Pig Sty Avenue

Digging over the NW bed at last. Lovely soil at the north end, first time in this allotment I've dug over with the spade rather than the fork. I might have it dug over and sown with field beans by early next week. And then I'm moving on to the old greenhouse foundations. I took a look at them last night, and said, spontaneously, under my breath: This is going to break my heart. That's in the shipyard use of that phrase, meaning it's going to be bloody hard work, digging out a mountain of rubble and old wood and - of course - plenty of broken glass. On the plus side, I've got twenty-odd Papaver somniferum legacy volunteers which are starting to yield absurd amounts of seed. The borage and the phacelia are like Piccadilly Circus: honey bees, mostly, bumble bees, some other kind of bee which I can't name, hoverflies, and a tiny moth. I don't yet know how to do it, but I plan to harvest a rake of seeds from them, too, and, somewhere, sow a 9 square yard patch ...

Work, (the stuff I get paid to do), and the visit of a pal who I taught with in Saudi, together with the shortening days, have meant no allotment time since Sunday. For the first time in months I woke up this morning to no stiff muscles. It's given me time to work out a list of what I've still to do. This is more or less how it looks at the moment, the only fiction being the border, which is various kinds of fencing just now, but which will be a hedgerow. The overall plan is to incorporate the fruit bushes into the hedgerow, clear the "shed", midden, and old greenhouse foundations, extend the path right to the southern hedgerow boundary, and have a new shed, frog-pond and poly-tunnel in the SW quarter. The NE bed will then become the E bed. The basic growing plan will be that the northern end will be vegetables in crop rotation, and the southern perennial herbs. But essentially I want two big beds with a path up the middle.  Et, voila! That's how...

The bottom of the allotment, once a mound of earth across the whole width of the garden, (30ft) and up to 5ft wide and 4ft high, has now been cleared, and used to level the big NW bed - which is now pretty level. The old path stopped at the foot of the mound. The photo here shows the northern end of the garden, where the mound once stood, and the first stage in a new path. The old one consisted of paving slabs on top of a couple of bricks or broken bricks. The soil underneath has a very high clay content - it may be the original soil, as the subsoil is heavy clay, and it would make sense if the original topsoil contained a lot of clay. This might be why I'm getting flooding, if the water is running down the slight slope to my plot, and getting held up by heavy soil running right down the middle, under the path. So, the plan is, lift the path, dig down, and re-lay it on a 2 or 3 layers of old bricks and other rubble - you can see where I've made a start. The rubble should,...

Allotment neighbours and passers-by have told me in awestruck tones that the amount of work I've done is fantastic/amazing/incredible. Hmm. In some ways, I'm ahead of the plans I made back in June. In others, now that the nights are drawing in (every sunset is nearly five minutes sooner than its predecessor this time of year), I'm wondering how much I'm going to get done before the autumn's done and the winter's here. The main thing is to get it levelled, dug over, and planted out with the winter field beans before November, which is what everything I've googled tell me is the last month to plant them. But when in November? It might be that I won't get the whole plot dug over by then.

The allotment is full of frogs. I'm not helping them, in the short-term, as I clear their refuges amongst the rubbish and weeds. They have a very accusing stare as I chop into get another clump of nettle roots, and they're obliged to move on. The north west bed, which accounts for about 30% of the plot, should be levelled in the next week or so. I have to clear a mound of earth at the far end of the north-eastern side, chopping into it with the hoe because it's held together by those nettle roots. All the earth from that goes onto the north west bed, to get it more-or-less level. It's a case of chop into the mound with the hard-working Libyan hoe, fill a the barrow with the shovel, tip the earth on the low-lying areas, rake it level. Slowly, slowly, it's losing its hollows and wrong-facing slope. The frogs and their baleful looks are giving me a bit of a hurry up with this job. Once it's done I can sow it with a kilo of winter field beans, which will give th...

Mostly, the allotment currently looks like a demolition site. A battlefield, even. It certainly feels that way. But there is one wee oasis. In the floor of what was once a greenhouse I've planted three small beds, one with borage, one with phacelia, and one with comfrey. These form, (accidentally, I must admit) a lovely gradient, with the phacelia being a bit taller than the borage, and comfrey shooting up high in the background. They're all in flower now, and of an evening after a couple of hours hard labour and saying, "Oh! More fucking broken glass!", and looking down my nose at the Wood Chip Folk, it's wondrous to sit near these and watch the bees and hover-flies getting some autumn goodies. Bumblebees seem to prefer the phacelia, whereas honey bees like borage. All three plants are pretty good at suppressing weeds. The comfrey will go to another, permanent bed later. The borage and phacelia I'll try to harvest seeds from. On balance, I prefer the borage a...

Wednesday, the City Council had returned the allotment skip. Hooray! I set about clearing rubbish. Lots of glass, big sheets of it, and barrow-fulls of it broken. Worst of all, two sheets about 7x3ft, each made of two layers of thick glass, stuck together with a plastic membrane. These buggers would have been big and awkward enough anyway, but they'd partly broken, with the broken glass half hanging on to the membrane, making them incredibly difficult to manoeuvre. I'd estimate they each weighed more than a hundredweight, and frankly they caused a bit of effort getting them onto the barrow, down a couple hundred yards to the skip, and then back off the barrow into the skip. Old greenhouse doors and panels with the wood rotten. What looked as if it had once been a table in a nightclub. Tools rusted to hell-and-gone. Old bits of metal fencing. Glass, glass, and more bloody broken glass. I was dismayed to realise that under all of this there are more layers of rotten wood, brick...

The bathroom windowsill faces East, so it only gets the sun (in Glasgow? Hahahah, shut up) for an hour or so in the morning, and is therefore ideal for the Salvia divinorum plants which don't like too much direct light. A few weeks ago I noticed they'd been infested with Greenhouse Whitefly,  Trialeurodes vaporariorum , the wee blighters. I consulted Professor Google who suggested introducing Encarsia formosa , a tiny parasitic wasp. So I bought some from these ladybird people . You get five wee cards to hang on the stems of the plants. There's a panel in the cards with a few dozen unhatched Encarsia formosa on them. Nothing seemed to be happening, except that I did see a few very small (half a millimetre) beasts crawling upwards over the cards after a week or so. Now, after about three weeks, most of the white-ish whitefly larvae have turned black.  What's happening is really nasty, but unpleasantly satisfying if you've learned to hate the whitefly munching your ...

Was it my mention of a french drain that got me an absurd number of views from France this week? Or maybe it's just that cafes from Calais to Perpignan are abuzz with talk of how much earth Pig Sty Avenue moved this week, and the bold decision regarding gorse in the hedge? A french drain, incidentally, is named after a Mr French , a 19th Century New Hampshire lawyer, who, amongst other accomplishments was an expert on agricultural drainage. Nothing to do with French people, though I'm sure they're no slouches when it comes to making sure their gardens don't get waterlogged. Incidentally, I had the second of two heavy labour sessions last night, grubbing, shovelling, and barrowing God knows how many tons of earth. As I did so, and the levels became clearer, I realised that I don't need to raise the level of the bed that much. It's just that now, it slopes down slightly away from the path. I need to bank it up somewhat so that it's sloping ever so slightl...

Hard labour down at the allotment. My predecessor, perhaps in an attempt to improve drainage, had dug all kinds of little trenches, and heaped the spoil from them in particular in a great mound at the foot of the plot. It spans the whole width, so about 30ft, and was about 4 or 5ft across, and 3 or 4ft high. Slowly, slowly, and with great effort, I'm grubbing this out with the Libyan hoe, shovelling it into the barrow, and moving it to fill in the little ditches, and to raise the general level of the left hand bed, which is at some points almost 2ft below the level of the next-door plot. I've moved almost half of the mound now. If you count 4 barrowfuls to the ton, I've shifted about 5 tons of earth so far. It looks like goodish soil, but sorely lacking in organic matter, (apart from the nettle roots), and virtually no earthworms. The allotment secretary told me we all notice the lack of worms, and there is a fear that we have the dreaded new zealand flatworms, though no-...