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…

Now I may be a grumpy old man but I do find the need to light bonfires at the slightest excuse really irritating.  Gardens do not need fires.  They are the  antethesis of gardening.

The whole point of gardening is to get out into the fresh air, give yourself exercise and grow some good wholesome vegetables. Or that is what I thought but what do I know.  Autumn seems to be the season of fire lighting.  A season that culminates on the 5th of November where people vie to get the largest most dangerous pile of flammable material that they can and then proceed to burn it all.

Not only that but insult is added to injury by firing off of fireworks.  As if we did not have enough pollution.  Why not add a little more heavy metal contaminated smoke to the atmosphere?

‘Oh’ I hear you say, ‘but aren’t they beautiful?’  No.  Flowers are beautiful.  Gardens are beautiful.  People are beautiful.

Garden fires produce carcinogens - cancer producing substances.  You loose the nutrients locked up inside the plants when they burn.  It adds carbon dioxide to the atmosphere unnecessarily and it dumps pollution onto surrounding allotments.  You do not get rid of stuff.  It is still there - just changed- and some of it gets onto other people’s allotments.

What do you do with diseased plants?  Well one thing I would not do is heap them into a smelly, smoke ridden pile of wet plant material because I will guarantee that you will not destroy  pests or diseases in this way.  Heat is one of the ways of killing microorganisms, however I would be surprised if the heat generated and the achitecture of a normal smoky garden fire would be a reliable way of safely disposing of diseased material.

There are alternatives to having fires.  You could use your green bin if your local council provides one, you could take it to the tip or you could bury it on the allotment.  Ah but… I hear you say - regardless of the ‘buts’ there are alternatives.I have never met a problem that shredding, burying or composting did not solve.  Burning is not the answer.

I have experimented for several years now burying large logs and tree branches.  The accepted wisdom is that this practice will remove nitrogen from the soil. Bacteria and fungi rotting the logs need nitrogen and they absorb it from the surounding soil.  Now this may be the case, however, if the logs are buried below the normal root run of vegetables any nitrogen that the microorganisms remove would not be available to most vegetables anyway.  I am talking here about burying at least two spits down in  subsoil.  Nitrogen is usually leached from the soil and this may be a good way of trapping this nitrogen and giving us the potential of recycling it into the top soil when the logs have eventually rotted away.  In my experience the rotting process is relatively quick and the soil formed is very friable.  I call this the  Montezuma method. These South American indians knew what they were doing.  They were excellent horticulturalists and agriculturalists.  They built vast floating gardens that fed cities.  They floated gardens on logs and brush wood. In any case, it does not seem to have any adverse effect on my vegetables.

Earlier in the year I buried a leylandii tree two spits down by double digging and burying it under the subsoil.  I have just dug down to see what has happened to it and I cannot find any trace of it.

Burying  logs has several advantages.  It raises the soil above the surrounding area.  As there are two springs on my allotment, raising the soil level means that the water flows below the soil and into the subsoil.   The surface 6 to 8 inches are normally well drained.  The logs and brush wood seem to leave drainage spaces in the soil which water can flow through easily.  I am burying carbon that would otherwise be converted into carbon dioxide and add to the carbon load of the atmosphere.  While carbon dioxide and methane are produced from the rotting process, I would suggest that most of the carbon will be left in the soil.  There is evidence that soil could be a carbon sink and buried carbon in the form of logs and brushwood could stay in the soil for hundred or even thousands of years.

It’s been quite a long time since I wrote a blog here.  Now several people have asked me if I am going to continue it.  After a while considering, I have decided to start writing again.  (Also, I lost my password and have only just reset it.)

I am going to write an article on the anti social practice of lighting fires for the allotment newsletter.  If you look back at previous blogs you will find that I abhor bonfires.  There seems to be no justification for them at all.  Maybe it is because I am a grumpy old man but there are so many reasons for not increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and I will list them – but not now.�