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...