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…

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.

I finished off at the slabs and dug down to the bottom of them so that I could straighten them.  They were leaning over a little.  I had straightened them last year when the contractor had dug a trench by them in a futile effort to drain the trackway. However they were leaning again.  It did not take me more than a couple of minutes - or so I thought.   I aslo put in a post for the sweet peas and was going to put in one for the beans too, however it needed to go right where the vibena is so I thought that I would put it a little further in to avoid it.  I had a quick look at the bay tree.  It seems to have suffered a little in this very cold weather.  All the growing tips have gone brown.  I think that a good prune when the weather becomes warmer would do it a lot of good - it would make it look much neater anyway.

I just about finished straightening them when the light started to go.  I looked at my watch and it was half past six.  Where does the time go?  I just had time to collect up all the tools and put them into the shed before I lost all the light.   I had spent seven hours on the allotment.  No wonder I was feeling a little chilly.  I had taken off my old jacket when I was digging.

Well, I am aching a little now, although I feel I have done a really good job today.

I put the comfrey tub up on a plinth so that I could fit a tub underneath it and catch the comfrey liquid.  Now that I have cracked the bottom it will not be water tight any more.  I think that I will have to buy a new one. I cleared the brassicae bed by raking up all the dead leaves and forking over the ground.  I put all the dead stumps into a plastic sac and put them aside for taking home and putting in my green bin.   There was some sign of club root so I hope that that doesn’t get onto the top section.  I will lime where the brassicas are going to go this year.

I fed the winter cauliflowers and leeks with a little blood, fish and bone meal.  Then I used the three pronged cultivator to go down each of the rows and clear weed off them.  I will have to go over the middle part of this area - where the Calabrese were.  It has got a little overgrown with weeds.  No problem at the moment, however they will grow into big plants.

I have put up more supports for the rasp berries and planted a few more canes.  I gave all the raspberries  a dose of blood, fish and bone.   I am hoping that this will lead to more luxurios growth above grond.  I turned over about three spits of ground before I had to leave it and go out with my daughter.  It was a close call but I did get to the photographers on time.  My daughter is getting married and it seems that I will have to say which of the items she has decided on I give my approval to.  I just don’t mind and on some things I have no opinion.  Tomorrow I will go up to the allotment early and tidy that sweet pea area.  Then I will level off the top piece.  I am going to take the path out of this area and use the slabs as soil retainers.

I will have to dig over the potato bed soon, however the seed potatoes have not yet arrived.  All the seed has arrived now and I am sorting it out one or two packets to begin my sowing this year.

Thats about all I did all last night and in the morning.

I took them up to the allotment and put some of the blood fish and bone into a tub.  I filled up about half the tub with neat comfrey liquid and then added the charcoal almost to the rim of the tub.  I didn’t bother to grind up the charcoal - it was barbeque lump charcoal.     Now the theory is that the charcoal will soak up the nutrients and hold it within the pores and on the surfaces within its structure.  This will enable the nutrients to be released slowly over many years without it being leached out of the soil.  I doubt that there will be any spectacular increase in the yeald or the size of the vegetables.  This is something that has to build up over many years.

I will continue to do this for as long as I have the allotment now.  I would be particularly interested on its effect on the new soil at the bottom of the allotment.  The soil is particularly infertile and needs a lot of added organic matter.  I have been adding quite a bit but when the brassicas eventually come out I will add a lot more.   The peas will be going into this soil, so I think that charcoal and nutrient mix will be spread along the rows.  I will take out a spade width of soil about 2cm deep when planting the peas.  The mix can then go at the bottom of this mini trench.   I will sieve the soil back on top and this will remove quite a lot of stone which is still in this soil.

I will also use the charcoal mix in the dibbing holes for the brassicas.  I usually water them in with a mixture of seaweed extract and comfrey so it will not really be any different.  I am going to avoid putting any fertiliser on the brussel sprout area.  They seem to like a poorer soil and it keeps the brussel sprouts very tight buttons.

I put some shredded paper onto the third compost heap.  I made these compost heaps with old pallets and wired them together.  Not a nail to be seen in any of them.  I will put anything onto the compost heap that has once been alive.  They are all grist to the mill.  It is a bit like the leaves I am burying under the ground where the old greenhouse used to be.  They are very dirty and full of plastic litter.  It does not take very long to get rid of the litter so that the leaves can be put into the trench.  I would like to put in good clean leaves that have been composted for a few years, however I do not have the time for this so they go in willy nilly.

I have been given a wormery.  I just said that they were a bit of a time waster, however if you are given one then that is a different matter.  I will have to put a tap on this one and I will use the tap from the big comfrey bin.  The big comfrey bin has now got a big split in the bottom so I cannot store comfrey liquid in it anymore, however it can still be a digester with a bucket or tub underneath it to collect the liquid.  I will use the this tap on the new bin.   Now, I thought that maybe the comfrey could be recycled even quicker by putting it into the wormery rather than the digester.  I suspect that this year I will have to use both.

The sweet peas have been devastated by the cold weather.  I have lost over 50% of them.  Rather than potting them up I will plant the straight into the allotment.  This means that I will have to put the canes up fairly soon, which also means that I will have to finish the digging as soon as possible too.

Went down to the allotment and got there about 12 o’clock.  Worked on digging the area that the greenhouse was on.  I tripple dug it taking out two spits and then forking over the bottom spit.  (A spit is a spade length.)  The ground has dried off a lot, however the clay was still claggy at this depth.  I put a couple of barrowloads of laylandii shreddings at the bottom of each of the trenches and then covered them with a couple of barrowloads of leaves.  There is bind weed Calystegia sepium in the leaves growing up from the soil in the bins.  I have taken out quite a bit but the whole of the bins will have to be dug over and the bind weed stolons taken out.

I finished digging this area, although I have not filled the last trench completely with soil.   I will not really be able to finish it tomorrow either because I am going to a wedding fair tomorrow.  I never thought that I would need to say that last sentence ever in my life.  My daughter is getting married and I have to be involved it  seems.  I would not really mind except that the wedding is booked for 2012.   Thats in two years time!!!!!   Never mind.

Here are two of the worm species on the allotment.  I am not very good at identifying things so I will give this a go but I might be wrong. I think that the top one is Octolasion cyaneum and the lower one is Aporrectodea rose.   

I am going to look up images of them on the internet to see if they match.

After resisting for several years, I eventually succumbed to the temptation of growing flyaway, which is an F1 seed.

I must say I was pleasantly surprised by the taste.  We used it both in salads and steamed.   It shows you just how much better fresh vegetables taste, regardless of the variety.  I must say, though, I would go for early Nants and Autumn Giant if I really had a chance and a polly tunnel to grow them in.

I have tried Flyaway for about three years now.  They are not completely resistant to carrot root fly and I still cover them with enviromesh.  Some suggest that you just need an eighteen inch barrier, however even that does not prevent Psila rosae eating your crop.  I cover completely using hoops to keep the enviromesh off the foliage.  I had some really good roots this year - for the first time in a long time.  I have ordered some more Flyaway this year but I will still cover them.

The number of generations they have during the year depends upon the temperature.   There can be three generations of flies a year.  The first generation hatches out round about the middle of April and continues until the end of May. These lay eggs at the end of May and beginning of June which hatch out from the beginning of July to the end of August.  This is the second generation.  There is evidence of aestivation due to hot or dry periods and this might  alter the timing of egg laying.  They lay their eggs and these hatch out, usually,  from late September to late October.  There are virtually no flies about from November to April the next year. They seem to overwinter as larvae or pupae.

In England the first and the second generation seem to do all the damage to our carrot crops.  The larvae can continue to cause damage in stored carrots.  The third generation of flies give rise to a high number of flies in the next year even when there are few flies laying eggs.  They lay eggs around the middle of November so the carrots should be taken out or covered even at this late date.

The flies seem to be most active in the late afternoon or early evening.  A number of sites on the web say that this is the time to remove covers and either thin or weed the carrots.   It would seem from the research that this is not good advice and weeding and thinning should go on in the morning before they are active.  So if you are removing netting to do weeding the most propitious time to do this would be in the late morning.  Carrot root fly also feeds on the roots of other Umbelliferi.  80% of Umbelliferi support root larvae, however they have fewer larvae per root than cultivated carrots do.  Fools parsley Aethusa cynapium is an example of a very common plant that is susceptible to carrot root fly.

The fly does have some natural predators such as parasitoids like Dacnusa gracilis  and the fungal pathogen entomophthora.

Possible methods of controlling carrot root fly are

·         Late sowing.  The timing of these sowings is difficult to assess because it depends on temperatures.  If we have an early or late spring then the fly will be hatching out at different times each year.

·         The carrots could be harvested earlier; however this means that we condemn ourselves to accepting much smaller roots.

·         Resistant varieties could reduce fly damage by up to 50% compared with a susceptible variety.

·         I favour covering the crop and this sometimes results in no damage at all if used properly.

·         Barriers can reduce damage by 15% in early August.

·         There are far too few parasites or predators in the natural populations to give sufficient control of carrot root fly.

In 2009, I used both a fly resistant variety and complete cover using enviromesh.  The enviromesh was buried along all edges so that there was no entry point at soil level.   There is evidence that the flies do not regularly fly more than 18 inches above the ground.  However, there must be times that updrafts and wind will take the flies higher.  This is what I have found because when I use a barrior I get root fly while if I cover completely, there is little infection.

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.  

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.