All Allotmenteers, Please Take Note...


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 the shed hard-core. 

Anyway, that's the 'old greenhouse foundations' in the photo, (better call this area now, the old greenhouse floor, because I'm pretty sure now that's what it was).

I'm about a yard into it (where the spade is), so maybe 7ft to go (the SE corner of the area is marked by that black 10 gallon drum). But it will be much easier now that I've gotten all the heavy weed-entangled rubbish off of the top of it.

Tell you what else I'm looking forward to: the day when all of this earth movement is over, and I can give all the paths a bloody good scrub with a yard broom. The area in the foreground of this photo could actually be a rather quaintly pleasing patchwork of bricks and other materials, but it's all mud-covered now.

Another thought occurred today: where in the name of all that's holy did all this rubble come from? I mean, whole bricks are there for structures and paths; pebbles will find their way up from the subsoil. But bits of broken brick and concrete fragments in these quantities? 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Leech or flatworm? Ants and Swiss Chard

Image
For the 2nd time in a week or so, (1st time regarding dwarf beans ), I'm following Alys Fowler's advice, this time with regard to Swiss chard .  Long story short, after midsummer plants which often bolt if planted in spring will resist the impulse to do so, probably because of shortening days; (I say shortening, but in Glasgow, in July, we're still getting 18 hours of daylight).   I got a packet of Bright Lights , at a good price, (another reason to wait until July before sowing, lots of bargains, I've noticed). But where to sow them? Most of the 2nd bed is under a tarpaulin, but it wasn't quite big enough to cover the whole bed, so the last 5ft or so went under a sheet of plastic, (in the background of the photo in this post, here .) Transparent plastic was a foolish idea, weeds were growing underneath it, so I covered most of it with sheets of metal from the old shed. I decided to leave the tarp, but use the area beneath the plastic for the chard. Who-ah there...
Read more

"Chevy Chase. Fuck ever happen to him?"

Image
As Paulie Walnuts said in The Sopranos. It got me thinking. As it happens, he's been working steadily , but you can see what Paulie means. It's like that with film and television actors: you don't see them in anything for a year or two, and you wonder if they're dead or perhaps on a lengthy charlie and booze session. Or maybe doing proper acting on the stage? Only appearing on the telly gives them meaning to us. That video with Paul Simon was on one of the cable music channels the other day. It always makes me smile. As for Paulie and the rest of the crew, the clock's ticking. Of course, America already knows how things finish, but we don't. My mate Ian was telling me about a friend of his, visiting the States a few weeks ago, flicking through the channels in his hotel bedroom, he hit on a repeat of THE final episode, just beginning. What a quandry! He watched it, as it goes, but kept shtum when he came home.
Read more

How many pallets can you fit in the back of a Fiat 500?

Image
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.
Read more