I just need to remember that I promised myself that I would put in the aubrietia along the slabs that I have reset in the ground.  I will have to make sure that the hole between the last two slabs is covered so that soil does not escape onto the trackway.  I think that the aubrietia will be able to do this job for me. Secondly the RHS plants I can’t remember the name of them and I have long lost the seed packet will have to be moved from where the potatoes are going to go in.  The potatoes will shade out the RHS plants.  I will put them next to the strawberries.  The strawberries look very forlorn at the moment.    However, they are very robust plants and I know that they will burst into life as soon as the weather begins to get warmer.  I am going to feed them with comfrey liquid soon just to give them a really good boost.

The comfrey has not really started to grow yet.  In some places there is a sign of movement but this is not significant.  The winter cauliflowers  are doing quite well.  I would have liked to have kept the ones that the yobos pulled out but that is public gardening for you and you have to be philisophical about things.

Although there are still some buttons on the brussel sprouts  they are coming to the end now.  I took about half of them out and bagged them to take home and put into the green bin.  I have already cleared out the early sprouting brocolli and the calabresse stumps.  I know that I should have taken them out a long time ago and I will probably have encouraged club root to spread but I did have my big digging projects on the go and I had to leave clearing up until now.

I have started to dig around where the new raspberries are now. The soil is very friable here and easy to work.  I doubt if the moved raspberry canes will fruit this year.  I will just be happy if they survive the move.  I put a lot of well rotted cow muck in the planting trench with a little blood, fish and bone and mychorrhizal fungi which is a bit like belts and braces although something might help the raspberries to grow.  I don’t think that I could survive without a few raspberries to eat at the allotment.

The potatoe bed is still the one area that really needs to be sorted out.  I still have not got any horse muck to put onto the soil, but I live in hopes that someone will give me some.  I need to get out the last of the parsnips.  I am going to make a couple of litres of parsnip soup and freeze it, I think.  The sorrel is still growing but the leaves will be very course now and I will plant some more in the roots bed.  It will not take much to clear this bed and I don’t really want to dig it over.  I will probably just hoe off the weeds, scrape the soil with the three pronged cultivator and rake it over to prepare for the potatoes.  If I don’t get any manure I will just plant with some blood, fish and bone meal.

The Sweet Cicely (Myrrhis odorata) is starting to grow along the path slabs.  Behind them a fairly ragged row of daffodills is waiting for a little warm weather before they start to flower.  Onions are doing alright but there will soon be an onslaught of the leek fly.

I will have to move the lupins too because they are in the way of the sweet peas.  Not a problem and I will do this when I dig in the rest of the green manure.

And so to seeds.  I will be planting a few seeds - particularly the brassicas during next weekend.  I might put the onion setts into compost in the greenhouse too.  It will start them off and protect them from  Napomyza gymnostoma.

The black currents seem to be doing well although some of them might have  Eriophyes ribis.  It is not overwhelming, however I take the buds off and bury them in the digging trenches.

I will take all the sweet peas to the allotment at the weekend and try to plant as many as I can and see if they will survive.  A lot of them were lost in the very cold weather but I am hoping that the ones that survived are the tough ones that will grow the most rigorously.

So there it is; March again…

I actually bought some charcoal today.  I went to the garden centre in Albrighton and was going to go on to David Austin Roses but I never got there because of time.  I also bought a big tub of chicken manure and another of blood, fish and bone.

I took them up to the allotment and put some of the blood fish and bone into a tub.  I filled up about half the tub with neat comfrey liquid and then added the charcoal almost to the rim of the tub.  I didn’t bother to grind up the charcoal - it was barbeque lump charcoal.     Now the theory is that the charcoal will soak up the nutrients and hold it within the pores and on the surfaces within its structure.  This will enable the nutrients to be released slowly over many years without it being leached out of the soil.  I doubt that there will be any spectacular increase in the yeald or the size of the vegetables.  This is something that has to build up over many years.

I will continue to do this for as long as I have the allotment now.  I would be particularly interested on its effect on the new soil at the bottom of the allotment.  The soil is particularly infertile and needs a lot of added organic matter.  I have been adding quite a bit but when the brassicas eventually come out I will add a lot more.   The peas will be going into this soil, so I think that charcoal and nutrient mix will be spread along the rows.  I will take out a spade width of soil about 2cm deep when planting the peas.  The mix can then go at the bottom of this mini trench.   I will sieve the soil back on top and this will remove quite a lot of stone which is still in this soil.

I will also use the charcoal mix in the dibbing holes for the brassicas.  I usually water them in with a mixture of seaweed extract and comfrey so it will not really be any different.  I am going to avoid putting any fertiliser on the brussel sprout area.  They seem to like a poorer soil and it keeps the brussel sprouts very tight buttons.

I put some shredded paper onto the third compost heap.  I made these compost heaps with old pallets and wired them together.  Not a nail to be seen in any of them.  I will put anything onto the compost heap that has once been alive.  They are all grist to the mill.  It is a bit like the leaves I am burying under the ground where the old greenhouse used to be.  They are very dirty and full of plastic litter.  It does not take very long to get rid of the litter so that the leaves can be put into the trench.  I would like to put in good clean leaves that have been composted for a few years, however I do not have the time for this so they go in willy nilly.

I have been given a wormery.  I just said that they were a bit of a time waster, however if you are given one then that is a different matter.  I will have to put a tap on this one and I will use the tap from the big comfrey bin.  The big comfrey bin has now got a big split in the bottom so I cannot store comfrey liquid in it anymore, however it can still be a digester with a bucket or tub underneath it to collect the liquid.  I will use the this tap on the new bin.   Now, I thought that maybe the comfrey could be recycled even quicker by putting it into the wormery rather than the digester.  I suspect that this year I will have to use both.

The sweet peas have been devastated by the cold weather.  I have lost over 50% of them.  Rather than potting them up I will plant the straight into the allotment.  This means that I will have to put the canes up fairly soon, which also means that I will have to finish the digging as soon as possible too.

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.

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.

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 took down a 30 ft silver birch on Saturday.  I dig around the trunk exposing the roots and then cut through them with a bow saw.  My son and I then pulled it over.  This is the only way I know of easily removing the stump.  The roots are then left in the soil to rot.  We cut the branches off and put them into bags - I like to cut them up quite small with the secateurs.  John cut the trunk into 1 metre sections.  We put the whole lot into the car and I took it to the allotment.  I dug down about 4 feet and into the subsoil and buried the whole lot.  It is remarkable what you can bury in a big hole.  The subsoil was replaced and I got several barrow loads of grass mowings and put them in the hole too.  I covered the grass with topsoil. This is what I call serious Montezuma method.

The reason why I am taking down the silver birch trees is that they are taking all the water from the top soil in the garden and very little will grow well near them.  They are getting quite old now and I have several younger ones to replace them.  I only have four more to take down now.  They will all be buried in the subsoil of the allotment.

I doubt if anyone out there believes that I do this and can still grow substantial vegetables.  While I agree that woody material will remove nitrogen from the soil in decomposition, I do not find that it adversely affects the vegetables that I grow.  Maybe I would get even bigger crops it I did not do this kind of thing.  I doubt it though.  Trees have relatively large amounts of nutrients locked up inside them.  Why send this up in flames when you burn them?  I would rather have the nutriments.

Doing all this deep digging means that the onion bed is not finished yet.  I will still have to bury the other silver birches.  I could not leave the onions any longer so I have put them in pots in the greenhouse.  I put a little mychorrhizal fungi in the pots as well to encourage association.  I also planted my garlic and shallots in pots as well.

I have started to plant the sweet peas today.  I have put them in those plastic sectioned seed trays.  I planted about 100 seeds and I have forgotten all their names.  Percy Thrower was one and Royal Wedding was another.  I will look and see what they are tomorrow because I don’t want to go out to the green house now. Its dark and cold out there.

I didn’t have time to take down the runner beans although I was going to put them into the hole I had dug in the onion bed.  I will do this next weekend.

I need to put some green manure on this area of the allotment.  I will dig it in during March next year.  I don’t want to make this area too fertile because I will be putting my brassicas in this ground.  If you make the ground too fertile the brussel sprouts start to blow (open out) and they do not make tight buds.  Also the purple sprouting will flower early.  I will put blood fish and bone on the cauliflowers and cabbage with possibly some chicken manure as well.  They will benefit from the extra nitrogen.

Everyone is asking about my green manure that I planted two weeks ago.  It is a mixture of annual meadow grass and tares.  It is a good mixture adding both body and nitrogen to the soil.

I am still cropping beetroot and carrots; however I am leaving the parsnips until the first frost.

The rocket and American cress has come well and I am looking forward to cropping that during the winter.  Most of the strawberries I moved are doing well.  These were all weeded at the weekend – I was amazed that the weeds had come back after I removed weeds last week.  Brassicas are doing well if small.  Brussel sprouts are about half the size I usually grow them.  This new soil that they gave us is not worth the trouble.  I am thinking of moving my grapes onto this. They like really poor soil.

Getting an immense crop of maize this year.  Another example of global warming.  When I started gardening over 40 years ago we would never have planted maize, cucumber, pumpkin, tomato and courgette outside.  Nowadays I do not give it a second thought.

The council has now put a stake in the quagmire part of the allotment.  I think it is to indicate that this was one of the allotments that had the soil replaced.  They just need to look at the soil to know that.  It is yellow with large15cm stones in it.  Compared with the soil they removed as polluted, this so called top quality top soil is like my subsoil - but with stones.

I think that the stake signifies that I am about to get a load of muck delivered.  The council has said that they will dig over the allotments and take out all the stone.  I will believe that when I see it.  I hope that they dig in the muck as well.  However, anyone that tries to walk on that part of the allotment is in danger of sinking without trace…

Do I really want the hassle of draining this part of the allotment???  Not really.  On the other hand this is a substantial area of new soil that could possibly have potential if it did not have a flowing stream running over it.

To change the subject, my mate Tony with the horses and trap telephoned me at the weekend saying there was a substantial amount of well rotted horse manure ready for collection.  He also said that I could borrow his trailer to get it up to the allotment.  Therefore, I will be transporting horse manure for the rest of the week.  It is true to say that one man’s rubbish is another’s gold.  You can keep your banks and money and stocks and shares.  I will take a good load of horse muck any time.  You can’t eat money.

I will also have to take the greenhouse glass off the allotment.  Some really pleasant person has carefully smashed it up for me and left the shards all over the allotment.   So kind.  I just hope that I get it all because I really do not want to get cut by glass again.  Last time it was particularly unpleasant.  Really, I should go and get a new tetanus jab just in case.

The trouble is, if you put substantial amounts of muck on the allotment, you increase both the bad and good bacteria.  I define good and bad as those that will and will not give you nasty diseases.  They are not inherently good or bad.  They don’t sit there in the soil plotting to infect you.

But this is by the by, I am starting to clear off the old brassicas.  Believe it or not, because I can’t, after about 15 years of clubroot free growing, the allotment has got clubroot again.  Never mind.  Good hygiene, good rotation and dressings of lime usually gets rid of it.  I did get a 6foot brussel sprout this year - regardless.  However, the cabbage white stripped the leaves and it only produced tiny sprouts.  Fresh sprouts taste the same whether they are large or small so I don’t worry.  Well the old sprout plants went into the green bin to be taken away by the council.  I do not burn diseased material if I can put it into the green bin.

I have taken the hedge clippings down to the allotment.  I have also dug out several of the overgrown shrubs in the garden and taken these down too.  They will be buried at the bottom of the double digging trench.  Now some will say that woody hedge cuttings will rob the soil of nitrogen.  Admittedly the carbon to nitrogen ratio will be quite large but there is little information that I can find that indicates that; this will be substantial; will affect the vegetable plants if it is buried more than 12 inches below the surface; and that the nitrogen will not be returned to the soil once the hedge cuttings rot down.  At the moment, my jury is out but I have to say that putting woody material this far down in the soil does not seem to have affected vegetables in previous years.  You might say that the vegetables would be bigger; nevertheless I don’t really want brussel sprouts bigger than 6 foot.  I wish I had taken a picture of the big brussel now.

I am still getting veg off the allotment.  I haven’t had all the parsnips or carrots yet.  As I take out the brussel sprouts, I am gleaning all the little ones and taking them home to cook.  I am still using up both my red and white onions and the potatoes have not run out yet.  Together with the frozen peas, beans and cauliflower that is quite a substantial array of vegetables for cooking.   The winter cauliflowers look very bedraggled at the moment but I am hoping that they will perk up during the next couple of months.  I will give them all a dose of comfrey liquid during March just to give them a boost.   The garlic has not sent up any leaves yet.  Last year they were showing before Christmas.  The snow and frost has kept them tucked in the soil but the warmer weather we are getting now may make them throw up new shoots.

I need to order some more seeds and I must send off for some Sante potatoes.  I have the Kestral already.  They are beginning to sprout so need to be put out in the greenhouse where they can get lots of light.  I have bought some new raspberry canes again and hopefully this year they will take.  Last years ones were hopeless.  I think one out of ten canes sent up shoots.  Never mind.  I reckon that I had a fairly substantial harvest last year and I looking forward to the new year.

I have not been visiting the allotment except to get vegetables over the past month.  I am still cropping brussel sprouts, broccoli, parsnips, carrots and leeks.  This time of year the only way to keep warm is by digging.  I’ve got a lot of water on the new allotment so I wanted to double dig to improve the drainage.  The council have replaced the soil on the bottom third digging right down into the clay subsoil.  They were very surprised to find that the hole they dug filled with water.  They thought that I had cracked a water pipe in the area.  I have to keep repeating that these are natural springs.  There are no water pipes that I have found on the allotments.  There are no drainage pipes either - except the ones that I have put in.  As they had taken about a third of the allotment soil off, it made an impressive lake.  Now the reason why this area of the allotment was not waterlogged was because Eric and I had raised its level by about 18 inches. 

However, the new soil they replaced it with is level with the path.  Consequently, I am left with a quagmire.  Now one thing I could do is complain to the council and see if they are likely to put more soil on the allotment.  I am not sure that I want any more of their soil.  Compared with the very dark brown to black allotment soil around it, this soil is decidedly a bright yellow.  The council say this is the best of the best soil they could get.  This just means that it is the most expensive they could  get.  Apparently it comes from an organic farm. 

No, I will  not complain.  The soil is there and they have said that they will give me a load of muck as well.  This will raise the soil to some degree.  I will drain it as best I can this year and then continue to raise it using leaves, muck and lawn mowings left by the gate.  I doubt if my fellow allotmenteers will be too pleased because when I am in allotment raising mood I can remove large amounts of material and put it under my allotment. 

And this is infact what I am doing. 

 I am raising the top third of the allotment by burying the grass mowings that nobody seemed to want left by the main gate.  It was a large pile - but not so large now.  Then, yesterday the bloke that owns the shire horses on Penn Common brought down some horse muck.  That brings allotmenteers down like flies.  Needless to say there is none left now and quite a bit of it is under my allotment. 

I tend to dig muck and other organic material into the allotment straight away rather than leaving it in a pile on the allotment to rot down.  There are a few reasons why I do this. 

• this area of the allotment will not be used until May time and that means that the muck has at least 5 months to rot down. 
• althought the carbon:nitrogen ratio is quite large and nitrogen is probably going to be taken out of the soil to maintain microbial growth, it will be returned as the microbes die due to shortage of decomposable organic matter when they have done their job. 
• introducing a good dose of organic matter to the soil helps to drain it.  This happens in several ways.  Firstly you have to dig it in and this helps to break up the soil.  I am double digging so this means that the soil is broken up two spits deep. 
• organic matter like this does not necessarily all break down into plant nutrients.  There are soil processes that allow organic molecules to form complexes with soil particles.  These complexes can exist for a very long time - hundreds of years! They alter the water holding properties of the soil.  They retain water when there is water stress and they allow water to pass through the soil and drain away in wetter periods.
• it gives me a good dose of exercise because I like digging.  Now after a little excess over the Christmas holidays I have put on a little weight and this is a great way of working it off. 

Yesterday I was working in temperatures that did not go above 2 degrees.  When I left the allotment to go home it was -2.  This means that I had to burn off food just to keep myself warm.  I must admit I was not too keen on the temperature when I arrived at the allotment particularly as one of the committee members came over to talk to me about the new allotment soil.  However, after half an hour of double digging, I was really warm.  I still had to wear my gardening gloves because the handles of the wheel barrow are very cold. 

I have just had some thick soup made from leeks, onions, carrots and peas all from the allotment…  Beautiful.�

I have no clubroot on the allotment now but I continue to make sure by liming the area where the brassicas are going to go and rotating religiously.  I lime the soil primarily in the spring, March or April, before planting the brassicas.  They will not go on that area of the allotment again for at least 6 years.  (I have divided the allotment into 6 roughly equal plots) You have to be careful to rotate other brassicas like radish, rocket, turnip etc because they can be infected with club root as well.  You must not leave infected stumps in the soil overwinter.  This just adds to the problem.  As Percy Thrower used to say : An untidy garden invites pests and diseases.

One of the best things about sharing information on the internet is the speed at which you learn new things.  The advance of more natural ways of doing things is amazing especially for the allotment grower.  Thanks a lot Christine for the comments. 

If we can develop new varieties of vegetables that are resistant to diseases then this will help us to produce good vegetables without having to resort to synthetic chemicals.  I will not recommend anything that I have not tried myself, however there are some club root resistant varieties of brassica.  I am one of these gardeners that usually does things at the last minute.  I’ll nip down to the garden centre and get the same old varieties every time without looking for new things in the catalogues. 

I have grown Kestrel and Sante potatoes this year.   They are nematode worm resistant and have performed very well indeed.  If you need a resistant potato then this might be the way to go.  They are resistant to white cyst eelworm Globodera pallida and the golden cyst eelworm Globodera rostochiensis.  The new Sapo blight resistant potatoes did eventually succumb to  blight but the tubers have stored very well with none rotting.  I cannot say that about the Sante though.    I am replacing my ancient gooseberry bushes, whose variety I have no idea about, for gooseberry American mildew resistant varieties like Invicta. 

Almost 27 years ago someone on the allotment gave me some gooseberries and raspberries.  I have been growing these ever since.  They are only now beginning to crop poorly and making me consider getting new ones. 

I am going to continue buying pest and disease resistant varieties. 

I think that I had better look at the catalogues a little more carefully.�

For my 100th post I thought that I would put some photographs of the allotment on here.  Yesterday I got my first handful of beans off the Aintree runner beans.  I got a couple of buckets of sweet peas off as well.  That is why there are not many on them.   The weather is very overcast but not cold.  22^oC in the shade - not that there is much sun today.   

As you can see the allotment is beginning to become very green and there has been a lot of growth.  This lower half allotment is new this year.  I had to clear quite a lot of weed off it before I started to plant.  I double dug it all right up to the Onward peas. 

Comfrey growing well in the foreground and beans and sweet peas in the background.  You can’t see the pumpkins between the beans and the comfrey.  This is number 26. Number 25 starts by the shed. 

Carrots are under the enviromesh, beetroot next then two rows of annual flowers as companion planting. 

Then there are 10 lines of leeks interspersed with companion planting. 

You can just see the pumpkin in the foreground. 

Courgettes are big but not producing yet.  Lots of flowers but no courgettes.  Kelvedon Wonder peas are nearly finished now but you can see the Early Onward in the background starting to fruit.  Running alongside the sweet corn is a row of nigelia as a companion plant.  The shed is on Eric’s allotment not mine.  The plum tree is mine though. 

Sweet is corn growing well.

Please note that the weeds are on a public path between allotment 25 and 26.  Number 25 is my old allotment.  Behind the rhubarb there is a new blackberry plant and along the supports are a new line of raspberries.  If you look at the post that you can see going into the ground, there are two grape cuttings that are growing really well.   In the background you can see Florence fennel, radish, rocket, lambs lettuce and spinach.  There is also poached egg plant.  Not much yellow on these flowers though.   There are quite a few apples on the Granny Smith.  You can see how much I have raised the allotment using concrete slabs.  In the far background there are the brassicas.

And here they are winter cauliflower, Brussel sprouts, cabbage and broccoli.   I have left the nets over them to keep the cabbage white caterpillars off them.  I will have to drag some more soil around the stems at the weekend because they are getting quite big now and might start falling over.  I don’t really want to stake them because I have used all my stakes for the peas. 

The Sapo and Sante potatoes.  There are some Kestrel potatoes in the foreground and these are starting to go over now.  The tops look good but this is no indication of how big the potatoes are. 

The Kestrel potatoes are just going over.  I will have to start to harvest them next week.  I will plant Caliente mustard here after they have been taken out.  In the background you can just make out the blackcurrent bushes.  They have cropped very well this year. 

In the foreground are the Meteor peas that replaced the winter onions.  In the background are the onions interspersed with tagetes and a row of chamomile as companion planting. 

 

The onions are growing much better now but there is still some distortion in the foliage.  You can see two lines of parsnips in the background.  Not many weeds at the moment. 

This is what you can do with double digging, horse manure, chicken manure and comfrey liquid. 

I will be raising the new allotment up as high as the old one.  I will use turf, leaves and lawn mowings initially but will also continue to use horse and cow muck.�