I gave myself the task of filling in the trench I had put shreddings and leaves in.  There was a big pile of top soil but it was very friable and so levelled itself out without too much effort.  I decided then to carry on and dig in the green manure.  I did not trench this because it was a cropping area that I had dug over very well in the past.  It is a very fertile part of the allotment and had horse manure on it two years ago.

I finished off at the slabs and dug down to the bottom of them so that I could straighten them.  They were leaning over a little.  I had straightened them last year when the contractor had dug a trench by them in a futile effort to drain the trackway. However they were leaning again.  It did not take me more than a couple of minutes - or so I thought.   I aslo put in a post for the sweet peas and was going to put in one for the beans too, however it needed to go right where the vibena is so I thought that I would put it a little further in to avoid it.  I had a quick look at the bay tree.  It seems to have suffered a little in this very cold weather.  All the growing tips have gone brown.  I think that a good prune when the weather becomes warmer would do it a lot of good - it would make it look much neater anyway.

I just about finished straightening them when the light started to go.  I looked at my watch and it was half past six.  Where does the time go?  I just had time to collect up all the tools and put them into the shed before I lost all the light.   I had spent seven hours on the allotment.  No wonder I was feeling a little chilly.  I had taken off my old jacket when I was digging.

Well, I am aching a little now, although I feel I have done a really good job today.

The Alan Roman seeds have come today.  The potatoes, onion sets and the shallots have not come though.  I have yet to get anything from Thompson and Morgan at all.  I might go onto Italian Seeds site to order some more seeds like rocket.

Went down to the allotment and got there about 12 o’clock.  Worked on digging the area that the greenhouse was on.  I tripple dug it taking out two spits and then forking over the bottom spit.  (A spit is a spade length.)  The ground has dried off a lot, however the clay was still claggy at this depth.  I put a couple of barrowloads of laylandii shreddings at the bottom of each of the trenches and then covered them with a couple of barrowloads of leaves.  There is bind weed Calystegia sepium in the leaves growing up from the soil in the bins.  I have taken out quite a bit but the whole of the bins will have to be dug over and the bind weed stolons taken out.

I finished digging this area, although I have not filled the last trench completely with soil.   I will not really be able to finish it tomorrow either because I am going to a wedding fair tomorrow.  I never thought that I would need to say that last sentence ever in my life.  My daughter is getting married and I have to be involved it  seems.  I would not really mind except that the wedding is booked for 2012.   Thats in two years time!!!!!   Never mind.

Here are two of the worm species on the allotment.  I am not very good at identifying things so I will give this a go but I might be wrong. I think that the top one is Octolasion cyaneum and the lower one is Aporrectodea rose.   

I am going to look up images of them on the internet to see if they match.

Decidedly warmer today, although it did get very cold towards twilight.  I got down to the allotment about 9:30 and there were quite a few people working on their plots already.  I chatted to Tony and he said that I had missed the annual general meeting of the allotment society.  Well it seems that there is going to be no change and the allotments are going to be run by the same person.  It is a shame that the committee does not have a look in.   I wanted to complain about the bonfire being lit on the car park.  but that is for another time.

I moved all the slabs on the top bed squaring it off quite well.  I went on to moving the path slabs and that took a little more time.  I am taking out the top soil under the path and putting it on the beans and sweet pea bed.  I am replacing it with a mixture of stones and subsoil.  I am digging a big hole to get the subsoil out and then filling it up to the top of the subsoil part with laylandii shreddings.  I got to the raspberries and took two of them out.  I put them back in immediately down with the other raspberries giving them a dose of mychorrhizal fungi.  I  will  not give any of the others mychorrhiza because they may be infected through these ones .  I hope that I will be able to move them all this March.  The holes under the path were filled with the old greenhouse foundations.  Remember that they are there Tone because I don’t want to be digging that lot up again.  I took the old angle iron that used to be the children’s swing down to the gate for the rag and bone man to pick up next time he passes.  When I picked one of the slabs up, it was covered in about 15 little black keel slugs.  I took them off  and put them in the wild area on the allotment.  There were a few hiding in the raspberries too.  These all went too.  I think that if I get rid of these pests as soon as I see them, it will make gardening this year a little easier.

While I can understand the agonizing that many of us undergo when attempting to produce food that is grown with as few human made chemicals as possible, we must be reasonable. Ferric phosphate FePO4 is indeed an inorganic chemical. All this means in chemical terms is that it does not contain carbon. The confusion comes when we apply the term organic to biological systems. Organic in biology means related to life or organisms. If we replace the metal iron with the metal calcium in this compound then we get a major component of bones – calcium phosphate which although making bones is an inorganic chemical. Does this mean that the strict advocate of organic gardening should not use blood fish and bone as a fertilizer? Now I would rather not use ferric phosphate as a slug and snail killer because I would rather remove as many as I can by hand – gloved if possible. There is little evidence about the effect that ferric phosphate has on other soil organisms and is probably best avoided if you are trying to be organic – as in the biological meaning of the word. Beer contains organic chemicals. You could use this as a trap because slugs and snails seem to be attracted to it. Beer is a man made chemical mix though.

It started to rain  and the slabs got a little sticky.  They are blooming heavy and I didn’t want one to land on my foot.  Still it is a good job nearly done.  Now I say that when you begin to feel uncomfortable gardening because of the rain or the cold or both, then it is time to jack it in and go home.  I hate it when the water from my water proof jacket drips onto my trousers.  I am having to wear jeans too because my garden cord trousers have given up the ghost and been put on the compost to rot down.  Jeans are very hard wearing trousers, however they were never designed for a cold wet climate.  Every time they get wet, the wind whistles through them as if I had nothing on.

I picked some of the brussels and parsnips.  I was going to take some leeks but I don’t think that they are worth the trouble.  I didn’t get the  calabrese out and I should have done.  never mind.  I think either the fox or the badger is back.  They have made some big holes looking for worms in the strawberry bed.  I tidied this up.

I just had picked the vegetables when the light went.  I think that it started to rain a little harder when I got home.  I did not use any of the vegetables - had a cheese and onion pie.  I will do the vegetables tomorrow morning. Ok, I am going to celebrate because this is my 160 post on this blog and 112111 people  have viewed it.

As you can see, I have dug down three spits so that I can fill the trench with brush and shredded material.  You can see the green manure in the background and some of the shallots and winter onions.  As I dug out each spit I mixed the soil using soil cone heaps.  This was the area where the apple tree was and I have not dug down this far for over 15 years.  However, I must have dug down here in the past because I found two of my old sandles at the bottom of the trench.  There was also some unrotted sawdust horse manure and leaves that I must have burried a long time ago.  This shows that carbon can be sequested in the soil for a long time.  Behind the spade and fork you can see the brushwood from the silver birch trees I buried here.  And if you are wondering where the apple tree is, that’s under there too.  I dug down another spit with the fork but I didn’t take this soil out of the trench.  I was able to put four barrowloads of shreddings into  the trench.

  As you can see it is mostly laylandii.  Most people would avoid using this on their allotment because it has such a bad reputation for making the soil acid and incapable of growing anything.  This far down though, I don’t think that it will have any effect on the top soil.  It will help me to keep the soil drained though.

After filling the trench I put back the third spit soil mixing it thoroughly with itself.  Next, I put two or three barrowloads of leaves in the trench.

The second spit soil goes in next and finally the top soil.  You can see the soil heap cone that I have used to mix the soil with itself.  I level out the soil afterwards.  And that is all there is to it.

For a few years now I have not been seriously digging.  When I took over the bottom half there was a lot of water running on it from the springs so I had to do some serious drainage.  The best way I have found of draining the allotment is to dig down about three spits and then to add lots of brushwood, shreddings and even logs.  This seems to keep the soil open and allow water to pass through the soil without coming to the surface.  It seems to have worked very well because there is no water on the bottom half although there is a stream flowing down the trackway next to the allotment.  Since I did this last year, I found that mixing the soil seems to have increased the yield from this part of the allotment.  I had four rows of Early Onward peas that had a fairly remarkable crop.  We still have margarine tubs full of them now.

I repeated the exercise in November last year burying a rambling rose from one of the houses that back on to my allotment.  It was seriously taking over the trackway.  I cut it back and buried it so I am hoping that this will aid in the drainage too.  I did not dig a small area by the shed because there were still some of the annual flowers flowering.  Now that they have well and truely died, I will dig these in and try to raise the allotment here to the same height as the rest of this area.  I will probably use some of the brushwood and shreddings  to do this but make sure they are buried very deep down.  This is the exact place where the water was running across the allotment all of last winter.  There is absolutely no water at all this year, however I still want to raise the ground about another 30 cm. if I can.  I have to be careful not to bank up the soil onto the shed though.  It will only encourage it to rot.

I have painted the shed with Cuprinol or whatever it is called.  I didn’t buy it.  It was given to me.  Well, I have painted it on the shed about three times and I still have half a can left.  I am blowed if I am going to throw it away.  It is a nasty old chemical and would only pollute the world.  I will continue to paint the shed  until it all goes.  I may well paint the bean sticks and the poles holding up the wires for the raspberries.   I still haven’t moved the raspberries from the top half to the bottom half.  This is starting to irritate me because it is getting a little late to start moving raspberries.  I will have to do it though because I have planned to grow runner beans where the raspberries are now.  I have already moved the large water butt although in the move it developed a big crack in the bottom and is now useless.  I will use it to store things in and get another bigger one.

On the top of the allotment, I usually just hoe the few weeds off and cultivate the top couple of centimeters with a claw cultivator and then plant into that without digging.   This year though I will dig quite a lot of the allotment.  I am going to dig in the green manure and possibly add a lot of leaves or other organic matter depending on what people leave in the bins by the gate.  I hope the bloke with the shire horses brings another big load of horse manure.  No matter what is in it,  it is all grist to the mill; particularly three spits down.

So, do I do a no dig system or do I begin to double and triple dig again?  I might just run out of time and have to revert to no dig.  The brassicas  like to have a firm soil to grow in.  I think that this may help to deter the cabbage root fly ( Delia radicum ).  So I am not too worried if I cannot dig  the brassica area over.  I have not walked on it since I took the beans and the sweetpeas down last year, so the worms would have had time to soften it up a bit.  Going over it with a hoe, claw cultivator and rake will be good enough to prepare it.  I will also be liming this area I think.  It has not had lime on it for about four years now.  A good liming will help  to prevent club root (Plasmodiophora brassicae.)  I keep to a strict rotation and it has been about four years since I grew brassicas  on this part of the allotment.  Now  that I have the bottom half, I will be able to have a six year rotation.  It makes rotation much easier if each of the beds were equal in size.  This is why I am moving the slabs on the top allotment and making it exactly the same size as the other beds.  I will also relay the path to the tap, taking out the topsoil and replacing it with stones to make a soak away under the path.

This should even things up so that I do not have those irritating little areas where it is not worth planting anything.

I will  have to find somewhere good to plant my viburnum because it is just where I will be altering the path.  There are a lot of bulbs there too which will have to be moved.

This reminds me.  I need to take down the large plastic bags to put my old brassicas in to bring home and put into the green bin.  I should not have left the stumps in the ground because it encourages Plasmodiophora brassicae to spread throughout the soil.  I think that spores from this fungi can stay in the soil for a number of years and it is a devil of a job removing it from a planting area.    I have been fairly successful in keeping it off the allotment until this year.  I have found that the new soil that the council bought has club root in it.  I just hope that it does not spread through the rest of the allotment.

I don’t burn the stumps.  I really don’t think that a damp, smoky, foul smelling fire will be good enough to kill off club root spores. So taking them home to put in the green recycling bin is the best option for me.

Mixing the soil through digging seems to be effective in distributing and reestablishing nutrients from lower in the soil towards the top.  No  dig might be alright for a few years but I think that a jolly good digging once in a while would increase yields - especially after twenty eight years of continuous cultivation.

I am still getting really good crops off the allotment though so I can’t  be getting a lot wrong…

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

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

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

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

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

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