off weeds and pea tops.  This leaves the roots in the soil and the root nodules may continue to fix nitrogen for a while. 

I will have to find somewhere to put the chicken wire that holds the peas up because there is nowhere on the allotment I can store it.  I still can’t get a shed up because the council will be removing the soil from the area where I want my shed.  This will not happen until October.  I will be shedless until then.  I might just take it home.  I need a good shed.

Loads of carrots coming and still no sign of carrot root fly - yet. 

Got several pounds of beans off the runner beans during the week.  More today. 

The Kestrel potatoes are coming out tomorrow.  A mixture of caliente mustard and tares is going to be sown on this area as a green manure.  It will be dug in in October and the winter onions put there. 

Still some blackfly on the runner beans.  I am still blasting them with water from the big sprayer I have.  I also sprayed the beans with aspirin and there seems to be less blackfly because of this.  If they are still on at the weekend I might spray them with liquid derris. 

Both the onions and the leeks perked up a lot after I sprayed them with aspirin and derris. They were also watered with diluted comfrey liquid so they can’t complain.  I will give them a bit more at the weekend. 

The April sown lettuce has gone to seed now and needs to be taken out.  The May sown lettuce is coming on but needs to be eaten. 

I am going on a week’s Sunship Earth course next week so I will not be gardening.  I will have a rest instead.

If you have read any of my other blogs then you will know that part of my new allotment is contaminated with benzo (a) pyrene.  It is a chemical that does not easily enter the food chain and I am being allowed to continue to grow on this area.  Most of this it is given over to sweet peas but I do have runner beans and pumpkins there as well.  It is a carcinogen so  I have been advised to make sure I wash my hands after working in this area. The dosages in the hot spots are worrying enough to cause the authorities to replace the soil to a depth of 60cm on this part of the allotment. 

How this chemical came to be on the allotments is a mystery.  It could have been there for years because it does not dissolve easily and is not washed away.   I am happy with the reassurances I have been given and I am carrying on growing.   It is not the ideal though. 

Now this colours my opinion of the new weed killer aminopyralid.  This weed killer is sprayed onto pasture and while it kills weeds, it does not kill grass.  Cows eat it and what goes in comes out the other end and eventually can land up on someones allotment as manure.  Aminopyralid can stay active for up to two years which means that the manure could affect allotment vegetables.  It seems from the allotment.uk forum that this is what is happening throughout the UK.   Now I thought I was safe because I only use horse manure from horses that live on a pristine field.  I would like to believe that their manure is uncontaminated.  However, chemicals like these have a way of squeezing themselves into the most unlikely of places. 

I am more of a biochemist than a chemist which means that I look at man made chemicals in a slightly different way.  Biochemists like to mash things up because they deal with very small quantities of naturally occurring chemicals.  They also deal in cascades - which means one very small amount of a chemical causes production of another small amount of chemical which then may go on to cause the production of a relatively big amount of a further chemical - or several different chemicals.  So in biology a small amount of a particular chemical can produce quite a big effect.  It only takes one molecule of a chemical or one photon of sunlight to cause cancer.  The only thing that higher concentrations do is make it more likely. 

We have been cheerfully spraying and dousing the environment with man made chemicals for years.  I did it myself.  In the 1960s lots of new pesticides and herbicides came onto the market.  However, it did not take long before a lot of gardeners started to question what effect these chemicals were having on our health.  I remember saying to myself what is happening to the soil animals?  With tiny amounts of chemicals having a relatively large affect on individual animals what effect did it have on the whole ecosystem?  Then came: “The Silent Spring”.     

I stopped using them and since then I have been trying to garden intelligently; using nature rather than fighting it. 

Now aminopyralid seems to be a wonder chemical that has absolutely no effect on the environment at all. Have a look at

 www.epa.gov/opprd001/factsheets/aminopyralid.pdf

Yet it is still effective in allotment manure after passing through a cow.  I would worry about it spreading throughout the environment. 

Are we going to have a “Flowerless Spring”.  It seems that we have not moved on very much from Rachel Carson.