Pig Sty Avenue

Maybe it's something primeval, the need to secure a growing space with a hedge. The Secretary Formerly Known As Bee Lady has not gotten back to me about more bare root hedging plants. I don't know what the story is there, but must proceed under my own steam for now. This winter I'll plant the gorse right around the boundary, in a staggered row with gaps to be filled subsequently. Assuming the seedlings don't get waterlogged or dried out over the summer, there are 200, enough for a staggered row 1ft apart around most of the boundary. For the rest, I'm going to buy (yes, I know) blackthorn seeds , and stratify them this winter to plant next winter. Also silver birch , (the first tree I learned to recognise when I was a small child). Thinking further ahead, maybe several thousand years further ahead, I'm going to stratify yew , (the price of rootballed yew is outrageous - so there's a big profit margin if you have a bit of ground and patience). Holly has ...

It's mostly weeding, this time of year. Sowing direct has not been a great success, but it's not a complete wash out, either. Hoed between the rows, and then got down into the rows of coriander, sage, neeps and beetroot to thin and weed. It's extremely satisfying to stand back from that and see a row of well spaced, weed-free plants. And getting down and doing real fingertip weeding means you're getting to know your crop, and all the bloody weeds that invest them.

I rigged up a gate months ago, with wire hinges, "secured" by more wire tying the gate to a post. It would take a burglar of modest intelligence a few seconds to spot the weakness in this, and so it proved. Sometime between Thursday afternoon and Saturday morning, somebody disconnected the hinges. He or she then rifled through the shed. Nothing taken, no real vandalism. So I got around, at last, to fixing up the gate with proper hinges, and even bought a cheap padlock. Topped off with barbed wire. It's not exactly Fort Knox, but it deters the casual/creepy visitor. I told one of the neighbours what had happened, and he told me that others had had similar visits, nothing stolen or vandalised, it was just made obvious that someone had been there and been through the plot holder's stuff. I strongly suspect a fellow plot-holder, someone with some serious personality flaws. But, whatever, I'm very pleased now to have a proper gate.

Many gardeners clearly believe that copper acts as a barrier to slugs and snails. The theory is that an electrolysis effect occurs between the slug or snail, its body, and the copper. I can find no academic research to back this up. So I decided to try to find out. Here's the equipment. Cheap cider, two empty plastic containers and 0.5mm copper wire. And here they are in situ. The idea being, slugs and snails would be attracted to the cider. If the copper barrier theory has any validity, the right hand pot would fill with dead specimens, the right hand with its copper wire, though attractive, would be snail free, or at least have less than the right hand one. Unfortunately, some other allotment fauna, likely a fox, likes cider so much it pulled up the pots apparently to get the last dregs of it out of them. [sighs]...

Growing in the margin of the pond, (well, growing at the edge of the muddy holes in the ground at the bottom of the plot), quite a lot of examples of this plant. I had no idea what it was, and whether it's been attracted to the pond, or was there hitherto. Thanks to Twitter in the person of Enviro Bytes , it's suggested that it's Persicaria maculosa , which also rejoices in the name of spotted lady's finger. Leaves might work on a salad.

Above, the bulrush that's growing near the bottom of the middle pond. On the left, 2 weeks ago , on the right as it was this morning. I was as bit further away with the camera at the beginning of the month, but nonetheless you can see that it's grown quite a bit. Below, the one on the pond margin, also doing well. I can't explain why I'm watching the progress of this particular plant so keenly. It apparently has many uses, according to the sort of blokes who like to go back to nature . I'm not growing it as a crop, though I will try the roots, just to see what they're like, if and when I've got lots growing. Maybe I can explain it. If these two plants grow, and seed the whole pond, and grow to their full height, they'll be a standout allotment feature. Just now, after a rather dry month, the pond is just a muddy hole in the ground, and that's probably how it's going to be for several months of every year. But it's doing its job, the Mi...

From a dozen or so comfrey plants last year, I've already got 100+ volunteers popping up all over the place, now edging the paths. On the left, newly transferred to the skinny brick path. On the right, these were planted alongside this year's potato bed by the main path over the last month or so. Sometimes, they die right back on transplantation, but come back within a couple of weeks. I hope to have all of the paths edged with comfrey by the end of this growing season, and next year it should be magnificent, 3-4ft high. The point is, path edges attract weeds, so it's best to get in first with something useful. And there's nothing more useful than comfrey. It can be cut back 3-4 times a year and the leaves used for turbo-charged compost or to go into a water barrel. It's on the paths, so will in the nature of things get trodden on or trundled over by the wheelbarrow: but that's fine, because it just grows back. Good bee plant, too.

The 2nd earlies are maris peer, a couple of bags from Lidl, sold as 'new potatoes' for, as far as I can recall, 59p a kilo. They were small, like regular seed potatoes. I put 5 rows of them, I think that was from 2 bags. This is how they were looking a couple of weeks ago. This morning I banked them up even higher, the word 'vertiginous' was running through my mind. They're in flower now, I expect they'll be ready to harvest in a few weeks.  They were planted on Good Friday, which was late March and seemed rather early - they took ages to show through the earth. But they've been successful, so maybe that was the right thing to do. This bed was adjoining the old currants and berries area. The bushes were going feral, falling over and rooting, and encroaching on the bed itself by several feet. The fruits were competing with a jungle of nettles. Now, apart from on the very fence, there's not a weed in sight. I'd planted comfrey near here last y...

I had a big ugly "bramble" in the old midden, near the SE corner. There were a number of "berries" amongst the original fruit bush area. I'd come across plants around the boundaries which I partially recognised from their leaves, and wondered, "Are these brambles or blackberries or raspberries or what are they?"  You know, sometimes my own numptiness astonishes me. I've at last, this morning, as drizzle keeps me and the dogs indoors, woken up to the wonderful possibilities of the genus Rubus. First of all, "bramble" according to Wikipedia is a generic term, usually referring to Rubus fruticosus, aka the blackberry. A year ago, I was in too much of a hurry to get everything cleared, taking a Year Zero mentality which I abandoned after a few months when the plot itself, kind of, pointed out its absurdity. But I do recall that, amongst the feral blackcurrants, nettles and thistles, there were both blackberries and raspberries. They ha...

That's 96 of the gorse seedlings pricked out into 4 plug trays with ordinary multipurpose compost. A few of them you can hardly see because they've obviously only just germinated in the last few days: that's worth noting. I sowed them in trays on 27th April , and reported a lot of them germinating 11 days later . But as I've learned this morning, some of them were germinating some 6 weeks after sowing. So, let's say, Ulex europaeus appears to germinate at temperatures around 20c in between 1 and 6 weeks. In the shallow trays I used, (recycled tin trays from supermarket ready-to-roast chickens), it wouldn't have been wise to leave them much longer than 6 weeks, as some of them had already impressive root systems, up to 6ins long. The plug trays I got from Tesco, 5 trays of 24 plugs. I filled them all this morning, but have only pricked out 50% of the seedlings, so will fill another 4 or 5 plugs. Even if I lose a few along the way, we're looking at 200ish...

We had a shower or two overnight: the grass was wet-ish when I went out first thing with the dogs, anyways. So first thing I did on arriving at the allotment was to check out the water barrels... ...and there you have it. Bone dry yesterday, a bit of water this morning. Admittedly, there's probably only enough to fill a thimble, if not an egg-cup, but it shows that the guttering is working. More showers forecast for the weekend. Pond still dry this morning.

Got into a working rhythm with this today. Rubble and earth and roots and God knows what else is piled up on what I was calling 'old greenhouse foundations', East of the path. That's where I first planted anything on the plot, borage and phacelia. It's a mixture of bricks and half bricks and bigger bits of concrete, which take a role in the skinny boundary path. Smaller rubble goes across the path into the New Potting Shed's foundations. There's a lot of earth mixed through it. Today is the first day I've used the riddle in earnest. One shovelful of earth/rubble is just right for the hand riddle you can see in the photo. Good abdominal exercise, if the whole plot is to get riddled eventually, I'll be swapping the beer belly for a six-pack. Really feel like I've gotten to know the plot's earth, doing this. For example, you can see in the riddle there's a great deal of "gravel", bits of stone about 1cm3. The riddled earth I...

A hardcore morning, quite literally. To the right, middle ground, you can see a pile of rubble that's accumulated over months. To the left, much lower down, the concrete base of old structures, at several levels. The task now is to move the rubble hardcore from the right to the left side. I'd estimate this was half done by the end of the morning. The plan is to get it level with the central path, supporting the shed. We've had no real heavy rain since I cleared this structure, and I need to see how the water's going to pool or to drain away at this point, which is a low-ish one. Any full or half bricks, or brick-sized bits of concrete went into the skinny path, which now extends the length of the Midwest bed. I was wondering this morning, when we get the next Google Earth image of the plot, will we be able to see the skinny path, a thin line just inside the boundary? 

Wood pigeons have done far more damage to the peas than the dogs. I don't recall them being a nuisance in previous allotments. I should have known, of course, having seen how fastidious my neighbours were about netting their crops. Heigh ho. Another example of how one can fail to acknowledge a potential hazard until punched in the face by it. The damage is so severe I got the idea this morning to turn over the whole of the Fabaceae bed, the SW bed, and sow it with clover for this year. I think today is the 1st anniversary of starting work on the plot. It feels like a significant decision: dig over and green manure the pea bed. I then went down to the other end of the plot, and thinned out the neeps, (aka swedes). They've had some attention from the wood pigeons, but have weathered it reasonably well. I've (at last) gotten around to rigging up a pigeon net: pigeon net over neeps. marigolds on path edge to the right, row of coriander to the left, currants and berries on...

If I'd bought a plant and it failed, I'd have to shrug and say "whatever". But plants that have been inherited by the plot have a degree of entitlement. Anyway, the two rhubarb plants, growing in adverse circumstances in containers when I took over last year. First I planted them early spring by the pond. They hated it there and put out no noticeable new growth. So I transplanted both of them to the temporary odds-and-sods bed. One of them, at least, seems to be appreciating the move already, putting out new growth.

It's just too hot. Like Jagger/Richards, "The sunshine bores the daylights out of me." I find the standard NW European discourse around weather: sunny & warm = good; cool/cold wet = bad, to be tedious in the extreme. If we all lived in tents, it might have something going for it, but even tents get fetid in warm weather, I've found. I can't explain it, but my spirits rise with the level of my pond. Much of the UK got heavy thunderstorms today, people injured in Co Antrim , but not a drop of rain has fallen on Glasgow, despite that high pressure feeling of irritation, reminiscent of Ulysses, which at least got the release of the downpour. This heat and the tooth aching pressure, like a sordid, dangerous love affair which never gets consummated. But I laid another few feet of the skinny path . I weeded round the NW corner, where the currant and berry bushes mostly are, discarding five of them that hadn't come back to life. Gorse will take their place, as...

One of the last of the loose bricks from the midden area. The skinny path, intended to mark off the beds from the hedgerow, and give access to me and a wheelbarrow, has some way to go, and no more bricks, so I need to give that some thought. Maybe a rough "gravel" from all the bits I'll have left over when I start riddling? I love these old bricks and wonder what they've been through and what they could say about the industrial past, and how they came to be in my allotment. This one, according to the best guess I can make synthesizing google hits, was made in Chester sometime between the 1930s and 50s. Presumably it had an industrial application. 

sow phacelia in West beds cut back weeds in NE corner; (I'm letting this go a bit wild this year, but don't want anything setting seed) cut back weeds in midden area weed NW boundary  weed all planted beds continue skinny path laying move rubble to shed foundation (if time)

A double line! The front row I put in early spring, currants and berry bushes from the NE edge. The back row, by the fence, the trees I got from the Secretary-formerly-known-as-Bee-Lady. Proper hedging trees: hazel, blackthorn, crab apple, dog rose and elder. There's roughly 1ft between the rows, and between each plant, but it's not too regular. Of course, this is entirely the wrong time of year to be planting bare root trees, but they had good root balls, and had been kept in water, and their foliage looked healthy enough. 15 plants, I watered them in with 4 gallons of tap-water, and then 1 gallon of comfrey tea. This is a significant moment in the hedgerow's history - not just a line of currant and berry bushes around the fence, it's a baby hedgerow, and will one day be roaring with life.  Last summer as I hacked back the nettles, I disturbed two birds' nests. I felt very bad about that. It's going to take several years, but one day the hedgerow will be...

The new Secretary, formerly known here as the Bee Lady, has mentioned several times that she has saplings for the hedgerow. We've at last arranged hand over of the same, 3 each of hazel, blackthorn, crab apple, dog rose and elder, which will fit nicely in the back row, along the NE boundary. Entirely wrong time of year, really, to be planting trees, but she tells me, although they were bare root, they've been earthed up over the winter, so should be ok.

That's the Mid- and North West beds dug over now. I've bought 50g of phacelia from Nuts 'n' Cones , and will sow that in the next week or so. Basically, I've got 5 or 6 rows of directly sown seeds in each bed, and the rest will have to be phacelia this year. The heavy clay in the bed, dug up from the pond and beneath the path in the winter, has dried out and broke up nicely. What with both the green manure to grown on it, and the horse manure to go into it, and the mixture of soils, it should be a wonderful growing medium next year. I should really have watered those rows of seeds today, but I've foolishly neglected to catch any rain, and I've ran out of water entirely as of this afternoon. I'll keep the gorse seeds going with water from the nearest tap, but that's over 100 yards away, not a reasonable distance back-and-forth with the watering can to water the whole plot. The pond is now completely dry for the first time ever. I worry for the Typha...

Of course, the essential in allotment infrastructure improvement will be the shed. There's plenty of hits about this in Google, but there's an awful lot of shite, pop up adds, and most annoying of all, (maybe irrationally) blogs of misspellings, emoticons, sprinkled throughout by lols. (Why do people think it's necessary to end every sentence with a lol; the intention seems to be to signal that a joke has been made, but for we older internet-users, lol meant, literally, "I just laughed out loud to that" so interspersing your blog post with lols paints a picture of someone sitting at their keyboard, alone, laughing like an idiot at their own attempts at humour; ffs, stop it.) Nowhere can I find a really good, step by step guide to what to do. (There might be one on YouTube, but the first couple I looked at dragged me into watching ads, so I thought, "bugger this for a game of soldiers".) I did find three blog posts which, whilst not being complete guid...

Yesterday I banked up the 5 row of maris peer potatoes.  Apart from them, I've got a row of odds and sods of potatoes, 2 rows of desiree, and I've got 2 rows of king edwards still to go in. Blight or other calamities aside, there should be a massive crop altogether, and the 2nd earlies could be ready before the month's out. In terms of production, spuds are going to be an isolated success story. Not enough rain, too much dog. I underestimated the fundamental importance of a potting shed. Get things started early, and get them out into the ground when the frosts are past. Which means having a stove in the potting shed, keep the cold out in the early spring. And a poly-tunnel is not just about tomatoes, it too is vital in the early part of the growing season. Even the spud success story will be for nothing if I don't get the shed to store the spuds. The point is, I thought I'd be ready this spring. Now, as summer starts, and we're a few days away from the firs...

Hawthorn trees in Alexandra Park in glorious flower this afternoon.  With 240ft of boundary, the double row hedge needs 480 plants. Let's say 500. The rose seeds have gone the way of last year's hawthorn, and not germinated at all. Figs, ditto: I suspect the drying process has buggered up the seeds, and I'm keeping my eyes open for fresh figs in the supermarket. So far, I've got about 40 berries & currents, and less than 200 gorse - let's say 200 plants total, 40% of a hedgerow. So plenty of room for luck and imagination, yet.

Perhaps I wasn't at my blogging best yesterday . Actually, I was a bit flakey, having been digging in the sun for several hours, I think I had a touch of sunstroke. Anyhow, looking back , I planted the T latifolia on 03/03/16.  So that's nearly 3 months it's taken it to come into its own, and there was a high attrition rate, with 2 of the 7 plants I got through the post getting their shit together and beginning to grow. And here we have the photos, including Morrison's gardening glove for scale: planted at pond margin 3/3/16, and rarely submerged - have been watering it the last few days had been in a weighted plant pot with two others, now discarded. Plant pot moved deeper over recent weeks. Now planted at bottom of middle pond. Tip of leaf would be out of water in (unlikely) event pond became full now         I don't care about the typical British attitudes to weather, I've spent too long in hot countries for the sun worship bullshit. Now, I wi...

Both of the dogs are a bit off-colour, which you'd expect. They were in conditions, (you don't get told the details), which necessitated their rescue by the Scottish SPCA. They spent a month in kennels during which time they both had hysterectomies. And five days ago they came to live with us. So the poor wee pooches have been having quite a time of it. We all know that dogs eat grass, and its said to be a medicine for them. But here's something I learned today, they also eat comfrey. Here's the most mature plants after the dogs' visit this morning. They also had one of their play-fights in it. But it's comfrey, and will recover quickly enough. I was for cutting down this stand of it anyway.  And my decision to edge all of the paths with it is further validated.

This year, sans potting shed and/or a poly-tunnel, it has, of course, been all direct sowing. Today, the dogs discovered that they could run around the plot at will, and of course it was great fun to chase each other over the almost bare earth of the seed beds. Hmm. Two thoughts occurred. First, Sparky is, surely, half whippet. She can run almost twice as fast as her somewhat less crossbred staffordshire mother. Second, plants which germinated a few weeks ago, like the peas, don't take much hurt from being run over by dogs. Seeds which have not yet, or have only just, germinated, I'm not so sure. After moving some plants around the plot (see here , and here ), I weeded the currants and berries at the NE boundary, pulling up three big old currant bush stumps which had given up the ghost, and replacing them with bramble volunteers which had been growing by the pond/cherry tree area. I also replanted half a dozen comfrey volunteers along the main path edge.  And then I ha...

Of the 7 Typha latifolia I planted in early spring, 2 have thrived. 1 was in a pot with 2 others, which have died; (1 was missing this morning, presumably the fox had it). It has has been moved deeper through the pond levels, by me, as it's gotten bigger. This morning I transferred it to the mud at the bottom of the middle pond. Even if we got a couple of days steady rain, and the pond filled completely, it's big enough now at over 1ft, to be just above the water level. The other survivor is on the pond margin, at a point which is only under water by a couple of inches when the pond is full - so it hasn't been submerged for several weeks now. The Centre for Agriculture and Bio-science International has collated research on T latifolia here . We're told that "leaves are produced in the spring, flowering occurs in early to mid-summer, and major clonal growth in the autumn". My 2 are putting out leaves now, so they're on course to flower, and thereby...

I took the rhubarbx2, lavender and rosemary from their spots by the pond, where they are not thriving, and replanted them in the anything-goes, odds-and-sods bed, just north of the shed site. I've learned that none of those plants like a pond margin. I particularly hope the rhubarb pulls itself together, as its a legacy plant from the previous plot holder. Not that I expect any fruit this year, but I'd like to have them healthy and find permanent homes next year.