I have finished straightening the path to the water tap and it looks alright.  It is an allotment, Tone, stop quibbling about the levels.  It will more than do.
I did not dig out all the top soil from under the slabs because of not enough time.  This will be a job for later.  I have put some roots of apple mint under the slabs and I am hoping that they will come up between the flags so that when I tread on them they will give off a lovely minty smell.

I began to dig where the old greenhouse used to be.  I have not dug deeply there for a good 20 years.  I boasted that my top soil goes down about a metre, however here it barely goes down 30 cm.  I have also moved all the raspberries and started to dig where these were. Again, the soil depth is not much more.  I am digging up a lot of stuff that had not rotted down in the greenhouse.  I put the remnants of my old compost heap in the green house when I first put it up.  They are still there now after that many years too.

I will tidy up this area next weekend and then go onto digging where the carrots are going next year and then finally onto the potato bed.  I am hoping to get some manure from Tony for this bed.  I like to put a lot of horse muck onto potatoes.

I have finally put in my order for seeds.   Maybe because I feel a little more warmth in my bones now.  Last year I had ordered by February 6th and the year before I ordered in January.  I don’t know what was wrong with me this year.

I have also ordered some Champagne rhubarb and a new gooseberry called Xenia.  Xenia is a red gooseberry and can be used as an eater as well as a cooker.  I will take cuttings off this and multiply the bush by at least ten.  I will do the cuttings in July.

I am going to write a blog on carrot root fly Psila rosea when I have read as much research as I can find.  

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.

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…

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.

Well  this  is  interesting.  We  have not had  a winter  like  this for  years in  England.  When I started to  garden  seriously - when I was about eight years old,  winters were like this.  The soil was like iron  and water froze  solid  in the butts.

Well I cannot get the leeks or the parsnips out of the ground at the moment.   During the Christmas  break, however,  we had fresh  parsnips,  a few leeks, brussel sprouts, beetroot and  brocolli.  We also  used  frozen  peas, maize, beans,  carrots and stored  pumpkin,  onion and potatoes.    That  is twelve  vegetables for Christmas  lunch…

Some nutter has  been  pulling  out my winter cauliflowers  for  some reason  and  I  have  lost  about  a  row of them.   Not  to  worry because I  have another two  rows.

What  can  you say?

All  the winter digging has  stopped.

The  four large silver birch were taken down by friends in November.   There was a large amount of brushwood and branches which I took down to the allotment.  I also  took down  the  large 5-8 cm branches.  I  would  have taken the  trunks  as  well  but they wanted them for their  log fires.  I took  out a line of gooseberry bushes and buried them as  well.  They keep on getting American mildew and I want to buy some resistant ones.  I love gooseberries.  I took out several of the blackcurrents as well and buried them with the gooseberries.  They were very old varieties that I was given ages ago when I first got the allotment.  They were not really producing very many fruit so I have replaced them with cuttings I took  of the new varieties.

I dug pits three spits  down carefully making sure that the layers of soil were not mixed.  Now  you can believe this or  not  but  I still had  top soil at this depth.  The top spit was  exceptionally fine  and  friable because  I  had  sieved it  several times over the  years.   I put quite a layer of  brushwood,  leaves and  compost in the bottom of the  pit.  The  larger branches  at the very bottom and the finer  pieces  nearer the  surface.   My son had cut the smaller pieces into approximately  5cm pieces so  a  lot  would fit into a small  area. I replace  the soil carefully mixing each  layer using the conical pile method.  If you make a pile of soil into a cone  shape  then each time  you put another spade full of soil on the top of it, it  mixes down the sides.  This  is how I used to mix potting composts when I worked  in tomato glasshouses.  Each  layer  was  mixed  like  this when  I  put the soil back  into the pit.   I did not mix the layers though.

Now the conventional  wisdom  is that this  addition of high carbon to nitrogen material  will  deplete  the soil  of nutrients.  After doing this  for  many  years,  I  question whether  this  is true in  all circumstances.   My new stainless  steel  spade  has a blade about 12 inches which means  that I am  going down about 3 feet.  At this level would  decomposition cause nutrient loss?  Nitrogen  is used both by bacteria  and  fungi to make their bodies.  This  nitrogen must be  obtained  from the  soil  some how or other.

The bacteria  could only get the  nitrogen from  the decomposing  material  itself.  The  fungi on  the other  hand  could stretch out mycelium into  the surrounding soil in  search of nitrogen.  The most  likely  place  that  they would find  it is  in the top 6 inches of topsoil.  Would  this be  feasable for  fungi  to  grow  mycelium  this  long.  Well in  this  though experiment,  I  have to say there  is evidence that mycelium do  grow remarkably long and this would not be unusual.  So,  I  want  to  find  out  next  year if the onions  suffer  with  nitrogen  depletion - although  I  have been  given  some  free  blood,  fish  and  bone and have already put it on the winter  onions,  shallots  and  garlic.   I  don’t really think that burying brushwood this deep will affect the plants growing in the top soil significantly. I would like a harvest of onions that is  not affected by Napomyhza gymnostoma, the onion miner fly, which  is a much more pressing problem than  worrying about nutrient depletion.  To that end I will be covering the  winter onions  with enviromesh  as soon as the cold whether has gone.

The effect  of burying brush wood  like this is to raise the allotment soil up at least 6 inches or so.  The theory is  that the brushwood would keep the subsoil  open and porous to  excess water.   Where the soil has  not been able  to fall through the brushwood, there would be  voids which water could pass through with little obstruction.   This would cause  the ground to be  much better drained.   There has not really been a water problem on this part of the allotment since just after I took it over,  however I would like to make sure that  the  water that  is on the rest of the allotment has  an  easy route off, and this  route will also include this  area now.

Another  reason  I  think that this  is will be  advantagous  is  that the decomposition  will produce heat  and  warm  the soil.  This is the theory behind the  ridge  for  ridge  cucumbers.   I must admit that when I went up and tried to dig this  area at the start of  the very cold weather it was just as hard as any other part of the allotment.  Maybe the heat had not penetrated across to the area that I was digging in.   Maybe I need to wait until  the  spring  before the bacterial and fungi start doing their job.

I must admit that the  pumpkins  did  well  on the  manure pile (that  I  left because  it was contaminated  with  aminopyuralid herbicide) possibly because of  the heat the manure  generated .

Moreover, a layer  of decomposing organic  matter like this could also  help   to  prevent  water loss during  the  summer. Evaporation from the  top of  the  soil  would cause water to  rise during  periods  of hot  dry  weather due  to  capillary action.   A thick layer of  brush  like  this  would  slow this process  down with  any luck.  Whether  this  is  infact  what  will  happen  remains to  be  seen, although I  think  that  this  is  the  theory  behind  digging  a  bean  trench and  putting  lots  of compost at  the  bottom  of it.

I am  encouraged  by finding  out that the South American early civilisations used this as a method to make terraced fields and also to  drain  fields  around  lakes.  These  are the  peoples that bred  potatoes, beans, tomatoes, maize,  cucumber,  marrow,  squashes,  and many more  food  plants.  Respect…

As my back  has  improved a lot,  I  will probably be down at the allotment as soon as the  weather improves.  I really hope that this cold  weather will have seen off a lot  of  pests on the allotment.   With that  in mind the only reason that  I  want to  go  to  the allotment at the moment is to replenish  the bird feeders.

The sweet peas seem to be holding up in the greenhouse.  I would have liked to transplant them  into their opend ended  pots before  the cold weather  really set in but I  haven’t so we will just have  to  wait and hope they will  survive.   There is  no  heat  in the greenhouse.

I am looking  at catalogues and  websites at the moment because I will have  to order my seeds soon especially if I want the  varieties that work on the allotment.   I am going to go for kestrel and Sante potatoes again.  They worked fairly  well even though they had the contaminated horse manure on them.   They have decided to use aminopyuralid again after banning it last year.  I cannot see how they can keep it out of the manure.  Still I  will get some  horse manure  from  Tony in the next few weeks.  I have left a space on  the  allotment to pile it  on.  I will  put it under the potatoes again because  I  see little benefit  to  leaving  it  to  rot  down  for  a year on a pile.   I have  always dug in manure fresh  or not -  it  might as well rot down in the soil as on a heap.  By the time  I get around to planting the potatoes in this area the manure will have had  at least threee  or  four months to decompose.   I  never find that it is so hot that it  damages the  plants.  The only manure that I would be  very careful with is pigeon  because that can seriously damage  the  soil if  put on  neat.   Pigeon  manure  will  be  put onto the compost heap  as an accelerator - not that I  have a  compost heap for any lenght  of time.   I  like  to dig stuff in  straight  away if I have a space on the allotment.  I  dig  it in at least two  spits deep  so  that it  does not affect the top soil.

I will put most of  the compost that  I  have collected this year onto the bottom plot.   It still needs to be raised up a lot - it has still got running water on the surface.   With the very poor new soil that the council have given me, there is a big need for  organic matter to be incorporated into it.  It will be the area for the peas this year and this will give me the opportunity to add lots of manure and compost into the trenches before planting.  I doubt that I will get such good peas this year as  last.  We will  see…

Other jobs that I would be doing if the weather was a little more clement would be to move all the raspberries to their new home and to straighten the old path.  As the  allotment has been raised up, where I am going to straighen the path is about 2 feet below the soil surface.  I will have to dig away some of this bed,  move the  soil retaining  paving slabs across and  then replace the  soil.  There may be some soil  left over so I will use it to raise the  ground where I took the old greenhouse down.

I got down to the allotment on Sunday afternoon.  I took down the lawn cuttings and put them in the double digging trench.  Nearly the whole allotment site has taken down their runner beans now so I decided to do the same.  The tops went into the trench as well.  All the canes and the supports went into the greenhouse.  There were no more flowers on them and all that were left were the old beany beans that I had missed on previous picking.   The pumpkins were making a nuisance  of themselves because they had grown through the beans.  They are not very large ones, most being about the size of  a football, but there are one or two that have grown beach ball size.  Now all we have to do is eat them.  I might make pumpkin pie or soup with them and then freeze it.  It is always a good standby for the winter. 

I cleared the area where the radish, rocket and spinach had gone to seed.  Put them all in the trench.  The Florence fennel went to seed too so I put that in as well.  Double dug another trench and was just about to start filling this one with lawn cuttings and manure left near the bottom gate when it started raining. 

This time of year the allotment can be a little disheartening because the ravages of the summer are clearly evident.  Lots of the brassicas have been well and truly eaten.  The gooseberries have lost all their leaves.  Lots of the annual companion plants have gone over and need to be taken out.  So the poor old allotment really needs a good old tidy up.  I just wish that I had the energy and the time. 

The nights are drawing in now and by the time I have organised myself to get up the allotment after work it is beginning to get very dark.  I doubt that I will be able to do anything substantial except at the weekends. 

I have really cleared the bottom third of the lower allotment except for a few more comfrey plants.  I also need to take off about seven slabs which I had carefully levelled to put my shed on.  Never mind.  I have just stacked the other slabs on the path to keep them out of the way of the JCB digger.  I don’t know when they are coming to take the soil off the allotment but they did say that it would be the end of October because we would have harvested all our crops. 

The leeks need another spraying with derris to keep off the leek fly , Napomyza gymnostoma. The leeks have got some rust on them but they are still growing very well.  If the fly stays off them they will be really big around Christmas.  I am loath to take the companion plants out around them because they seem to be protecting the leeks.  Maybe it is just my wishful thinking.  I also hope that the wet year has deterred the fly as well. 

I am going to take out the old Granny Smith apple.  I don’t really want to but it is not producing many apples and the ones I do get are mangy and moth eaten.  The Victoria plum is also going over and needs to come out.  I might give them to the November the 5th people to put on their bonfire.  I am not too happy about burning things off the allotment but they came pleading for wood for the bonfire and this was all I had to offer them.  I will not be there so I don’t mind. 

I have some black grapes.  If they fatten up any more and ripen I might get some raisin sized grapes before the end of October.  It has not been a good year for grapes.  The new strawberries seem to be doing very well.  I will move the cambridge strawberries because they will be smothered by the potatoes next year when I put them in that bed.  Also I want that room to put several piles of horse manure.  I am not too sure where to put the strawberries but they cannot stay were they are now. 

The autumn raspberries are coming with great profusion now.  As is my want, I am eating them straight from the canes.  I don’t know if you agree but I do not find them as sweet as the summer ones but beggars can’t be choosers.  I still ate them for my mid afternoon break. 

Eventually it became too miserable in the rain and I decided to call it a day and come home.  I dug up five or six pounds of carrots, washed them carefully and put them in the car for people at work.  I told them that they were organic and that they would be a little moth eaten.  The consensus seemed to be that they did not mind so they have  got some to chew the bones out of. 

Today I am having tomatoes, cucumber, marrow, beetroot, carrots, red onion, potatoes, sweet corn and white onion for my evening meal.  I am making a vegetable curry with a salad on the side.  What could be better than that?  Maybe if I had brought home a few of those autumn raspberries?

Picked over 12lbs of beans off the runners.  I could not believe my eyes when I eventually got up the allotment.  The beans were doing very well even though there was running water flowing over their roots.  The sweet peas have well and truely gone over now and need to be taken out.  They will be dug in on the top half of the allotment. 

I have taken one of the small pumpkins off to eat.  We will probably use it in a stew or vegetable curry. 

Plenty of carrots although some were being eaten by slugs most were almost perfect.  Not as long as I would like but that does not really matter.  I bought home about 8lbs of carrots.  Beetroot doing well bought home about 10.  I didn’t weigh these.  The ground around the carrots and beetroot was sodden and waterlogged.  I could not walk on it without sinking.  I will have to spend quite a bit of time on this area if I want to crop it next year. 

Red onions are great.  Not very big but ideal for salads.  I am going to make a couple of salad sandwiches later and the onions will go in them. 

A very good crop of sweet corn.  After all the cold weather and rain, I thought that they would all rot off.  However, they have seemed to have thrived.  I bought back about 20 cobs some of which we have already eaten. 

The autumn raspberries have come in a rush and I picked quite a few.  I was given one a long time ago and I don’t know the name of it.  I have also been given some Autumn Bliss canes which have cropped this year. 

Cropping all these vegetables meant that I did not have any time to plant the strawberries or the mustard.  Maybe next week.

Sometimes you just have to be very strict with yourself.  I had gone up the allotment just to dig out all the potatoes however, I was sorely tempted to go and pick beans and peas.  I stuck to my guns though and, apart from tying up some raspberry canes that I hadn’t yesterday, I got out all of the Kestrel and Sante potatoes. 

This is not an easy job.  I hate leaving any small potatoes in the soil because they will harbour pests and diseases.  They used to rot in the soil because of the cold but now we have warmer winters this does not happen so readily.  I meticulously picked out all the little ones and put them in the wheel barrow to dispose of with the tops.  Last year I bagged up the potato tops and took them to the tip.  This year I have just put them on the soil that they are going to take away in October.  They might as well take the rubbish as well. 

It rained a lot yesterday and the ground was still very wet today.  So lifting the potatoes involved moving a lot of wet soil.  When I had filled a tub with potatoes, I took the tub over to the tap and washed the soil off the potatoes. 

A lot of them had blight on them and others had slug damage.  I have filled four hundred weight sacs with really good ones so I am not really worried about the poorer ones.  I will try to eat as many of the poor ones before they go off.  You just have to cut out the diseased parts and the rest is really good. 

Last year the mice found my potatoes so this year I am trying to keep them off the floor of the shed.  I am putting them onto old plastic baskets at the moment but I can see them buckling in the future.  A more permanent structure is called for I think.

Some things that you do down the allotment come as such an automatic job that you fail to recognise that other people might not have a clue what you have to do; whether you do it or why you do it. 

So, here are some of the things that I do at this time of the year.

I  wash my potatoes down the allotment. I wash them in a very old Sainsbury plastic basket. This means that while I slosh them with water, water can drain out of the holes.  I do this for three reasons.
The first is because I have spent a long time developing my top soil and I don’t really want any of it to be washed down the drain at home. Dirty vegetables could help to block the drains as well.�
The second is because it will remove any slugs or other minibeasts that are on the surface of the spuds.
A third reason is that it helps me to check the spuds for disease and blemishes that will stop them storing so well. If there is soil on them then they are difficult to see.

The early summer fruiting raspberries have finished fruiting and the fruiting canes will now go brown and die.  They will not fruit again so it is not worth keeping them tied up.  I go along the line of raspberries cutting out the old fruiting canes with a secateur. I recognise the old canes because they are brown and woody.  They also have the old fruiting spurs on them.  I then tie in the new canes that have grown this year.  I can recognise them because they are usually green right down to the ground. Remember I am talking about summer  fruiting raspberries so don’t do this to your autumn raspberries - until they have fruited of course. 

My raspberries are a hotch potch of ones given to me 25 years ago.  They are not just one variety.  This suits me because it means that they don’t all come at once but fruit from June until the beginning of August.  I have a gap during August where I do not have any raspberries and then the autumn ones start to fruit.  Believe it or not the autumn raspberries have been given to me as well.

I am slowly moving my raspberry line because they are not fruiting as well as they used to.  After 25 years you can’t ask for much more.  I did buy 10 canes from Ashwood Nursery but only one of them grew.  This one is called Glen Prosen.  I don’t mind because they are very easy to propagate just by splitting off the canes with a little root on them. 

As so many of the new ones died I have done this with the old ones and made the row up. 

The Adrienne black berry is now beginning to send up long canes.  It will fruit really well next year.  I will tie in the canes to supports. 

The strawberries have long gone over and now are sending out runners.  These can be grown on and planted as new plants.  The ones that I have got now are Cambridge and I bought them over 15 years ago.  These last two years they seem to have been infected by a virus and unfortunately this has been and will be transferred to the sport via the runner.  I am going to give them another go next year but someone on the allotment site has given me 6 Marshmellow stawberry plants that look as though they are very healthy.  New strawberry plants should be planted now so that they have more potential to fruit next year.  I will dig in quite a few comfrey leaves into the area that I am going to plant them in.  This will add phosphate to the soil.  I will also plant them with mychorrhizal fungi.  I doubt if I will do anything else to the soil. 

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.�