Pig Sty Avenue

That's Sparky & Cleo, the new additions to the household. Getting a rescue dog from the Scottish SPCA has been on the family agenda for years. The time has come. These two were a package, we suspect Sparky (left) is Cleo's daughter. God knows who the father was. Some kind of whippet? A Jack Russel? Anyway, they've been taking up most of the weekend, getting them settled in. So less constructive allotmenteering than I would have liked. I did get there tonight without the dogs for 90 mins or so. Put in a couple of rows of Desiree (main crop spuds), just a regular bag I'd bought from Tesco. Did a bit of weeding. Yesterday, the dogs ran around a lot on the beds, and some rows of seedlings will not have benefitted from the treatment. But I'm learning to be pretty Zen about these things. It's all a process. One sackful of spuds will be better than no sackful of spuds. This year, I'm in a desperate hurry to get it all under cultivation, and I should achie...

Women's Topics (By Our Lady Correspondent) It almost seems as if certain dressmakers had to decided to make ridiculous those women who wear their creations. To realise this, it is enough to read some descriptions which appear in French journals. One costume seen at a smart gathering in Paris had, I notice, the skirt entirely covered with monkey fringe, the corsage a la mode was conspicuous by its absence, shoulder straps of jet emphasizing the slightness of the bodice... It would be laughable were it not so pathetic to think of 20th century women dressing themselves like savages, or rather like monkeys! BIGAMY TOO COMMON At Edinburgh Sheriff Court yesterday Archibald Mutch Trotter (22) pleaded guilty to committing bigamy in Edinburgh on January 17, 1919. An agent stated that accused was almost blind, and he produced a doctor's certificate to that effect. His condition was due to shell shock. Sheriff Crede[?] said bigamy was becoming extremely common, and people were beginni...

Done. Though, there was a bit of rush towards the end as it began to rain in earnest, which is why I hit on the wheeze, (which I might regret before the growing season's out) of sowing the "Kleine Rheinlanderin" peas as a broadcast. And I still need to work out some climbing arrangement for the runner beans.

This is where we can see the benefit of ascertaining the family of each and every plant , because already, (prior to starting this new system), I've made a blunder. You'll see I've got Apiaceae in all 3 of the West beds. That's because they've each got a row of coriander, which should of course have gone with its cousin, carrot, in the Midwest bed. Lamiaceae also appears in two of those beds, because I've planted sage in the Midwest, and oregano in the NW. See?  It does work. The coriander, sage and oregano bungles probably won't matter long term, and have taught a valuable lesson, (the puzzle over where the hell herbs fit into a rotation got me thinking about this in the first place). The point is now to make sure no bed has the same family planted in it 2 year's running, but should get a break from it for as many seasons as possible, preferably 2-3. The schemes for crop rotation you can google online try to be simple, but, paradoxically, are hard...

Inserting tables into a blogpost is do-able, but you have to do it all the long way round, after already doing the work in a spreadsheet. So for now, here we have most of the plants I plan to grow, in their families. This is done by screen grabs from the spreadsheet, so I can update them as necessary. So that's voila, kind of, for now. I've already realised there are omissions of plants I definitely want to grow, (valerian, st john's wort, feverfew), but it should be a matter of just checking which family they're in and adding them to it, or introducing a new family if necessary. And it'll be complicated but not too difficult to juggle the families around rotation, companions, and winter crops.  On a simple level, it's a good wish-list of what I plan to grow in the next few years.

The comfrey plants on the Rediscovered Path edge are nearly 3ft tall. They were the first to be planted in early spring, having been dug up from their bed in Autumn. Coincidentally, that bed was in the vicinity of the Rediscovered Path and Tattie Bed. Numerous volunteers spring up from this area, with new ones almost every day. The process seems to have been, when I dug them up fragments of root left behind grow new plants. Comfrey, with (accidental) foreground bokeh. The flowers are drooping, and the bumble bees get at them upside down.  I tried to get a photo of them, but the view upwards towards the sky makes the exposure difficult on the iPhone's camera. Here's the best effort of several: So it's not a great photo, there's some way to go yet as an iPhone wildlife photographer. But you can just about tell the that the bumble bee in question is rather kind of blond or pale ginger, which means it's likely to be Bombus pascuorum.

Intention of banking up the 2nd early potatoes, which I did, and maybe also sowing a row or two of seeds, which I didn't. The reason was, I got a visit from a neighbour, who clearly likes to talk. He showed me the plot he works with his brother. They have a photo pinned up of how it looked when they took it over, and it was a bloody mess. So they've done a lot of work, but the overall effect was to make a suburban back-garden, koi pond, dahlias and all. Other people's allotments are as mysterious as other people's choice of life partner. Anyway, when I was extending the path I came across a number of corms of a type unknown to me - not bulbs or tubers. I asked the Suburban Garden Neighbour if he knew what they were and, God bless him, he opined that they were Crocosmia . Looking at the photo on wikipedia , I think he's probably right. I gave him a few, then went through the rest and discarded any that weren't showing new growth. The remaining 14 I planted on ...

The information online about crop rotation is not adequate. It doesn't take much account of perennials, green manures, herbs or other companion plants. And it doesn't usually use the proper botanical taxonomy, which you need if you're going on to Google Scholar to seek out research. Family plants plants Fabaceae pea winter field bean mange tout alfalfa french bean gorse runner bean lupins broad bean clover So, for example, the family Fabaceae (in the table above) is usually referred to as "legumes" or the "pea family". And yes, we know that's peas and beans, but it also includes the gorse in the hedge and the lupins you might use in a fallow year. So I've put together a spreadsheet with 13 plant families containing ALL of the plants which I'm likely to want to grow, (I might have to include other down the road, of course). Having done that, I then encountered another learning curve, namely, adding a table in...

At least 1. Maybe I could have got 3 altogether, at a pinch. Also 200+ gorse seeds, which have begun to look in danger of damping off, so I'm thinking they'll be better off at the allotment in the fresh air. I'm worried about slugs, snails and woodpigeons, though, so I put them in a wheelbarrow, covered with a net. Also this morning, planted a row of beetroot detroit.

This is from the West side of the plot, the ash tree's point-of-view. To the right is the SW bed, planted today with a row of coriander, and another of peas. To the far left is the Mid- and South West beds. The bed this side of the skinny brick path to the left is the odds-and-sods bed: hawthorn and alder, wildflower mix, and papaver somniferum seeds. Dead ahead is the famous "old greenhouse foundations" aka "concrete and brick structure", (hereby re-named "new shed foundations" - with straight ahead the pile of rubble which will mostly be deployed to level them). The panorama photos won't be possible next year, the views straight ahead being blocked by the new shed and the poly-tunnel.

Figs, now. The old Pig Sty Avenue allotment had a fig bush growing on its boundary, planted by don't know who, don't know when, but it was mature. No fruit from it, maybe it was a male tree, maybe its roots weren't confined or chopped through. But the thing that has stayed with me: right up to November, its stubby wee flowers would be a like a flying insect Piccadilly Circus; I particularly remember hover-flies.  And any meaningful assemblage of trees must have a few figs. There's Adam & Eve's pinnies, for one thing. I sowed the seeds from a fresh fig once, and was impressed by how easy it was. Can't remember now what happened to the plants. Years, and years ago, I had a friend who kept a fig as a houseplant, growing on the corner of the fireplace, a proper coal fire, 10ft or so from the windows. It wasn't putting out much new growth, as I recall, but the fact that it was living under such circumstances was itself remarkable. So, figs are tough as o...

The SE bed, I don't speak of much. This is currently where the old shed is, a pile of half burned old timber and ground elder roots and God knows what else that will go on a bonfire when I get time... The plan is that here will go the oomska (right by the gate), and a herb/perennial bed. There's also a midden hidden there, and lots of bricks and all kinds of other mysteries. Today I was laying the skinny brick path on the South west bed, peas this year, to facilitate weeding prior to planting. Anyway, there are partly buried rows and stacks and lines of bricks on the SE bed. So I was mining them for the path. I don't think this SE side has EVER been gardened. Apart from the bricks, I found that the ground is a mixture of stones (pebbles, probably from the subsoil, and broken bricks and concrete) and what I'm thinking of as the original topsoil, when this was farmland more than a century ago: a kind of blueish clay, not as heavy as the glacial till of the subsoil, bu...

That's looking west, from what I tempted to call the grassy knoll, the allotment's last mysterious mounds at the old midden by the eastern fence. Straight ahead is, foreground, rubble heap, then place for the new shed, then the ash tree and white plastic chair. Over to the left foreground is the old shed, with the peas/beans bed on the other side of the path. In the right foreground, the oil drum with a plastic planter on it, then the spuds. The pond's away down in the right middle ground, with the park in the background. Going right from the ash tree is the west bed.

The neeps planted just 10 days ago. So far, unmolested by snails or wood-pigeons. We eat a neep a week in our house, so that's 50-ish needed in total. Several more rows...

Having ascertained that I can build a shed for an estimated £50 + a few weekends of cursing and ingenuity, I began to look askance at the £300 being asked for a polytunnel. Hmm. Turns out it's easily done with 6x2m scaffold tubes, & about 40m of 50mm mdpe gas piping. Improvising a the polythene cover would be possible, but I can buy a ready made one with a door etc for less than £50 on eBay. So that's it for less than £100. All of which means, this coming winter I can have both my shed and my polytunnel for about £150 the pair, that's 25% of what they would have cost me from a commercial retailer. Meanwhile, I keep myself firmly on the right side of the allotmenteers' ethical code by doing it all on the cheap, by the sweat of one's brow. 

Roots only, mostly carrots then, in the Midwest bed this year, (as there'll be no onions anywhere). Seemed like a good idea at the time, but that overlooked the fact that it's probably the stoniest bed. Here's a photo of the heap of stones I've gathered up from the Midwest and NW beds, and that's literally just been scratching the surface with the rake. Heigh ho. I'll riddle that heap when I get time. The bits of quartz from the subsoil will go to one side, and the less attractive pebbles, with bits of brick, concrete and glass will go into leveling the foundation for the shed. Got just one row planted. Of course, I should have riddled the ground for carrots. But I'm up against it for time, now, being keen to get the beds all planted out by middle of next month. Stony ground gives hilariously mis-shapen carrots, so we've got that to look forward to.

Another packet of seeds we bought last summer on our visit to Edinburgh Botanic Gardens . Decided to plant a row of these this morning, read the instructions, and... they want a month's stratification. So they're in the fridge now, in wet compost in a small Barbie Princess food container. (I mention the details to alleviate the possibility of saying "WTF is this?" at some point in the future?

The packet of seeds I mentioned yesterday , free from Beefayre :

On Saturday I weeded the potato patch thoroughly. On Monday, 9 of the plants (of about 50) were looking like this. Oh no! I was most concerned that they might have some sort of blight, especially as they weren't proper seed potatoes, but just a bag of maris piper sold for the pot from Lidl. But then, I thought, maybe I damaged the roots when I was weeding on Saturday? I was pretty thorough, let's say. (Though, now, I can see that a wee bit of root damage would be unlikely to cause such foliage problems.) I tweeted the photo this morning, and first one, then another twitter suggested frost, so I checked out the Glasgow temperature records. It was indeed down to 3C over the weekend. So, clear sky, it could have been a frost. Which is a relief, it's NOT some sort of blight. And I've also learned that when BBC Scotland weather warns of the "possibility of frost in sheltered glens in rural areas", that can also mean the east end of Glasgow. If I'm plan...

In the middle of the photo you can see a metal post I banged in this evening to mark where "structure" stops and earth begins. The brick path running across the bed I also put in, to mark where the Midwest bed starts. So the area around what will be the new shed, I decided to use as a kind of informal seed bed. That's the ground between the metal post and the brick path, and running down to the left beneath the ash tree. All seeds hanging around the fridge, homeless, went in there today. There were about 400 hawthorns. They'd had 2 months in the fridge, and month on the windowsill, no shows, so back to the fridge; (where, by the way, the carrier bag I'd put them in with their compost stuck to the back of the fridge, tore when I tried to get it out, spilling compost all over the bloody fridge and causing me 20 mins work to empty the fridge and clean it all up). Also the alder which has been on the windowsill for a month or more, and produced only 3 plants, (...

As of last Thursday, I had 100+ gorse germinated, but that seems to have perhaps doubled over the weekend, so many it's tedious to count them, and new ones still coming through all the time. Mind, I estimated 400 seeds, and the test batch gave me 6/10, so 200-300 plants seems likely. I'll prick them out once they have all got secondary foliage, couple of weeks away, and then down to the allotment ready for transfer to the boundary in late summer.

That's the ash tree, I'm registering it on the Living Ash Project. I had thought to coppice it, but that makes it more liable to getting chalara, so no coppicing for now. It seems fine at the moment, as do all the big ash at the edge of Alexandra Park on Cumbernauld Rd.

The neeps I got from the Real Seed Catalogue people planted just a week ago ('Joan') have apparently ALL germinated already. They're just about throwing themselves out of the ground.

I weeded the tattie patch last week with the hoe, but there's nothing quite like getting right in amongst it, squatting on the planting board and going to it with the trowel. It's important in this part of the garden, because apart from the usual ground elder, there are a couple of horsetails showing their carboniferous faces in this part of the plot. My first ever allotment on Pig Sty Avenue was wick (as we say in Jarrow) with them. The only way to keep them in check is to try to get all of their unbelievably long root out, (usually impossible, it seems to go down several feet), and keep at them every time they appear. They WILL come back from the root, but the trick is to not let them mature, because they also propagate by spores, and if that happens you're in a Japanese knotweed kind of situation. That's comfrey in the foreground. I'm planning to edge all the paths with it. Every allotment needs plenty of comfrey, and it seemed like a good idea to let it, and...

I know it's only May 2016, but I had to make sure for peace of mind that I had the beds sown with the right crops by thinking ahead to the rotation for next year, including plans for the 2016/17 winter. I've taken the opportunity to look at the whole projected layout. The pink areas will be perennials, (herbs, mostly) or wildflowers or pond marginals, whatever. Notice the oomska is right by the gate, telling any visitors: THIS IS AN ALLOTMENT. It's also well placed for next year's 42 wheelbarrows' full. I might or might not have the poly tunnel by next year, I should have the shed built, all things being equal. And the hedgerow should be well on its way, but it might take several years to get the double row, especially as I'm planning to do it in the good old allotment style, costing me nowt.

What with digging over, sowing seeds, defending same against wood-pigeons, and marvelling at the survival of honesty , there's plenty to be doing. But this morning I had a eureka moment vis-a-vis the shed situation. The old shed cannot be saved, and I must have a new one this autumn. Tiger sheds do a new 8x6ft one for £299 , delivered, which isn't too bad. However, talk around the plots tells me that new sheds are the most likely to lure thieves and vandals. One of my neighbours apologised at the AGM for attracting numerous unwanted visits to her shed, which is brand new and painted purple. I have considered in the past building my own, but dismissed the idea because of the difficulty of fitting full sized pallets in a Fiat 500. The eureka moment came when I remember The Neighbour had been to a scrap yard to get scaffold boards for his raised beds... The yard delivered them free! Surely, a scrap yard will have plenty of pallets and corrugated iron? I can probably get all I ...

A row of peas, along the planting board, before I used the rake to cover them. At sunset, almost. A I took this photo, I was aware of a clattering of wood-pigeon wings right behind me, the brute was startled by the shutter sound the iPhone makes, perhaps. It reminded me forcibly that a priority this weekend has to be sorting out netting, or all the sowing will be for nothing. I covered up this row with a long narrow sheet of perspex, and another of glass, which just happened to be at hand, until I can rig up the netting. I've got plenty of net material, but I'm short on stakes. No allotment today, but must give this priority tomorrow. Anyway, back to the peas: this is at the far Southern end of the plot, next to the oomska and wood piles. So now I've started at both ends of the W bed, and will work my way to the middle before mid-June. Wood pigeons permitting. The neeps at the very other end of the plot have germinated already. I need to get some netting down there,...

Along the E boundary, not far from the cherry trees, right on the fence, this is growing. It's a beautiful wee plant, all the more so as the rest of the plot is still bare earth, or a sheen of new weeds waiting for the hoe. A kind person on Twitter identified it as Lunaria annua, whose English name is Honesty. There's a good article from the Torygraph, here . It says, "Lunaria annua will cope in most situations and seems happiest growing among other plants", which suggests it could do well in the understory of the hedgerow. And the seed heads look nice in a vase, apparently. It shows, when rehabilitating an allotment, don't be too ruthless with the "weeds" until you know what they are. I mean, the nettles you can see round the Honesty, are just a bloody nuisance. But this plant is lovely. Another reason for not using glyphosate.

I reported a few days ago that the gorse seeds had gone berserk , and I can say that their exuberant behaviour has continued all week. As of this morning, there were 110 approximately, with no sign of abatement in germination. Assuming all of those seedling survive to the planting-out stage, that's already enough for a single line of hedging down the W boundary, which is the direction casual, uninvited visitors are liable to try to get in from. The fence by the SW bed is elderly, wooden and wobbly: I could kick it down myself in a few moments, so there's nothing to stop an amphetamine-fueled, mischief-bent Ned doing just that. It'll be maybe 3 years before the gorse can stop him, of course, but allotmenteering is all about delayed gratification, and I just need to be sure there's nothing a Ned would want to steal or even vandalize meanwhile.

Good news and bad news this morning. The good news is the Mitchell Library - from what I've seen online today - looks like an extensive archive of images and maps. The bad news is, it's all tied up with the City Council and, don't get me started... I remember using the Mitchell, must've been when we were living in Springburn, so that was 2002-3. The staff were either extremely well informed and helpful, or lazy, jobsworth twats. Which, I know, is the sort of binary formulation I now try hard to avoid, and will I hope need to revise when I go back a decade and half later. This photo is described by the Virtual Mitchell site as "Back of tenement off Dobbie's Loan with woman posed leaning against a wall". The windows you can just see behind the woman, (women, actually, she has a ghostly visitor who didn't want to wait out the exposure time, which might have irked the photographer in 1919 but gives it a story, now) look as if they could have belonged ...

Does that work? So, for example, next year it could be: 2017MEbrassicas 2017MWpotatoes 2017NWrootsallium 2017SWpeas Sorting an array will go by the year, then the bed, then the crop. Maybe I should look at one of the rotation systems and give each crop a number, too...

I took this a few weeks ago, it's the concrete structure. To the left it meets the Midwest bed at its southerly edge. Recall, this is where peas are going this year. You can't really see it very well on the photo, but the bed is slight raised, just at this end, as it meets the structure. It's only about 6ins or so, but you know when you get a bug up your arse about something? Anyway, I wanted to start digging over the bed at this end this morning, ready for the first row of peas, and decided to get it level first. I just hacked into the rise with the shovel, and threw it north down the bed. That whole side is just about level now, with a steady, slight, gradient running down from S to N. And I am considerably less bugged. Also planted komatsuna in the NWbrassica2016 bed, (I'm working out strings so that I can work out the crop rotation in future years). I've never grown or tasted it before. Mr Fothergill was a bit stingy with the seeds: only 50 for a row, so ...

The West of Scotland is the sunniest, warmest part of the UK, this weather. It's a puzzle to me why on a fine spring evening like this, the allotments are almost deserted. But they were tonight. Maybe it's just not a regular evening kind of thing for some people? Anyways, I did a bit more digging over in the West bed, gradually heading south. I'm planting brassica>companion> brassica et seq. So far that's rows of neeps, oregano, cauliflower, and tonight a row of coriander, from the Real Seed people , said to be slow to bolt, and to give leaves rather than seed. A few years ago I got a kilo of coriander seed from a Chinese supermarket, and sowed the lot. It germinated fine, but shot away, set masses of seed, and fell over. The chickens got the benefit of most of that. I was going to plant a row of komatsuna, but realised I wasn't 100% sure if it WAS a brassica, and it didn't say on the packet. ( It is ; I'll plant it tomorrow). A pair of greenfinc...

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Louisiana_Five_Contracts.jpg#/media/File:Louisiana_Five_Contracts.jpg   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Strang The lady on the left there (Cynthia, by William Strang , 1917) is a long way from the bobbed hair of the 20s, (which was first recorded in Chelsea in 1914). But in the East End of Glasgow, in 1919, 1920, I think a young-ish woman would have looked more like this, (though Strang, who died in 1921, may have been looking back to the previous century). All the same, when the lassies started getting their hair cut short in the middle of the 20s, must have been quite something, especially if they were applying lipstick and smoking cigarettes out of doors. The pace of change must've been dizzying to someone who'd grown up in the Edwardian era, been through the War, and then, pow! The 20s!

Blogposts here about the allotment outnumber those regarding the doctorate by... quite a lot. 100 to 1, maybe. Which is a telling ratio. The fact is, test validity theory, in fact almost everything connected with language testing is no longer floating my boat. If it ever did. And the thought of spending another 3 years researching and writing a dissertation which a handful of people will read, and which will advance the cause of human happiness, despite the best intentions, not one jot... Well, no. A novel's been growing in my head since Saudi, and its time has come. I'm not going to spill any creative beans here, but I will give details of the research, (which may give some clues): First World War especially life in the trenches; Glasgow in the 1920s; Territorial Forces just before and during FWW; crime and punishment in Glasgow, 1920s; Scottish state schools, 1920s; Teacher education, 1910-20. To get started, Jenkins, 1974. REFERENCES Jenkins, A. (1974). The Twentie...

I took a brief breather between my barbed-wire labours, and digging/raking/sowing (cauliflower), and contemplated The Shed. It really won't do, will it? The angle it's leaning at gets a little more acute everytime I really look at it. I was all for saving it, repairing and restoring an old allotment relic, using rusty corrugated iron sheeting to give it a between-the-wars African shanty town kind of look... But it's only decades of inertia saving it, somehow, from collapse. There are no sound timbers anywhere on it. Besides, the Old Greenhouse area, now aka concrete & brick structure, would provide a perfect base for a new shed, probably a poly tunnel too, and this wonky old lady could go and leave me with a new bed for, perhaps perennials. I suspect that the concrete & brick structure once founded a greenhouse & shed, and that this one was thrown up at a later date, out of true with the plot, and sans any real framework or foundations. And so, sittin...

Is it just me or does "botrytis" sound like something that would keep you off work with a toilet roll cooling in the fridge, and some comfort telly lined up?  That's the botanical for cauliflower, anyways. This afternoon I got a row of these put in: 49p ones from Lidl. So that's 3 rows in the brassica bed now: neeps, oregano, and caulis. I'm using an old dibber left behind by The Predecessor, and it's exactly 17ins from handle to tip, so that's how far I'm spacing my rows, just to have a bit of uniformity. Enough to get up & down with the hoe, rake, or barrow... Also today: The Carer at the community plot next door asked me to take the the barbed wire off the new(ish) fence, (that's the W boundary), as somebody had hurt themselves on it, and it was giving him a whole load of Council Health & Safety Risk Assessment stuff to deal with. Well, fair enough. I want to keep Neds out, obvs, but don't want to injure any innocent passers by...

The gorse seeds in the trays have gone berserk. Last night there was only 1 thriving germinated seedling. This morning there were 6 more breaking through. By midday, 9. Just now this evening, 19. In other news, I sowed the roses in a tray on a different windowsill. In a proper seed tray this time, following carefully the advice Prof. Google had to offer.  There are still only 3 alder, but they're handsome wee seedlings. I'll plant them together, in the wettest bit of the West bed, above the French drain.

Carried on this morning, digging over the West side, heading South. The methodology is to rake the top of the soil, there are lots of pebbles (from the subsoil, dumped during the pond and under-path excavations) and bits of glass (from earth dumped from the old greenhouse area, during the levelling process).  Then I dig over half a dozen or so rows. It's fairly light digging, which suggests it's nicely drained. The patches of subsoil, are fairly easy to break up and begin to blend with the good topsoil. As I dig, I take out any more pebbles that I can. Finally, before planting, I break it up further with the rake, usually finding a few more pebbles at this stage, (I use the pebbles to mark the point where the pond finds the Council's drain, and there's quite a wee cairn arising there). I think that there are more worms now than there were when I dug this bed over last autumn. It would make sense that their numbers recover now that this bed is not waterlogged. That r...

Here's the latest version of the plan, tweaked to indicate the skinny path, and the actual width of the beds. The three beds at the north end are all 11x22ft, which is nice. My Paint2 skills are not up to showing the couple of wee kinks in the paths.

So here we are at this morning scene of action. That's the far NW end. To the right of the photo is the boundary fence, and then a space already beginning to get filled with weeds. And then the front row of the nascent hedge, (the space between it and the fence is for - I was hoping - gorse). Then a new rubble skinny path. You'll notice it curves. That's because the line of the hedge curves, too. And that's because when I was planting the fruit bushes I wasn't paying attention. But it's worked out well: in the far corner there's enough room for extra gorse, and the corner is where unwelcome visitors are likely to try to gain access. And it makes for a thicker area of gorse for birds nesting. You can see where the path turns, and will now run straight, southward, 3ft out from the boundary. There's 1ft between the path and the bushes, to give the wheelbarrow space to run up the skinny path. I'll plant that with the sort of plants that like lurk...

This is the view looking North, taken from the point where the new South end path begins to run alongside the shed. To the left foreground is the newly levelled SW bed. On the opposite side of the path is a heap of rotten wood and ground elder roots, waiting for a bonfire. The left middle ground, with the white plastic chair, bucket (for quartz pebbles, mostly), and fishbox (for bits of broken glass) is the West side of the old greenhouse, and/or "concrete and brick structure". To the right of that is a pile of rubble, which lies over the East side of the old greenhouse, or whatever it is. The oil drum is on top of the rediscovered path. Beyond that is the tattie bed, and then the pond. Finally, where the scene of the action will be in the next few weeks, beyond the white chair is the Midwest and North West beds, which I've begun to dig over, (working my way up from the North end, where there are transplanted fruit bushes). The thing that keeps me opening this pho...

This is the most vigorous of the fruit bushes transplanted over the winter. I think it's a gooseberry. I've planted them in what will be the front row of the hedge, about 1ft apart. So their main job is hedgerow rather than fruit production. Nonetheless I expect gooseberries etc in due course. I'm glad about 75% of the fruit bushes have taken so enthusiastically to their new homes, because it must be said that other aspects of the hedgerow are not working out; no hawthorns whatsoever germinated after 2 month stratification of 100s of seeds; only 3 alder after 3 months stratification; the gorse has now joined this unhappy list, I got 6/10 in a trial (in a 4in pot) but only 1 so far (of several hundred seeds) in the trays. The common factor in failure seems to be the recycled tin trays I'm using, (formerly used to roast a supermarket chicken). I'll get  proper seed trays for the last leg of the experiment, the roses, which have now been stratifying in the fridge...

And there it is. Compare how it looked a couple of days ago . I'm relieved about this bed because there seemed to be too much earth in it when it was all heaps, but now that it's leveled it's hunky dory. I'm going to leave it a couple of days, let the magpies and robins have a good old scratch around in it for leatherjackets and what not. Then I'll give it another rake, maybe a bit of riddling, and then plant it with carrots, parsnips and marigolds. I suppose this is how no-dig is going to be: heavy duty work with the rake?