I am busy at home finishing off my greenhouse, glazing the frame, so I have little time on the plot. I got an hour or two this morning and concentrated on next year's brassica patch. There are a few weeds growing where the peas and beans grew last year, enriching the nitrogen in the soil. I should have dug it over last autumn but it is too late now as the soil needs to be firm for brassicas. My plan is to clear the weeds and then mulch with horse litter. I shall then plant through the mulch. I shall have to give the soil a good dose of chicken manure to help any plants grow well! I use the hoe to cut the weeds off then raked up the top growth to put it into the compost bin. Without disturbing the soil I have a lovely clear patch ready for the mulch and a barrow full of compost material. A friend had left 6 bags of neat horse manure (Thank you) outside the plot so I moved it inside ready to spread, probably on my courgette strip. I need to give them a boost this year as last year's crop was very poor! I took home a couple of parsnips (one only carrot size!), 3 thin leeks, a celeriac and my last Kohl rabi which has started to regrow. I also picked most of the Brussel sprouts on the one plant giving a crop. The other four plants either have blown sprouts or nothing at all. I will have to check back what happened to the young plants last year to make sure it doesn't happen again. At least I got one meal's worth and there may be a few more to come. Having phoned home, I was late as, while talking to a neighbour, another tenant arrived needing help with getting his car out of the mud. With a little help from me, my young neighbour managed to lift the stuck wheel out of the rut it had made and we got the car back on track. Home for a late lunch! On the way to the plot today I dropped in to Stewarts to get some clips and bolts for glazing the greenhouse at home. For once they are not much more expensive than online! Arriving at the site I cleaned down the blackboard to put up the notice about the new Facebook page, 'Roeshot Hill Allotment Association'. I thought I had made it members only but on the way out Mike tells me it is open to the public - that is anyone and everyone. He says that there are privacy settings but I have checked and cannot find them! While I am happy if anyone can see the page I would like it if just Roeshot allotmenteers and friends could comment and add their photos etc. Hopefully I will find how to do it, perhaps with your help via the page or the website contact page. At the plot I spent an hour or so clearing some of the nettles and brambles on the fence line between me and Frank. He has dug his side but I have a wooden board and the wire netting buried on my side. However, I managed to dig out most of it though some bramble roots go way down. There was also quite a bit of bindweed root as well and I could see some of the bindweed root on Frank's side that he had missed and had been washed to the surface by the recent rains. I must remember to point it out to him when we next meet. After all the rain we've had, the soil was pretty wet, almost sticky, even though on my plot it is quite sandy. Then I remembered promising to post a photo of the corners and joints of my 'raised' strawberry bed using lengths of arris rail for pegs. So here it is, with no corners for slugs and snails to hide in. When I opened up the compost bin to dump the bin of kitchen waste there was a rat sized hole in the top so I may have residents inside. The compost was quite warm to touch so it is probably very cosy. I used the kitchen waste to plug the hole in the hope that the rats will be disturbed and move elsewhere. Cutting a rotting pumpkin up into pieces with the spade probably frightened anything inside the bin! I also poked a cane down the side with a pop bottle windmill on top. The noise of it spinning disturbs moles so it may make life more uncomfortable for rats! The purple sprouting had a few heads on it, which I cut to take home along with a few heads of 'Sutherland' Kale, plants given to me by a friend for me to try. I also pulled the only swede that had swelled. It was almost the size of a tennis ball so it wouldn't win any prizes! I must sow them earlier next year! I thought I had missed out on this year's leaf mould bin as my main contributor has moved house to get away from the trees that surrounded his old house and dropped too many leaves into his garden!
However, a neighbour whose house is behind mine, and is also surrounded by 5 huge oak trees and 3 large beech trees, started collecting his up and offered some of them to me. He tells me he collects about 40 to 50 bags a year and the bags are the builders dumpy bags about half full. If he puts any more in he cannot lift them, and neither would I be able to! I've had about 16/17 bags from him this year. If anyone else wants leaves next year we could help relieve him of the problem completely between us. This week he rang to say he had 6 or 7 more bags so I went to collect them this morning. The car was full of tools so I had to make 2 trips with the trailer and when I had finished trampling the leaves down my bin was filled to the top. I covered the bin with some carpet weighted down with slabs. If I leave it a few weeks it will rot down and I shall have room for the half dozen plastic rubbish sacks of leaves stacked behind the bin. Last year's leaf mould is in the other bin and I can use that round the plot this spring. Any leaves that have not decomposed can be added to this year's bin. Since I had the newly emptied trailer on site I fetched a trailer load of horse litter to mulch my pea and bean patches. I have already got a row of Broad Beans and a row of Peas 'growing' in the left hand patch so I had some mulch left over. The right hand one needed cultivating to get rid of the lumps and bumps before I could put the surplus mulch on it. I will add more next time I take the trailer down and spread the heaps into an even layer all over the patches. Then I will scrape the mulch aside to sow the rows of peas or beans later, leaving a mulch on the walkways between. Having spent some time chatting to my neighbour and various allotmenteers I met, there was no time to do anything else so I went home for my dinner. I wondered whether I would get down to the plot today as it rained all morning. However, by the time I had eaten lunch it had stopped. The ground would be very wet so I set about constructing the boarding round my strawberry patch to contain the mulch I add every year. The patch is 4 feet wide and nearly 4 metres long so it took 4 gravel boards from In-Excess and an arris rail to make pegs to hold it in place. I like using arris rail as the triangular cross-section means there are no corners for slugs and snails to hide in. A photo of the pegs would have made it obvious how so I'd better take some next time!Here's the finished frame. The boards are 3 metres long so need an extension of nearly a metre to make the sides. The two extensions and the 60 cm backing across the joint used another 3 m. board. Cutting the two 120 cm. end pieces left just a 60 cm. length left over from the fourth board. I hope they last long enough to make the £20 spent worth while! I then fetched a barrow-load of neat horse manure from the heap just inside the gate. I was going to put it on the vacant part of the strawberry patch but I realised that it would be too strong for the plants I plan to put in in the spring so it went into the compost heap. I shall dig in some of my home-made compost before planting the new plants. I plan some early strawberries and some perpetual strawberries to go with them. I hope to extend the season from my Elsanta plants and some donated to me last year by a neighbour. I finished just as the sky turned pink with the sunset and returned home feeling good about another job well done! Now to repeat the process for the asparagus on the other side of the plot. Being Sunday I went down to the Trading Hut to collect my seed order, just a few packets this year as I still have tons left from last year.
Then I went on to the plot to finish digging out the roots and weeds in the path alongside the raspberries. The ground was rather wet but broke up easily enabling me to tease out the raspberry roots and, more important, the bindweed roots. At the end I needed to mulch the path but had no more pine needles so I raided the wood chip pile by the gate. I nearly gave up earlier when it began to rain but, by the time I had finished talking to a neighbour, it had stopped. It was a great feeling actually finishing off a job! I remembered to cut the tiny cauliflower and took it home. If we share it we will have a mouthful each! I got down to the plot a bit late today as I had a few jobs to do at home.
After emptying the kitchen waste bin, I got on with dealing with the autumn raspberry paths. I cleared the old pine needle mulch, spreading what was left onto the new mulch alongside the summer raspberries. Cutting down with a spade alongside the row of plants means I had cut any spreading roots and shoots. I also cut down the outer edge of the path to avoid disturbing the row of celeriac in the neighbouring bed. Digging was reasonably easy though a little wet by the fence where there were most bindweed roots to extract making it more difficult. Eventually I turned to using a fork as it was easier to break down the lumps of soil and extract the raspberry roots and shoots. However it was soon dug over, in between stopping to chat to other tenants and even a market research worker looking for over-50's to talk about how to market insurance to older people! He went off to Stewarts to warm up with a cup of coffee after spending a few minutes standing talking to me and I went back to digging to warm up. The wind blew up at lunchtime making it even colder so I left digging the other side of the row and went home, leaving a small cauliflower I forgot to cut. Hopefully it will still be usable when I return on Sunday. The weather has finally turned a little colder.
I went down to spread the horse litter from the heap at the end of my plot, dropped off during the Working Party on Sunday. One of next year's cabbage patch is now mulched with it, though I had to hoe some of the more established weeds off as they would have grown through. I put a layer on the compost heap to balance the grass cuttings I added in a quick visit yesterday. In between barrowing the heap to the patch and spreading it, when I found it was a bit heavy going, I went and spread the pine needles over the path beside the summer raspberries. I will scrape the old pine needles from beside the autumn raspberries on the other side and put them on top of the new ones. This year my supply of needles is rather smaller than normal so the autumn raspberries will have to be mulched with woodchip. The other task I completed was planting the Garlic I bought at Stewarts last autumn. I had left them in the bag as they can be planted any time over the winter. Unfortunately they had got rather mouldy so I had to throw away some of two of the three bulbs. I am saving the best bulb for another row but I got 16 cloves out of the two and planted a whole row. I left about 8" between cloves so I will be able to hoe off the weeds between them later without risking cutting into them. I will plant the rest when this cold spell is over. Having put some of the litter in the compost bin I ran out mulching the cabbage patch so I went down to the end of the track to get a barrow-load more. However, the newest heap was all hay with droppings mixed in so I first took a barrowful of that for the compost bin. The more mixed the ingredients the better the compost! Then I had to go back for a barrow-load of the old horse litter at the back of the bin to finish the cabbage patch mulch. The material at the bottom is always better as the liquid manure is washed down to the bottom by the rain. To finish I harvested a few leeks (they are still very thin), a couple of parsnips (multi-rooted as normal this year!), a couple of turnips and I cut the rest of the row of Perpetual Spinach. The plants I cut first are now big enough to give another cutting and I will have enough even in the depths of winter as there is still another later sowing across on the other side of the plot. At home I discovered most of my winter Squashes were beginning to go mouldy at the stalk so I spent part of the afternoon cubing the inside flesh so it can be frozen. My big marrows have still not been eaten as they are so big, but they both have started to rot so I'm not sure we will have anything from them as I don't think they can be frozen even when cubed! We moved a great deal of 'manure' in the Working Party this morning and, as part of that, I finished up with a trailer-load outside my plot. Having finished that job, I wanted to check over the plot.
It was still warm, the cold weather had not yet arrived, so I felt the onion sets and shallots - and the brassicas - would benefit from a dose of chicken manure pellets to help keep them growing. All the rain we have experienced will have washed much of the nutrients down out of reach of the roots so it is a good idea to replenish them a little. I noticed that my overwintering peas were looking bedraggled and 'got at'. Leaves have been nibbled leaving some almost bare of leaves. A scattering of slug pellets will help me decide whether the problem is slugs or mice. They also got a scattering of chicken manure. There were lots of dead leaves round the Brussels and Kale plants so I tidied up a bit inside the Brassica tunnel. At that point the rain started coming down again so I tidied up and left in a very heavy rain and hail shower. By the time I got home the sun was out! The weather has finally started to cool down. It is still not cold, I would say it is fresh, though the wind overnight has been very strong.
After an exchange of emails last night I arrived on-site this morning hoping to meet up with John Lack. Normally he is working on his plot long before I arrive but today I was the earlier one even though I got there well after ten. We had discussed repairs to the fallen notice board so I moved it and propped it up on the nearby fence. It was too heavy to move anywhere else but being propped up meant some of the water ran off it. John arrived just afterwards and quickly sorted out the problem. I just helped lift and carry. We discussed the work needing doing by the Working Party on Sunday. Hardening the access to the 'manure' bins is a big job which will need machinery. In the meantime we need to clear the 'manure' off the track beyond the Trading Hut and making sure there space somewhere for the next load. We need all the help we can get at 10 am. for a couple of hours on Sunday morning. Meet at the Trading Hut! After sorting out the notice I cleared the greenhouse frame on the Special Needs plot that had been blown over by the wind and collapsed. What was a perfectly good frame is now scrap metal as important struts have been bent! Finally I got to my plot. I emptied my kitchen waste bin into the compost and checked the rat poison to find all was undisturbed so I hope there are no mice/rats around in the shed and compost bin. I then started spreading pine needles over the path beside the summer raspberries, after I had hoed the strip to level it. One bag contained what looked like sweet pea haulms with a covering of pine needles so that covered the kitchen waste in the compost bin. Then I scraped off the needles from the other side of the raspberries and spread them over the top of the newly laid needles. I then dug over the newly revealed ground underneath after cutting through any roots spreading out from the row. The soil was not as wet as I had experienced on the first side, perhaps because the soil next to it has already been dug over. I harvested a few parsnips only one of which is a good shape but suffering from canker all the way down its length. Tender and True is the cultivar so I must use a more resistant variety next year and sow in a different bed. I also took a couple of leeks and a turnip (for me, my wife doesn't like them!). I then finished by cutting some chard, throwing away most of the bigger leaves attacked by snails and pigeons but that was a thicker covering for the kitchen waste. |
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May 2023
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