The grip of winter.
Sunday, January 10th, 2010Well 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.
