Pig Sty Avenue

No. 1 bed: spuds; No. 2 bed: vetch ; No. 3 bed: carrots & onions; No. 4 bed: brassicas No. 5 bed: vetch .  Mind, all of the beds have to be riddled. So, for example, when I lift the garlic from bed 3, I'll riddle that area before planting carrots there. And in bed 2, I'll gradually dig in the vetch, riddle the soil, and then plant another green manure on the riddled ground. And the rotation can proceed now in a clockwise direction, with a four bed system, (spuds, peas, onions/carrots, brassicas). The 5th bed will be a green manure for now, but eventually I want to introduce chickens into the rotation. To do that, I need to build a chicken house and run which is the right size for the beds, and which I can disassemble, move, and reassemble all myself in half a day. I'm thinking 10-12 chickens, enough to get all our eggs and a chicken for the roast once a month at least. This is several years away, but you heard it here first. The benefits of a chicken run in...

... I shall wear the green willow . I took a few small branches from an overgrowing willow tree by the allotments' gate, which yielded about 30 willow whips. I put 10 in the hedgerow, and the rest along the boundary between beds 2 & 3. The plan is to keep them cut low, to avoid giving shade, a miniature hedge. The main reason is to help the drainage - mind, in this area last year, the phacelia all faded and died in late August, which I'm pretty sure was because it was still getting waterlogged there somewhat. The new French drain plus the willow... we'll see. There's been quite a lot of rain the last 2 weeks, as Glasgow was on the fringes of storms Barbara and Conor. The pond is full. And the garlic patch is NOT waterlogged, which is a relief: that area had standing water on it last January , (to the left in the 1st photo in that post). Planting garlic to over-winter there was a bit of a punt, but it seems to be paying off, so far anyway.

I've re-laid the middle path, the part that had been obliged to snake to the west because of the old shed being misaligned, built across the middle of the plot, where of course a path should run. Straight this time, of course. Well, more or less, it wavers a bit, as good allotment paths should. For the first time, one can now walk on a path from the gate right down to the fence at the northern end. This has re-framed the plot: it's clearly five beds, plus space for shed and poly-tunnel, plus pond. And as for the beds, I'm going to number them from here on in: the compass points used hitherto were a mouthful. So the old SW bed is now no. 1, Midwest, 2, and so-on clockwise round the plot, so that the "new" bed, by the gate in the SE corner, is no. 5. 

This is the view from the gate, so that's the SE corner of the plot. I was preparing to excavate an area by the gate, a yard or so square, to lay bricks down, and then lay a path across to the middle path, (another story). But there's already a path there, covered until today in a couple of inches of loamy soil. It's a strange, green, crumbly concrete. I'd planned another brick path, leaving a foot or so of earth for the hedgerow between path and fence. Instead, I've got this peculiar green edifice, and an inch or two of soil by the fence. Heigh bloomin' ho. I was going to have pyracantha all the way along the S. boundary. But it looks as if it's going to be ivy, now. Which is fine. As you can see the fence there is an allotment-chic pallet construction, constantly leaning towards my side of the boundary because stuff is stacked against it on my neighbour's side. Well, we'll see how the ivy deals with that situation. The next job is to strai...

It felt like the end of an allotment era: apart from the few items which I can recycle, like sheets of metal for the new shed, that's all of the useless old stuff gone. And it was a hell of a bonfire. Being missives day, there were plenty of people around, and several of them visited, some bearing beer. The fire was lit at 3.30pm, and I left, a tad unsteadily, to walk home around 7. When I went back this morning, Thursday, I was pleased to see it had burned down really well. Some scrap metal, and a big heap of ash, but very little wood left behind. With the rubbish and the old shed away, I now have a 5th bed.

If the Allotment Association were a country, Missive Day would be like our national day. It's when we pay our rent and community association dues for the year ahead. And so here we are now with a whole year gone. I've just been looking at this blog's posts from December 2015. Blimey. A year ago we were getting inundated by Storm Desmond, I was just beginning to a get an angle on drainage, and the beds were far from level - there were tons of earth still to move. I like this set of 3 photos which show how the water built up into the earliest incarnation of the pond during that storm.  And here we are in December again, with only Angus so far, and that was confined to southern England, we had heavy frosts the while. Yesterday I had a blinding couple of hours in terms of tasks done: Built a structure, approximately 7ft long by 3 or 4ft wide and deep, to keep my tools and other bits and pieces in. I used the 2 old doors and a sheet of tin, nailed together with a couple of...

Before the old shed was demolished, yielding a lot of rotten timber and tarry-toosh , which cannot be recycled except by burning, there was anyway a heap of broken polystyrene fish-boxes, perennial weeds (mostly dock, nettle and ground elder), and of course scraps of wood. At the very bottom of that is the remains of the previous bonfire held there: what I learned from that was, if you want to get rid of all your old wood, you need to hang around until it's almost all burned, raking in the fragments from the periphery to the centre. Don't do that, and one ends up with circle of charred bits of wood, stranded when the bonfire retreats to its centre. On top of all of this I've piled up most of the remains of the old shed. Really, I should pull the whole structure apart and pile it all up again in a more bonfire-like way. This might also give any hibernating wildlife in there a chance to find another winter home, though in reality they'd probably encounter a fox or a...

No wonder it all fell down when I removed that window: the roof was several layers thick, and waterlogged, and therefore very heavy. Had it fallen down on me and the dogs when we were sheltering from a rain shower, injuries would have been likely. There was a layer of wood planks, all on the road to rottenness. They were covered by 2 sheets of overlapping tin, laid in a way that water was going to percolate through. Then a partial layer of sodden chipboard, so degraded that there were at least a couple of brandling worms living in it - how they got there, I cannot imagine. Another layer of tin, one single sheet this time, nailed down. Then two layers of roofing felt. "Tarry toosh", my Dad always calls it, I'm uncertain of the spelling: toosh rhymes with whoosh . Googled it just now with no helpful result. Finally, there was a layer of various sheets of chipboard and what-not, which had likely been put on the roof out of the way, and rotted down, adhering to the...

Speaking of France , I was listening to a podcast of Radio 3's record review about Cabaret , the musical. I loved the movie version, when I was still at school a cinema in Newcastle, now long gone, showed it every afternoon for a year or more. I played the wag from school, (that's Geordie for truant) and saw it ten or more times. And then a few months ago we saw it live in a graduation show at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, and, wow, it blew the movie out of the water. Anyways, Radio 3 suggests the best version is actually the French one. But it's not on iTunes, and prices for the CD at ebay and amazon, are ridiculous. So if any of my multitude of French readers can tell me how I can get the CD for, say, €10 or thereabouts, do tell.

A screengrab of this blog's viewing stats by country for the last month. Why are the French so attracted here? If you're French, and reading this, do tell me what's so interesting about a Glasgow allotment, or what you were looking for when you accidentally googled your way here.

I just thought, I can't stand this old shed anymore. I don't like it. I don't like where it stands. I don't like the way the roof leaks. I don't like the way it's constructed piecemeal and yet manages to have none of the of the allotment charm such improvisation normally brings. And the last straw, an email from the secretary to say that a fellow allotmenteer's shed was burned down last Sunday. The fire brigade were there for 2 hours, putting the blaze out. Right, I thought, if we're going to have a spate of arson, I don't want all my tools burned. So I got down for a few hours and emptied it, putting all the tools and other odds and ends under a plastic sheet for now. Anything which can live outdoors, like the fruit netting and gutters for the water barrels I stacked up by the fence.  I took out a large window, being keen to use the double glazed pane in the new shed. As I removed it, the whole structure gave a sigh and collapsed in a single sin...

The figs, as you can see, are (to use a gardening term), flying away. The top photo was taken on Sept 12th ., the bottom one today. I haven't been feeding them at all, although I am going to start with a general purpose feed this week. There are 40 modules per tray, and 2 trays. All modules are now filled with growing plants, and I've got 5 more together in a pot. Figs got a mention on Gardeners' Question Time last week . Someone wanted their fig, (singular) to look more tree-like. Ha, I thought. I've got 80 figs, and don't care if they look tree-like or not! The thing I took away from that is, figs are vigorous. BBCGQT didn't mention it, but I have seen photos of coppiced plants, and they grow back like billy-o. Which is good if the hedgerow is to fulfill its wood-for-the-stove role.

Life, weather and short days keep me away from the allotment most days. When I do get there, I spend a couple of hours riddling the earth from the environs of the old greenhouse, which is, obvs, where most of the glass is. Not much to blog about. I'm learning to chill-out about the time scales involved. If the entire 2017 growing season is given over to weeding, riddling and shed-building, then so be it. Another job is to burn the heap of rubbish and perennial weeds which has been putting a hurt on my eyes for months now. I need to get petrol, and get to the plot at dusk whilst there's enough light to get it started. In winter, the committee asks us to wait until 4pm if we must have bonfires. People living near the plots complained some time ago about bonfires, which was fair enough because numpties were lighting fires on sunny Sunday afternoons, when most of Glasgow puts its washing on the lines. Dusk on a damp day means complaints are unlikely. And the shed....

I'm still a bit ahead on The Lincolnshire Poacher. And it's quite interesting, the lag between it and Dance of the Hours, because it means I can see the learning process in operation. I can read music, but not yet sight read, which means simply that I'm much slower at reading than I need to be for playing. And that in turn means I need to memorize the pieces. It takes a long time. I've been learning The Poacher for months now. I can see progress now that I'm giving it an hour almost every other day, but it's still not quite memorized, sometimes, less and less each session, I'll momentarily lose the flow. Likewise with Hours. But as those last memory wrinkles get ironed out, I listen more, get the tempo right. It's easier with The Poacher, because I can hear the song in my head, though, disconcertingly, it's in a Benjamin Britten arrangement , - Devin Barad in that link, but I can hear Peter Pears, assassin of trad tunes, singing it. I think Dudley...

After a brief break from practise, I'm back into it again with a new approach. No scales or broken chords or any other kind of warm up. I do a session of Dance of the Hours one day, and The Poacher the next, just playing them right through, over and over. It's the practise-until-you-can't-get-it-wrong approach. Still haven't settled on the 3rd piece yet. The Spring (Period A) of 2017 is my last opportunity to use the 2015-16 syllabus. Entry date is 20th January, and the exam is at some time between early March and early April. 4 months. Which should be fine if I keep practising.

And so it proved. On the left is a riddle full of earth that has already passed through the big riddle. To the right is the same, after riddling. So there's still a lot of stones, (pea sized, mostly) and a few bits of glass. It means I have to riddle it twice, but it's worth it because the big riddle also breaks up any clods and separates out most of the perennial roots still lurking in the soil. Below you can see the big riddle, v1.1; (v1.2 has a wheelbarrow to catch the bigger stones and shards of glass - it was tiresome to gather them all up for use in the rubble drain).  And below's a photo of 2 heaps of earth. The foreground one is after passing through the big riddle. I took that through the hand riddle, it took at least 2 hours, and added it to the hand riddled heap at the back, which has of course almost doubled in size now: it's about 1m high and 2m diameter at the base, which if my secondary school geometry is ok means 4 cubic metres of beautiful ...

That's wee Sparky in the photo, which I took whilst having a breather from tidying up the rediscovered path, and moving the pile of earth at the end of it. Soon afterwards, she cut her paw really quite badly, presumably on one of the plots innumerable shards of glass. Emergency visit to the vet. No stitches, but a couple of metal staples to keep the flap of her pad on. That was 10 days ago, though it feels much longer because a slightly disabled dog becomes incredibly tying, and none of us are getting as much exercise as we'd like. Cleo, too, cut her carpal pad a few weeks ago, though not entailing a visit to the vet. Long story short, I caught have my dogs getting injured like this, so they've been banished from the plot pending clearing of the glass. This project got a major boost this morning when I was able to delegate domestic & canine duties for a few hours. I remembered Dad using a large riddle when we had a big Edwardian back garden in Hampshire which ...

A bit early, but I'm looking at starting stratification of hedgerow plants now. They'll be ready for February, when, inshallah, I'll have a heated potting shed to sow them in, ready for planting out the following winter, (2017/18). There's 100 Pyracantha coccinea . I'm putting them in warm water today, and will put them in the fridge tomorrow for 3 months - maybe 4. The methodology is to use a fairly small amount of seedling compost, which seems to be 50% sand, in a plastic bag which is not-quite air tight. When they come out of the fridge in late January, I'll spread the seedling compost over a tray full of more of the same. I've also got Pinus sylvestra , which really ought to be stratified now, we got the seeds on a visit to Edinburgh Botanic Gardens in summer 2015. Don't know how many, and it doesn't say on the packet, but I'd estimate 100 or so. According to the packet, and to treeseedonline , the stratification is only 4 weeks. I won...

The northern 1/3 of the NW bed is still neeps - and the marigolds are thriving, still. The middle section is now garlic: I dug in 3 barrow-fulls of oomska, and then left it for a week or so. Then raked it all as level as possible, and planted 3 rows of carcassonne wight  to the north, and 3 rows of picardy wight to the south of them; (I'm being precise because, whilst I found enough plant markers, I couldn't write on them, being unable to find a pen or pencil: the conditions in the old shed mean I struggle to lay my hand to anything I need).  That was last week, so say 10th October. They were planted 10ins apart, in rows about 1ft apart. (One is advised to plant them 6ins apart, but that won't give quite enough room to get a hoe between them). The final, southerly, 1/3 of the NW bed, and the whole of the Midwest bed, I dug over a week or so ago. I then left it for a week, as 'tillage prompts germination', apparently , and it seems like a good idea to give the we...

Like most tenements, we have a "drying green" (never used to dry clothes, though) with a brick structure to contain the bins. Ours is covered with a 9in thick mat of ivy. There's lots of information about propagation online, the upshot being, it's incredibly easy to do.  There's so much of it growing at the drying green, I could easily chop away literally sack loads of it. There's so much, I wouldn't bother with rooting hormone or pots, just plant the cuttings a few ins apart in situ , round the boundary. A 10% strike rate would be fine. It's a most excellent plant for wildlife. Here's a pdf document about that . I'm worried that it might smother the other plants, especially the gorse, but that could be managed with keeping it cut back in the early years of the hedgerow. Its thuggishness is another attraction for me: it's the boundaries of the plot which are now most liable to the persistent weeds: nettles, ground elder and horsetails. I...

I got the rubble-infested heap of earth moved up to the old greenhouse area, now the temporary home for to-be-riddled excess earth. Then I got the rest of the Mid- and North West beds roughly dug over, and shoveled the spoil from the new drainage trench over. It's ready to have a load of horse manure dug into it, and then to have Hungarian rye sown on top of that.  Also yesterday, I got a lot of the individual bits of glass I could see, and put them in the new drainage ditch. I'm horrified at the thought of the dogs taking any more injury from it. I noticed that the worm population along the path edge of the West beds appeared to be significantly higher than anywhere else. There's a lot of heavy clay in the earth there, from digging the drainage system under the path, but also being near the path it was well drained - the phacelia did best in a yard-wide strip down the side of the path, so maybe it likes clay, more likely it liked the better drainage. I'm hoping that ...

Also , the garlic wants planting in the next week or so. As well as the Carcassonne wight hardneck, there's Picardy wight softneck.  That's in the North West bed, brassicas last year, (there are still neeps in it, doing very well, we should have 1 a week up until Xmas), and roots/alliums next year. I'll harvest the garlic in May, or thereabouts, and then riddle that bit of the bed before sowing carrots and/or parsnips. Which is how I'm going to proceed next year: riddle ground between crops in the summer, when it's dried somewhat. That's because I've learned that riddling with wet clay is bloomin' hard work, slow.  Mind, the West beds have soil from all over, including the yellow subsoil clay that came up from the pond and the drain beneath the path. And it's another job which I stupidly put off with my own no-dig can-do overnight delusions, (it's going to have to wait until the whole plot's riddled, years). The job I didn't do was dig...

The iPhone's not charging, so it's sitting on a coffee table until I get into the city centre and get it sorted out. Which means I've been developing a wonderful freedom all this week, from calls, updates, messages and most of all, the time. Been busy at the allotment, and I've noticed that I work longer when I don't have a clock to refer to: 3 or 4 hours as against the usual 2. Which means I've done a lot this week, but by last night, Friday, was utterly exhausted: taking the dogs around the block for their last walk at 11ish last night was quite a chore, just putting one foot in front of the other. Weeding, digging over, riddling soil, shovelling horse shit. I cleared the whole old greenhouse area, breaking up its 7in thick layer of compacted earth, and revealing the whole of the path beneath; there was an ash-filled break in the path at the East end, so I assume it was once heated from a stove of some sort there. Another heap of tbr (to be riddled) earth ...

Also yesterday, I got that area of hedgerow hoed, running North and then East from the ash tree up and along to the central path. As I hoed away, cutting off ground elder, grasses, and clover, uprooting a comfrey volunteer and some small docks by hand, it occurred that it's going to be several years before the hedgerow shades out most of its competitors. That's a lot of weeding. The boundary is 70m long.  April to October, 5m a day means it would all be done every fortnight, which would be enough to stop it running away with weeds, as it did this Summer. That's in addition to hoeing all the beds. But, keep at it and it gets easier, mostly because hoeing 30mins to an hour every day for six months gives you forearms like Popeye. This from Cornell is good on hoeing , as it is on weed management generally. All of which I'm taking careful note of: next year, I manage the weeds rather than they manage me.

Hardneck garlic arrived just now. Long time since I've grown garlic, so I've done a bit of googling. This was helpful . Garlic doesn't like waterlogging, either, apparently, so let's hope the new drainage, right by next year's onion and roots rotation bed, does the business. I was going to dig in 2 barrowfulls of oomska, but I think I'll dig in 2 more, now. This area - well, every area of the plot - wants riddling, but I'll wait now until the garlic's harvested late Spring, and riddle it all when it's less claggy, and then sow carrots or parsnips. Carcassone, we're told, has been occupied since the neolithic, and was the site of an important Roman fort, so maybe legionaries planted the first garlic there. I like the virtues of hoeing being extolled on that quickcrop link . S/he's right there. But that's another post...

Weather forecast notwithstanding I took the dogs to the plot yesterday and between showers dug a spade-wide trench down part of the Western boundary, and then across the NW bed to the central path where it should flow down into the pond. I had the pleasing sight of it actually working, the trench filling with water, which followed me as I dug in the direction of the pond. Gorse, apparently, doesn't like wet, boggy ground. It's planned to be the staple plant of the hedgerow at the central area of the Western boundary, so the drainage needs to work well if it's going to thrive. It might be that along this section of the hedgerow, I'll need to plant pyracantha . I've bought 100 seeds, but have a feeling in my bones that it's going to become the mainstay, and I'll likely want more.

Thanks to Therese for pointing out the historical possibilities with Google Earth. There's a 1945 image, which is so unclear as to be meaningless. Apart from that, the earliest is this one from 2002. The chief interest is that the double plot next door, to the West, was paved over even then. I suspect this is what has led to the waterlogging - all the water falling onto that area running down into my plot. It also suggests that nothing much changed between 2002 and 2015. The fruit bushes to the East were taking up a lot of room, but the beds were being cultivated in the northern 2/3 of the plot. The absurd old shed is there, and there's something else in the midden area.

BBC, from: http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/2635167 If I was in Jeremy Corbyn's shoes, I'd be a bit ticked off today, having to make a speech whilst, in Islington, the weather's not bad, and he could have had a couple of hours at his allotment. No such luck here. Glasgow's right on the edge of that big lump of rain that's over the NW of Scotland, so it's been stop-started raining all day since about 10am; no allotment today. Nor for the rest of the week, it looks like. Bah. But that's it, we're bound by the weather, it's allotmenteering, not stamp collecting. The knock on effect of this rain is that, even when we get a break in the rain, the earth at the old greenhouse foundation is too wet to riddle.  Which means the supply of gravel and small stones to the new shed foundation's hardcore layer has stopped. Also, I've got to take my eyes off the new shed for a bit, I suspect, and get back to trench digging, where the rubble path's g...

2 barrow-fulls of oomska, ready to dig in to the NW bed for the garlic. Whilst I was down that way, I weeded the two rows of neeps, planted about a month apart. The first row is looking very good indeed: most of them bigger than the 'largish apple' suggested here . What I've noticed about our neeps is, they're significantly easier to peel and to chop than supermarket ones, which have skin a centimetre thick, and need a very heavy duty, sharp carving knife to get through them. Homegrown are more like potatoes to deal with.

After I moved some of the skinny brick path from the West to the East bed yesterday, I dug a wee hole where the brick path had been. And this is how it looked this afternoon. So my concern was justified: thanks to the phacelia for tipping me off that all was still not well in the Mid and North West beds. And this is very early autumn, mind, it's only going to get worse in the weeks ahead. So here's the plan: Along the course of the skinny paths separating the hedge area from the beds, and dividing the Mid and North West beds, I'll dig a ditch about 1ft deep, and fill it with rubble. That will still serve as a path, of course, and should guide the excess water down to the main rubble drain under the central path, and thence into the pond.

I was grateful to the brother-in-law who reminded me over dinner the other night to plant garlic. If the rains pass, as they're forecast to do, I'll clear a patch and manure it this afternoon, next to the neeps. The NW bed is for carrots and onions. Most of the ground there is from the heaps of earth I used for levelling, that is, far from the The Predecessor's mania for planting onions, and therefore, hopefully, less likely to be having any onion pests. First of all, I researched the difference between hard and softnecked garlic. This gives an explanation . All of the garlic you can get in supermarkets is hardneck, and I want some of that - it does better in cold climates, apparently. And it's said to have more complex flavours though it doesn't store so well.  But I want softneck, too, for the very reason that you can't get it in supermarkets. Flavour is less appealing when it's not fresh. I could of course get lots of varieties, but I'm beginning ...

The whole middle and northern part of the eastern boundary was all fruit bushes - berries and currants. I did a lot of work there when I got started last summer, first getting rid of the tall, mature nettles which infested the bushes, then pruning the bushes, then coppicing them, and eventually digging them up to relocate them elsewhere. I did think of incorporating them into the hedgerow where they were, but they'd gone absolutely crazy, after what seemed like years of not being pruned, nor even having the dead leaves cleared out from beneath them in autumn, which meant a build up of leaf mold and led to plants having several sets of root systems along their trunks. Which made dealing with them bloody hard work last Winter . There were brambles in that area too, whether by chance or design I can't say, and several gooseberries. But mostly it was blackcurrants. Not that I saw much fruit, but I've grown blackcurrants before and know their leaves. I also know how easy the...

Heavy rain Saturday, and heavy showers yesterday, meant no allotment all weekend. And when I got there today, the area of the old greenhouse was too wet to riddle it. So I moved part of the skinny brick path from part of the Western boundary, to it's new home as you can see here, from the central path to the cherry trees, delineating where the Middle East bed, (to the right) ends and the pond margin begins. The wee shoots you can see in the ME Bed are winter field beans, which have germinated well and made a good start. I've moved the bricks because it still seems the Mid and North West Beds aren't draining properly, so I'm going to dig a trench, fill it with rubble and call it a path and see if that helps, next year. And put in raised beds - I mean proper raised beds, about 3ft high - on the soggiest part. It's a case of watching where the water goes this Winter, which is l iable to be another wet one, apparently . By the time I get all the drainage works co...

Remember, I pricked out 80+ fig seedlings a few weeks ago into modules. These were sown with seeds from a dried Turkish fig back in May . So it's a slow process. Most are still showing only cotyledons , a few have grown secondary leaves, and a small number of those are just showing the next leaves beginning to bud at the apex. 16 of the 80 have died, but I still had approx 40 seedling growing in the original vermiculite seed-tray, so I was able to replace those. There are still about 25 left in that seed tray, and even if I lose a few more, we will have the 80 eventually for the hedgerow. 75, say, as there are still no doubt hazards for them along the way. The plan is to leave these 80 on the windowsill at home until the potting shed is built and heated, some time in the early Spring. At some point next year they'll be big enough to pot on, and then spend the next winter in the shed or polytunnel. They should be big enough to join the hedgerow some time in 2018. One thing I...

Here's what was once the path up the middle of a long-gone greenhouse. I gave it a wash and brush up, just for the photo. I'm looking forward to the day when all the heavy digging and excavating is done, and I can get all of my paths brushed down and kept clean. As you can see, it's under about 8ins of earth. You can't really tell from the photo, but it's surrounded by a low wall to the back and right, just what would have been used as the foundation for an old-fashioned greenhouse. The left hand wall I took out during my leveling activities, which I'm regretting a bit now, but, spilt milk and all that. The path looks very similar to the one which runs parallel to it, a few yards north, so perhaps they were laid by the same hand. That other path was under nearly a foot of earth. I'm trying to use them to piece together some of the plot's history. I know that The Predecessor held the plot for more than 30 years, so that would be since the early 80...

When you encounter a load of... rubbish in your plot, usually a mixture of rubble, broken glass, bits of wood and fragments of old plastic bags, mixed with good garden soil, when you do that, SORT IT OUT STRAIGHTAWAY! Don't, please, as I did, pile it all up together on a vacant bit of ground thinking vaguely, I'll deal with that later... Because this afternoon was 'later', and a tedious job it was: the aforesaid rubbish had become weed infested, which added a whole new layer of difficulty: roots and aerial parts clogging up the riddle and the danger of grass and other seeds finding their way into my nice riddled earth. I'd thrown up the load of crap onto this area (early in Spring I think it was), and today raked it off the top, put the bigger bits of rubble in the spare wheelbarrow, threw the weeds and bits of wood onto the for-bonfire pile, and then riddled the earth out of what was left - and there was still plenty of gravel and smaller bits of rubble for ...

Day off allotment today. Regarding the plot as my gym, all of this riddling is working the arms and shoulders. Spin-off benefit for piano playing there. I'm slowly processing through the old greenhouse area for the poly-tunnel. I haven't measured it, but estimate it's about 10x8ft. I've gone about 3ft into it, and so far moved 6 or 7 barrow-fulls of earth, and working on the assumption that for every 3 barrows of riddled earth, there's one of gravel and rubble, that's a couple of barrows onto the new shed's foundation. I have a feeling that getting to the end of the old greenhouse will supply enough hardcore for a nice thick and level foundation for the shed. And I'll have a cleared area all ready for the poly-tunnel. It seems to have a brick paved section down the middle, about 4ft wide, with a couple of feet of earth or clay each side of that. Which is perfect. I like the fact that the poly-tunnel and the shed will divide the plot up, 1/3 to the Sout...

 Harvested almost all (one row is still in flower) of the coriander today. Here it is in a colossal bunch, hanging up in the old shed. I'm hoping it'll shrink back a bit so that I can fit it into a hessian sack and catch the seeds before they start to fall. One of my few succesful crops this year, and I'm for growing it again. The scent of it when it rains is gorgeous. And I noticed that it attracted unrecognisable (to me) insects, quite unlike the honey, bumble and other bees, hoverflies etc which went for the phacelia. Flops over terribly, interfering with my neeps this year. Next year I'm going to grow it in 4ft squares with some kind of support around them. Below, 2 photos of the riddling process, before and after. Before show a spadeful of earth in the riddle. After shows how much is left by way of stones and gravel once I've got the earth out. BEFORE AFTER As you can see, maybe 1/3 of the spadeful's volume was stones. It makes me wo...

The region of what I used to call 'the old greenhouse foundations' was unnaturally high, a kind of island in the middle of the plot. Or more like a fortification, with a series of ramparts of brick and corrugated iron. I levelled the West side last spring , getting down to a concrete and brick base, which was actually by then lower than the rest of the plot. Since then I've been filling it with rubble as the foundation for the shed. You can see it on the left middle ground of the photo, with a scaffold board over it because I've been checking to see if it's level enough for the shed to be built on it. It should be a formidable foundation: a course of bricks and concrete on top of the original heavy clay subsoil, topped off with 6ins or so of rubble. Before I actually start building the shed, I'm curious to see whether or not any water's going to puddle there. So meanwhile, I've started on the right hand, Eastern side of the 'old greenhouse'...

Managed to get down for a bit of work this afternoon. After a quick survey and a think, I got back to work on clearing the area opposite the shed, which will be the site of the polytunnel. I'm going at it with a shovel, getting it down to the level of the path for now. Every shovelful is riddled, the rubble and gravel piled onto the new shed area for its foundation. That's nearly done, actually, only a few inches to make that side on a level with the path. When that's done, I suspect there's still going to be a lot of rubble and gravel. So the next thing with that will be rubble/French drain and path across the bottom of the Middle East bed, marking it off from the pond margin, (which has gone wild on me, but will have to wait), and helping with drainage. That path will continue along the edge of that bed, between it and the course of the hedgerow on the Eastern boundary. I think I'm going to run out of bricks for the skinny perimeter path, and will use rubble a...

Or something, I've not been counting since I got the bug when I was in Greenwich during the summer. Appropriately for Dance of the Hours, "hours mean hours" now, none of the "academic hour" of 45 minutes baloney. The Poacher took me, at last, it seems, through some kind of pain barrier. Not that it's gotten as easy as I would like, but it's not head-bangingly excruciating. Or maybe The Hours is just easier. I've got the RH memorized, now, as of this evening. And I've started on LH, which seems quite simple. I was going to use the @kommie_p 's teacher's method, which is to dive in with both hands, and I will return to that one day, but for now, to get 3 pieces under the belt before November, I'm sticking to the old RH>LH>2H. So I've got maybe 17 days before the closing date for Autumn entries for Grade 1. I have hardly looked at the aural and sight reading parts of the exam, yet. The bit's between the auld teeth now,...

Various circumstances conspire to keep me out of the allotment yesterday, and so far today too. But I've taken the time to prick out those fig seedlings. 2 module trays, each with 40 modules, and seedling growing medium, 50/50 sand and peat-free compost. These were planted in 2 improvised seed trays, (the tin trays that come with a supermarket chicken) with holes I stamped in the bottom. They took ages (6-8 weeks) before beginning to germinate. Back in July, I estimated 40 seedlings . And then a couple of weeks ago, I counted roughly 100 .  And then this morning, I got 85 exactly from just one tray: that's 80 in the modules, 5 in a small plant pot. The other tin tray contains a few less, maybe 40-50, and I've just left them there until I think on what to do with them, (fill another module tray, maybe, but I'm running out of windowsills, and these need to stay at home until I get the allotment shed built and stove installed). 40 Fig Seedlings, Pricked Out this Morn...

Only one of the original 7 bulrushes has thrived, although I don't think it's going to flower this year. In fact, although these plants are perennial, they actually seem to behave more like biennials, flowering in their 2nd year. And when they do flower, according to Motivans & Apfelbaum , the seeds have a very high germination rate. But they also reproduce vegetatively, from rhizomes. As you can see in the photo, the original plant to the right has grown a new ramet, (for which terminology see Grace & Wetzel, 1982). These are growing in the middle part of the pond, at the deepest point. That's been under water apart from a short spell of drought in May, when it was just mud. The other plant is surviving, but not thriving near the pond margin, where it is only under water when the pond is full, which has been a rare occurrence since last winter.  Grace, James B., and Robert G. Wetzel. "Niche differentiation between two rhizomatous plant species: Typha...

That's the Middle East bed, formerly the 2016 tattie patch. It's 3/4 done in that photo which I took yesterday, and I got it all finished - as far down as the pond margin - this afternoon. I dug it over, finding a few stray potatoes as I went. I sowed it thickly with winter field beans, var. 'wizard'. And then finish it off with a couple of inches of horse manure, now nicely rotted down. I'm curious to see how these wfbs do this year. Last year, I was running late with everything, and didn't get them sown until November, in rows. And then, of course, large parts of the Mid and North West beds were waterlogged. The beans coped surprisingly well, considering. Now, they have the benefit of a well drained bed, and a couple of months of growing before Winter comes.

...as Tom Waits put it .  A fairly trite notion, Tom, if you don't mind me saying. This morning was the first weekday I've had off from work for months, so I was determined to get to the allotment for as long as possible because there's still plenty to do after my 6 week absence in the summer. I tidied up around the area of the new shed. The gorse plants were there, but as I get back to digging the shed foundations I want somewhere to throw the numerous stones still in the ground, and the foundations are a shallow depression in the ground which I'm slowly filling with rubble, about 8x8ft, easy enough to hit with stones and bits of glass from anywhere on the plot. All of this in the pouring rain, mind. The dogs ran around, Sparky using the long stretch of nascent hedgerow with its little gorse plants as a running track, uprooting a few of them which I of course put back. The gorse are doing well, some have grown visibly in the last couple of weeks, putting out side s...

I'll reserve judgement until I start with 2H, but so far The Hours seems to be much easier than the Poacher. I've got the RH first 5 bars or so almost memorized already, after another hour on Sunday, and 10 mins this morning. I'll have more time for practice next week, when I'll make the final decision to enter for Grade 1 in November/December (the closing date for entries is Sept. 30th). But just now, buoyed up perhaps by the endorphin I got from yesterday's afternoon of digging , I'm feeling pretty confident about getting The Hours before the end of this month, and then Calypso Joe by end of October, and heigh-ho for the exam in November.

I had thought I was going to get away without digging the tattie patch over. Just throw on the winter field beans and a layer of oomska, and leave it alone until next year... But as I tidied up, barrowing away the potatoes' aerial parts for compost, I saw that it was compacted from all the walking on it as I harvested the spuds. Besides, there were still a few potato stragglers in the ground. So I got back to digging for the first time in 6 months or so, and I was soon in a lather with the unaccustomed exercise. The methodology: dig back three rough rows along the bed, that's about a yard, sow generously with the field beans, and then throw on a barrowfull of oomska - so that's one barrow of it to about 4sq yards - 2 or 3 ins deep. The field beans should punch their way through that no problem, the garden thugs that they are. I was delighted to find that the oomska pile's population of brandling worms, Eisenia fetitda , has multiplied whilst it's been standing t...

Here's the thing: the maris peer, and the desiree which I grew from supermarket spuds are fine, but they've not been great crops. That's half a sack of desiree from 2 rows, about 16 seed potatoes. The other ones in the photo are from an odds and sods kind of row, I think there were 5 maris piper, and can't remember what else. Anyway, the maris piper were a wee kind of novelty birthday present, but proper seed potatoes, but they've cropped better than anything. So, next year I'm going to get good seed potatoes, and I'm going to get varieties that I can't buy in the supermarket, something a bit different.