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…

Now, I wonder why people who write about gardening on the web should get together at the Malvern Show.    What outcome is expected especially from grumpy old men like me who enjoy allotments rather than the pristine, manicured gardens that are the subject of photographs on many garden blogs.  What am I going to get out of this and what are others going to gain from me being there?   The whole point is the meeting of people - to no apparent effect whatsoever.  However, I am sure that everyone will say that it was particularly useful and that they met many people.  I may still go because I like to see these events and how people relate to them.  Still, I would rather be bird watching.

The making of an event, rather than the gaining of information and the cross fertilisation of ideas, seems to be pointless.   I have learnt much more by reading posts that people have been writing on the Allotments.uk website than virtually all the books that I have leafed through.  Where else would I have found out about mychorrhizal fungi, Amazonian black earths, Napomyza gymnostroma, and the effects of using glyphosate?  I look in vain, through the most advanced gardening books, and these subjects are not there.

Will attending the Malvern show really allow me to gain more information?  I doubt it.

While these events are dabbling in the secret arts of gardening and the artistic side of gardening - neither of which I decry, I would rather investigate and interpret data that will indicate how to improve my gardening without harming the environment overmuch.   As I have a fairly successful allotment, most people think that I have discovered deep secrets about growing.  There are no dark secrets.  It is all in the books and now on websites and, although it is very hard work, it is simple.

The number of sites that go on about compost heaps.  There is nothing magic about compost.  Just pile a load of garden refuse together and leave for 6-12 months and then dig it in.   If you want pristine, beautiful compost then spend time dibble dabbling with it.  I do not.

So I might go to the Malvern show just to see who else likes to write about their gardening like I do.  The most useful thing about writing a garden diary like this is that you can see what you did last year and the year before.  It is always good to remind yourself what seeds you grew last year.  I aways forgot and lost the seed packets so I could not remind myself.  Now I list them on here and can see what I grew.

I spent some time over the weekend crushing the lumps of charcoal to a powdery mix and adding it to the charcoal and comfrey mixture.  I added some blood fish and bone too.   I have no idea if this will work or not but I cannot see the charcoal harming plants so at the very least I have just wasted about £6 on barbeque charcoal.   It is a bit of a faff having to break the charcoal up with the lump hammer but if I do a little each time I go to the allotment, it is amazing how fast you can get through jobs like this.

So onward and upward to converting my allotment into Amazonian black earth.

I am not really one for shows.  Not even to show my sweet peas.  I am still in two minds.  I might just wait until I retire.

Also known as Amazonian Dark Earths. After watching The secrets of El Dorado on http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/secret-el-dorado,  I now have a new project.  I want to begin to work on developing ADE on my allotment.  It is not just down to charcoal though.  There is a complex interaction between charcoal, nutrients, organic matter and mychorrihzal fungi. I have to thank Uriel 13 for putting me onto this.  His suggestion is that it is not mychorrhizal fungi but yeast that is important in producing this kind of soil.  He is suggesting sour dough yeast.

Whether it is mychorrhizal fungi or not, yeast is another avenue to follow.  I don’t know where to get sour dough yeast from, however my local garden centre sells mychorrhizal fung.
As to producing my own charcoal, I think that I am going to experiment with various commercial charcoals first and I am going to mix them with blood fish and bone in a solution of undiluted comfrey liquid to start with.  I am  going to dry the resulting mixture to produce a powder because this will be easier to mix evenly though the top soil.

I have a particularly infertile area of soil on the allotment, (If you want to know why look on my allotment blog under benzo (a) pyrene).  I am going to set up a proper comparison plot with several sections.  Another problem is what proportions should be used to make the most efficient soil additive.  I am going on the assumption that it is the adsorbsion of nutrient into the charcoal that is the inportant factor.  Also the provision of micro habitats for bacteria and fungi may be important.  The provision of very small crevices within the charcoal may prevent predation by other microorganisms.   As yeasts can be very small, as other fungi, they may find a sanctuary within the charcoals labyrinth. The trial plots will be:

• One with charcoal on its own,one with blood fish and bone on its own,
• one with comfrey on its own,
• one with blood fish and bone and comfrey
• one with comfrey and charcoal
• and finally one with all.
• I would like to check out fungi as well, however that might make it complicated :-)).

I will  grow peas on the different plots.  They may confuse the issue because they have nitrogen fixing bacteria in their roots, however it will be the same for all plots and that is my rotation so get over it…
Trying to think of ways that the soil remake itself may not be too problematic.  The increase in microorganisms within such a fertile soil may cause it, if they are produced in enough numbers.  Any nutrient from decomposition seems to be adsorped by the charcoal and this also gives soil fungi a really good habitat.  Together with an increase in the population of roots and leaf litter from above ground you are very likely to get an increase in volume of soil.

If the film’s suggestion is correct and the plots are set up like the ones reported then I should get enough information to convince myself of the value of this method of soil management.  I doubt very much whether it is properly scientific, however it is good fun.

You know I  really do have a great respect for the agricultural and horticultural knowledge of the ancient South  American  indian civilizations.    I think that  the jury is out as to whether the terra preta soils were deliberately produced or just resulted from  humans throwing out their waste materials.  I would  like to think that they were making these soils consciously.

There seems to be some  advantage to  adding composted activated charcoal to the soil.  Looking at the  properties  of activated charcoal, it  seems to be able to adsorb large amounts of organic compounds and this  characteristic seems to allow it  to  contribute to the fertility of the soil - for  hundreds if not thousands of years.  This interests me because apart from contributing  to the fertility of my allotment it would also help to sequester carbon in the soil.

Now previously in these blogs I have berated people for  lighting smoky fires  and  allowing  the  smoke to  blow over my allotment.   However, do I have to modify my opinion of fires now?  I don’t think  so.   Charcoal burning  may well be a good way of increasing  and  sustaining  the fertility of the soil but not near my allotment.

I am told there are charcoal producers that prevent noxious fumes from  venting  to the atmosphere.   I  am dubious… However, in the spirit of scientific or at the least horticultural exploration I will indeed try composting some activated charcoal  and see  if  it adds to the fertility  of the allotment when I dig it in.  Maybe  I  will also  put some under the peas because it  seems to help with the nitrogen fixing bacteria.

Snow  has gone now and I am looking forward to  digging on the allotment again.  I will continue with my Montezuma method because I think that this will also help to sequester carbon in the soil.

Charcoal and compost I can cope with.   I doubt very much if I will make my own especially if it involves burning fish and  bones.  How about mixing it with blood fish  and bone?  Worth thinking  about Tone…

 I cannot do much on the allotment at the moment which is a little frustrating back problems.  I am still taking down the 4 silver birch in the garden though.  The way that I do this is to dig around the trunk and expose all the roots or as many as I can.  After this, I tie two ropes as high as I can onto the trunk to guide the tree as it falls.  Next I cut through all of the roots which is not a particularly arduous task if you have a sharp bow saw.  I also put a little oil on the blade to make it even easier.  With my son holding one of the ropes to steady the tree and prevent it from falling in the wrong direction we both pull the tree over.  We cut it up into 1metre chunks and then I take it to the allotment to bury.  As I have said in previous diary entries, the burying of logs and brushwood has a long history in Central and South American agricultural culture.

I call this my Montezuma method.

I am planting my sweet peas for next year now.  They are being planted in peat free compost with a little  myhchorrhizal fungi mixed in it.  Last year, when I did this, the plants grew very well and although some of the sweet peas did not make an association there was a substantial number that did.   I am putting them into the tray dividers.  It is much easier to deal with plants when you use these plastic dividers.  The plants come out with thier little block of soil and the roots are not disturbed.  I could not find any of the bottomless pots in the garden centers at the moment.  I will transplant them when I can get some.  I am planting more than I usually do because several people have asked me if I could plant some for them.

The varieties that I have chosen this year are.

                Chatsworth                                                             Mollie Rilestone

1. Chatsworth for frangrance Thompson and Morgan
2. Molie Rilestone  for  fragrance Thompson and Morgan
3. Lilac Ripple for  fragrance  Thompson and Morgan
4. Royal Wedding for  fragrance Thompson and Morgan
5. Percy Thrower for  fragrance Thompson and Morgan
6. Flamingo Unwins
7. David Unwin Unwins
8. Norman Wisdom Unwins
9. Castle of Mey Unwins
10. Rosy Dawn Unwins
11. Peacock for  fragranceUnwins
12. Lipstick Unwins
13. Red Arrow Unwins
14. King Size Navy Blue for  fragrance Thompson and Morgan.
15. Blue Ripple for  fragrance Thompson  and Morgan
16. America fragrant  old variety 1896 Thompson  and Morgan
17. Miss Wilmott Fragrant old  variety 1901 Thompson  and Morgan
18. Cathy  for  fragrance Unwins
19. Appleblossom Thompson  and Morgan

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.

I have started to prepare the ground for the garlic and the winter onions.  Now you should know my feelings about bonfires.  People are gathering wood brush for November the  5th and leaving it on the car park by my allotment.  I am using this to make my Montezuma beds.  I dig down at least two spits and bury as much woody material as I can.  The subsoil is replaced and then compost, manure or lawn mowings are  put on top of that and finally the topsoil covers this.  It raises up the soil and makes a kind of hot bed for the onions.  I will have to cover the onions with enviromesh because last year they were very affected by the onion fly that infects the allotment.  It does not worry me but it is extra work.  Who ever thought that we would have to cover onions and leeks to keep insects off?The sweet peas were a disaster this year.  Every time they bloomed it would rain and damage the flowers.   I think that some of the seed had been infected with virus and this was then transferred to the other plants.  All the plants started to yellow at the bottoms and it slowly traveled up the stem.   I eventually took the lot out and put them in the green bin at home.

I will be planting new sweet pea seed  in a couple of weeks.  I am planting in plastic trays with compartments.  When they have germinated I will transfer them to those fabric pots with no bottoms.  When I do this I will add mychorrhizal fungi to the roots.

Blooming good year for runner beans.  The Aintree was spectacular again but the white runner  Desiree did not do quite so well.  The crop is starting to get a lot less now thank heavens.  All the summer onions were lifted last month and put onto strings in the shed.  I will take them home as and when we need them.  Spuds did reasonably well although not as well as last year.  A lot of the allotment gardens were affected by this weed killer aminopyuralid and my allotment was no exception.  I thought that I was going to be lucky because I got my muck from a friend that has horses.  It must have been in the bedding straw for the horses.

It did not affect the potatoes too much but it was not what I wanted.

Lovely crop of carrots this year.  Big ones too.  I left the enviromesh on them and did not take it off  this month like I did last year.  I did not think that the carrot fly would still be laying eggs at this time of the year but they are.  It helps to keep the slugs off them as well.

The foliage of the parsnips is very big; however, as I said to Don, it is not the tops we eat.  I just hope that this is a symptom of what is growing underground.

I have moved all my strawberries into one place on the allotment now.  All the new ones were given mychorrhizal fungi and they seem to be growing well.  I put a line of American land cress and rocket in for leaves during the winter.  I finished off the packet of spinach but there were only a few so I finished off the row with green manure.  I have bought a mixture of green manure this year.  Nevertheless, I am experimenting with just using normal rye grass for green manure.  It is coming up well so will be dug in next spring.

I spent a few hours in the last few weeks taking all  the cabbage white caterpillars off the brassicas.  I doubt if I got them all but I think that I made a big dent in the population so that they will not totally devastate them like they did last year.  I took the nets off them because they restrict access and I wanted to weed, feed and take off the yellow leaves.  I may have to put them back on because the pigeons start to eat them  if they get hugry during the winter.  I have been picking calabrese and purple sprouting for all of August and they are still coming now.  I will leave the purple sprouting in until next year because it should be coming next spring.  The new soil that they are in is very poor in nutrient so I was thinking of moving my grapes there.  Grapes like a very poor soil.  The leeks are here as well and they are growing very well considering the state of the soil.    I will buy a couple more stakes and put wire across like I have for the new raspberries.  I am in two minds whether to keep the old raspberries or throw them away.   I was given them about 30 years ago when I first had the allotment.  They are not the biggest cropping raspberries but they did do very well this year.  I think that every one of them is a differnent variety and some are very small almost like wild ones.  Their flavour is exquisite though.  I did not take any raspberries home this year because I ate them all at the allotment.

Now that I have my new shed, I am becoming much more domesticated.  I have a kettle and a little primus stove.   Now,  I keep  forgetting to take milk down to the allotment - I have tea - so I have taken to picking off the flowers of the chamomile and brewing up chamomile flower tea.  It is a mild sedative and keeps sending me to sleep. The comfy chair I have does not help either.  Fresh chamomile tea is perfection though.

Tomorrow I will continue to dig the onion and garlic bed.  I will probably find a lot of other things to do as well but I cannot think of them now.

I know that we should not rely too much on generic scientific research because each garden has a unique soil and microclimate.  However, to be able to promote companion planting as part of a wider organic more natural way of gardening, we do need some base to work from.  I would like to say that this method could be used in all growing situations but this is difficult to do without some prestigious research.

I think that every gardener that uses companion planting must have seen some effect and anecdotal evidence is as valid as any other.  Yet, I would conjecture that it may not work in all cases and this would make some people suggest that it does not work in any. 

My worry was that everyone was just copying tables throughout the internet without really trying things out.  They all seemed to be so similar.  If someone has just made them up as they went along then we are basing our gardening on very weak foundations. 

I am also looking into the research on using mychorrhizal fungi and there does seem to be more research in this area.  Its potential to reduce the amount of fertilizer use is immense. 

God does work in mysterious ways I think…�

The interesting thing about trying to garden with a little more intelligence than it previously required means that you find out fairly obvious things that really you should have thought about before.  Companion planting, it is suggested, helps other plants to grow with a little more vigour.  How this occurs is not always spelt out and probably has not been fully investigated.  We just have not really needed to know because we could slap on several nasty chemicals so that the plants could survive without the help of other plants.  Now that we cannot get lots of these chemicals we have to look at other methods of controlling pests and diseases in crop plants.  Companion planting must be a method of gardening that is ripe for serious research but in lieu of this there must be enough anecdotal evidence to convince people, that would like to garden with the help of nature, that there may be something here.  It costs nothing to a good grower except a few packets of seeds. 

If we accept that this could be a good way of growing, then it might bring with it other benefits.  We avoid the monoculture of growing the same plants close together.  Anyone in the
UK will tell you that their brassicas have been devastated this year with cabbage white butterfly caterpillars.  Maybe if I had put some companion plants between them, there would not have been such a problem.  What we are looking at is a more cottage garden type of planting system that allows flowers and vegetables to be interplanted. 

From my experience with tagetes this year I would suggest that there is a benefit to growing onions interspersed with it.  Grow the small French marigolds rather than the big African ones because some of the onions got a little shaded out this year.  So is this due to exudates from the roots of plants?  Is it due to their pungent smell?  Is there some other effect that might be coming into play?  I don’t know. 

If we are actively trying to improve the fauna and flora of the soil, a companion planting system may attract a more diverse range of organisms, which would encourage a more natural food chain.  If we add to this mychorrhizal fungi and allow an even more intimate soil community to develop then we may well achieve a more fertile response from the soil.  Using this fungus with green manures may also help to lock nutrients into the soil. 

The fragility of the mychorrhizal fungi is evident by their scarcity in our soils.  I sometimes see them around weed plants like dandelions but rarely anywhere else.  I am going to use dandelions as a companion plant next year. 

The comfrey plants on the allotment are going to be replanted during the winter and they will get a good dose of these fungi together with the moved rhubarb. 

A further advantage of using companion plants is that they attract insects that may predate garden pests.

To continue…

There are many sites that are really good at suggesting a variety of different plants for companion planting.  I have no idea if they work or not but I am going to check them out.  These plants are also good for introducing mychorrihizal fungi into the soil.  So if they are grown from seed in the greenhouse then pricked out with fungi, they can be planted in the garden next to vegetables or flowers. 

Possible advantages of companion planting.

• Plants that produce pest controlling chemicals either from their leaves or roots.  These could include tagetes and the herb plants.
• Plants that form a particularly good association with mychorrhizal fungi and will enable the fungi to form an association with crop plant roots. 
• Plants which have flowers that attract insect preditors such as hoverflies and lacewings. 
• Plants that could also act as annual or perenial green manures such as comfrey, nettle and sweet cicely and also do some of the above. 
• Plants that just make the allotment more attractive.   

I am going to list them here mainly as an aid memoir.

• Yarrow
• Monkshood (Aconitum)
• Bugle (Ajuga reptans)
• Borage - possibly with strawberries and pumpkins.
• Dill (Anethum gravellens) particularly with cabbage, lettuce and carrots.
• Chamomile (Anthemis) I grew this this year and will grow it again.  In some books it describes chamomile as the “doctor plant.”   Did well with my onions.  Also with cabbages.
• Chives around the base of fruit trees.
• Flax with carrots and potatoes.
• Hyssop with potatoes and grapes.
• Marogolds (Tagetes) It is really the main pest deterrent.  It suposedly keeps the soil free of nematodes, discourages many soil insects and looks quite good too. 
• Nasturtium with radish, cabbage, cucumber, fruit trees, and all the curbits.
• Petunia is good with beans.
• Rosemary is good with carrots, beans and cabbage.
• Columbine (Aquilegia)
• Pot Marigold (Calendula officinalis) Grew this this year and need to make sure that I give room to it.  It can shade out low growing vegetables.   
• Crocus.  I have just planted some in the allotment - without realising their potential.  They have been planted with mychorrhizal fungi.  I also planted grape hyasinth and snowdrops (Galanthus.)
• Californian Poppy (Eschscholzia californica)  This was planted and seemed to have an effect.  It is not a really long lasting plant and goes over very quickly. 
• Fennel (Foeniculum vulgare).  I don’t have any fennel at the moment but I might plant some next year. 
•  Hardy Geranium and Crainesbill.  I think I get these as weeds on the allotment. 
• Candytuft (Iberis) 
• Dead nettle (Lamium) with potatoes
• Lavender.   I grow this at home so it will not be a great problem to put them onto the allotment. 
• Poached-egg plant (Limnanthes douglasii) Now of all the companion planting this year, I think that this was the least sucessful.  It was planted under the apple tree but even so it could have made a better effort.  The upsetting and irritating thing is that it flowered for years alongside my allotment as an escape from one of the gardens.  Not on my allotment though. 
• Lobellia
• Honeysuckle
• Poppy (Papaver)
• Phacelia tanacetifolia
• Primulas
• Lungwort(Pulmonaria) This is growing alongside my allotment on the trackway. 
• Sedum
• Golden rod (Solidago)
• Periwinkle (Vinca) I have both the varigated and the wild one in my garden. 
• Dandilion is not usually included in the lists I have seen but I have dug up long taproots this year covered in mychorrhizal fungi.  
• Grass ?  I have just been weeding and a lot of the grass has mychorrhizal fungi growing on their roots. 

More information but without research evidence Tone:

http://juliesedwick.com/CPG1.aspx

 I don’t really mind if these plants do not have any affect on the vegetables in the allotment.  If I do interplant next year, they will brighten up the allotment a little.   

The weather has been a little damp and I have not been able to get down to the allotment for over a week. 

Last time I was down I sprayed the leeks with a mixture of aspirin and derris.   I don’t know if this is a good combination but I will inspect the allotment today to see if they are all right.   I really need to do them again today.  I will take the spray with me.  It needs a good washing out anyway.  The ground on this part of the allotment was saturated so I hope that the leeks are surviving.  I have not drained this part of the allotment and it does get saturated.  This will be a project for next year. 

Carrots are continuing to crop very well.  These are the best carrots I have had in many years.  The beetroot too is doing remarkably well. 

I will be planting Marshmello Strawberries in earnest today.  I have dug over the new bed and incorporated a lot of comfrey leaves.  The plants will also get some mychorrhizal fungi spores in the root holes.  Marshalls said that they were winners for the best exhibit with this Strawberry and it was recommended by people on the allotment so I have high hopes for next year. 

The Aintree runner beans are still cropping really well.  I will expect to have at least another 6-8lbs off them today. 

I have cabbage white butterfly catterpillars on the brassicas now.  I should go and pick them off but I cannot be bothered.  I hope that the birds will have most of them.  I could spray with nettle juice I suppose but I doubt if I will. 

I will be planting the mustard today on the old potato plot.  I took out the Sapo potatoes. and although it said it was blight resistant, there was still some blight on it.   

I will have a look at the summer onions and see if they need to come out and ripen off in the greenhouse.  They are not as big as I was hoping. I think that I will just use sets next year.  They are already advertising garlic so I might get some for next year and plant them now so that they get the benefit of all the cold weather. 

I still haven’t got the peas out and really need to do this now.  Overall, I think that it is tidy up time on the allotment.�