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.