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.

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.

I finally got down to the allotment on Sunday afternoon.  It was a beautiful day.  The sun was shining and the air was warm.  I was all ready for a good 4 or 5 hour stint.  I looked in the back of my car to find that I did not have any wellies. 

I was not pleased.  I had taken out all the gardening things and put them into the shed so that I could collect Frances’ boy friend who had just arrived from Hong Kong, large cases and all.  So where had I put them?  I put the fork, spade, sprayer, tub and lawn mowings into the car but no wellies.  (Wellies -short for wellington boot.  A rubbery boot used when gardening.)

I decided to continue regardless of my bootless condition.  I was wearing stout shoes, however I had forgotten the perilous nature of a semi waterlogged soil.  I kept to the paths after several incidents of sinking pecariously up to my ankles in the quagmire that I call my allotment. 

Fortunately I have a very long armed sprayer so I endeavoured to spray all the leeks with liquid derris while still remaining on the path.  A task that I achieved with remarkable ease considering the handicap I put myself under. 

This was my main task for the afternoon.  The weather was very pleasant so, when the allotment chairman came over to chat, unusually I did not mind at all.  It seems that the council are going to bring in large trucks and diggers to remove the soil from the allotments.  They are going to try to take out all the soil and replace it in three days.  My experience of  local councils leads me to believe they will not do this in three months, however I am very open to being surprised. 

Two of the allotmenteers that are also affected were moving their sheds and other equipment off their allotments so I and several others gave them a hand.  We have moved two sheds without dismatling now. 

If anyone wants expert shed movers, we have a cracking team at Mount Road Allotments …

I played about trying to dig out comfrey and heeling it in further up the allotment, but with little success.  I could not find the rhubarb under the comfrey and pumpkin.  I don’t think it has died back that much yet.  My main rhubarb patch is still in leaf.   Everything is disappearing at the moment. 

Well, having arrived home, I looked for my wellies in the shed.  They were not there. I cannot for the life of me remember where I put them.  However, as my friend Liz says, if you stop looking for things they turn up when you are least expecting them.  I am still waiting…

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.�

Now I grow this as a really good addition - in small amounts, to salads.  The feathery leaves are really quite sweet to the taste with an aniseed smell.

However, I have it on good authority that sweet cicely is as good as comfrey for making liquid fertiliser.  I have some in my kitchen garden and pinch out some leaves when I feel like adding them to a salad. 

They produce a lot of seed if you let them and while this might be a problem when they are established it is a boon when thinking of planting a lot on the allotment for fertiliser production. 

My plants did flower and produce seed this year so I have collected them and put them into a paper bag.  The pods have turned black and are breaking open now.  The seed seems to be incredibly fine but very prolific.  

I intend to plant a couple of lines of sweet cicely on the allotment and then compare its effectiveness as a liquid fertiliser with that of nettle (Urtica dioica) and comfrey.  This will be next years project though because the sweet cicely will not be ready until then. 

I went down to the allotment this morning before work.  Hoed around the two new rows of carrots.  They have germinated now and are growing quite fast.  I have not protected these carrots with envirofleece so they might be affected by carrot fly Psila rosae. I sprayed them with aspirin yesterday evening so they might not get affected. 

The spraying of the runner beans to wash off the black fly seems to have been sucessfull.  There were very small collonies of black fly but they are fairly easy to deal with.  I doubt if we will have further attacks this year. 

The peas have really fattened up over the past two days.  I will have to pick them seriously at the weekend.  Moreover, the gooseberries will need to be harvested.  Most of the bushes have no American mildew.  The gooseberries are big and plump so I will crop them as soon as I have 5 minutes. 

The winter onions have started to fall over and this means that they are ready.  I will leave them until the weekend and then take them home.

Comfrey does not spread by stolons like couch grass or nettles. It has tap roots that delve deep in the soil and bring nutrients back to the surface and into the leaves.  It does, however spread by seeds which are quite efficient at getting  everywhere.  There is a type of comfrey which you can get from various different internet places that is called Bocking 14.  This is a variety of the Russian comfrey Symphytum x uplandicum.  It has very large leaves and does not seed as readily as the British version.   

I do not bother with such niceties.  I grow the thug of a plant the wild comfrey plant Symphytum officinale.  It grows wild on our allotment site.  If you continue to cut it hard back – you can cut off all the leaves and it will come again, then it is relatively easy to keep under control.  It is not what I would call rampant but it does grow big particularly on good soil.  It will easily grow up to 5 – 6 feet tall if you leave it to flower.  It is a great ground cover plant and casts a lot of shade.  Few weeds will grow under it if you have it in a block of plants.   The bottom of my allotment used to be part of a makeshift car park that we made from stones taken off our allotments.  We also broke up concrete slabs and rubble to make a hard standing.   Over the years a small layer of soil covered the hard core and this is what I have planted my comfrey into.  It is thriving.  I would suggest that comfrey would grow absolutely anywhere so don’t worry about the ground. 

The comfrey will only be able to take out of the soil what has been put in.  It has very deep roots that can go foraging but even so you will have to provide it with some kind of feed.  I am putting grass lawn mowings on it at the moment.    I am not sure where the allotment site is getting their lawn mowing from and they might be full of unwanted chemicals.  The comfrey will get all the nutrients from the grass cuttings and then I can use the comfrey.  It is a way of using material that might be contaminated with unwanted chemicals and does not involve putting it onto the main allotment area.   

 I would not plant comfrey in shade because to get the biggest leaves and the most nutrients then full sunlight is necessary.  Having said this, it will grow anywhere.   

I make comfrey liquid fertiliser by filling a butt full of leaves and stems, topping up with water and then leaving it for a couple of weeks.  There is a tap at the bottom of the butt which allows me to drain off the liquid.  What goes in the butt stays in the butt and comes out through the tap at the bottom.  Some people have said that the comfrey blocks up the tap but I have not found this.   

The percentage nutrient value of comfrey seems to be nitrogen 0.0140; potash 0.0340; phosphorus 0.0059 which compares very well with commercial tomato fertilisers.   

What do I use it on?  Everything…

Whatever it grows good tomatoes. 

I think that there is a lot of mystique about the making of jam that is uncalled for.  The black currents that I bought home yesterday are now boiling away in the big pan. I like to use a very big wooden spoon - mainly to impress everybody.  I do not add any water at all.  Then I add the same weight of sugar as fruit - more or less.  Next, I bring this to the boil and wait until enough water has evaporated from the fruit to make it set.   You can tell when it is ready by dribbling some off the wooden spoon.  If it starts to set on the spoon then it is ready to put into the jars.  I think that mine is nearly ready now.  It has taken less than an hour to do it. 

I am going to mow the lawns now.

Oh dear I have broken the lawn mower.  I think that the motor has burnt out.  I will get some petrol for the motor mower tomorrow. 

Got down the allotment at about 1 o’clock and there was a heavy shower of rain.  I just wanted to pick some raspberries and strawberries so I carried on regardless.  After a while it stopped raining and the sun was very warm.  I picked the first of the sweet peas to take home.  They are smelling beautiful. 

I think that all gardens should have something to look at - colour; something to smell - scents; something to hear - chimes; something to taste - raspberries and something to touch - the soil. 

I spent some time washing the black fly off the runner beans.  I just used the sprayer and water.  I expect I will have to do it again next week.  I got them fairly clean though.  I watered peas, beans and sweetcorn with comfrey. 

Started at the bottom of the allotment and hoed the whole allotment.  The rain has started all the weed seeds germinating again. 

Finally, I took another cutting of the comfrey to put into the butts.  I have now filled two butts and have cut almost all the comfrey. 

Ate a dinner that included a salad of lettuce, peas, carrots, rocket and radish of my own.  My tomatoes have not started cropping yet so I had to use bought tomatoes.  Then I had strawberries and ice cream.  Lovely jubbly…

I have had a bit of a head cold this week probably because of the weather.  I still do things but with much less vigour. 

I have been down the allotment several times this week mainly to harvest and pick.  The strawberries are doing very well this year.  I must get some new ones for next year though.  I have taken home one of the winter onions. 

The strawberries are ripening well but I tend to eat these before I can pick any for the house.  I also picked about 5lb of blackcurrents.  I am amazed at this because I cut them back hard during the autumn and I thought that I would not get any.  Lettuce, rocket, carrots, radish and some peas were all harvested for salads.  I had some this evening and they were lovely. 

The allotment is full at the moment and I do not have any room to put anything else in.  I am going to put some peas where the autumn onions are at the moment.  I only harvested, weeded and watered but this still takes a lot of time.  I sprayed the runner beans with water to wash off the blackfly.  They are starting to get on my nerves now.  I will keep washing them off until they get the message.  It looks like it is a bad year for blackfly this year. 

I have bought some new canes for the sweet peas.  The winds this year have made growing them up strings a little difficult.  So I have been undoing ties and putting sweet peas onto the canes. 

I cut some more comfrey for the butt.  It is amazing how much of the comfrey I have used this year.  I water the peas, beans, sweetcorn and onions with it at the moment.  They all seem to like it.   There is still a lot of comfrey to be cut because it it producing a lot of leaf this time of year.  The rows I did not cut last time are still flowering.  They are covered in bumble bees. 

I did not cut any of the nettles today but I might tomorrow.�

I decided to take the leeks down to the allotment to harden off.  I know that they have only been out of the greenhouse for a day but I could not help myself planting them directly into the allotment.  Now, this is one of those times when you can’t do this until you do that.  I was worried that I would not have room to put all the leeks in so I needed to move the slabs that Eric had left on the allotment.  When he had had this allotment he grew tomatoes here on the slabs.  I have moved most of the concrete slabs to the side of the allotment giving me a very useable path.  I completed it today.  Now this patch is almost a rectangle.  The soil under the slabs was not very good so I decided to double dig it.  More turfs have been left by the lower gate car park so I got some of these to put at the bottom of the trenches.  It helps to raise the soil on the allotment and help with the poor drainage.  I have double dug most of this allotment now. 

I put in about 98 leeks adding some mychorrhizal fungi to each of the holes.  I like to knock them out of their pots and then plant them as I would any other seedling.  The others that I planted earlier were done in the traditional way by making a dibber hole and just sticking a bare rooted leek in it.  Both sets of leeks were watered in with comfrey liquid. 

I did not fill the whole of this area with leeks so I put two lines of carrots in.  I doubt if they will do very well but they are Flyaway so they might produce something. 

I weeded and hoed all of the rest of the allotment - or the areas that needed it.  I also put in a new row of radish and lambs lettuce where the February lettuce came out.  The March lettuce is hearting up very well and I will be cropping this at the end of the week. 

After finishing off here I went down to take off side shoots and tendrils off the sweet peas. They are not doing as well as I wanted.  I think that they are best sown in the autumn rather than very early in the spring.  Tied them all up carefully.  I am not sure whether growing them up strings is the best way of doing cordon sweet peas.  It has been particularly windy this year and they are being blown about whereas the ones on the canes are growing much better.   Remember that for next year Tone. 

I kept on putting the side shoots and tendrils in the tools tub.  Swapped the tubs round to stop myself and blow me if I don’t carry on doing it stretching over the right tub.  I struggle on like this all down the row and then I asked myself why I needed the tools tub in the first place…  I didn’t so I put it away and then found that I put all the side shoots in the right tub. 

I think that I have tired myself out again with all that double digging so sorry folks no reports will get done this evening.  I am going to go to bed early.�