Pig Sty Avenue

Cleo assumed this position at the allotment gate the second we arrived: none of her usual sniffing around. Hates bad weather, that dog. So I didn't hang around. There was a new bag from the florist, approx 10kg of green material. I dumped that by the heap, not taking the time to turn it over and mix in the new stuff. There was also a large amount of kitchen waste - a bag of split peas past their sell-by date, and a bag of frozen peas which had been pressed into service as a cold compress, plus the usual teabags and turnip peelings. But the headline news is in the photo below: ambient temperature 3C, (on a thermometer nearby) and the compost thermometer showing 15C. Still a long way to go: I've read that with regular turning a heap can get to 50 or 60C, (though I've never seen that myself), so maybe it's on the way. I was turning it every other day, but this week have left it alone since Tuesday. I'll turn it again with the new material over the weekend. ...

...I've noticed people's eyes glaze over when I try telling them about it face-to-face. What's wrong with them? This is fascinating stuff! To recap, there's been a compost heap in the far NE corner for 18 months or so now, nothing new added to it since the summer. I'm resisting the temptation to tidy that up and put what must now be fully degraded compost onto one of the beds because that corner will be a winter refuge for frogs and invertebrates. Nearby, I started another heap, between the fence and the pond. The reason for the location was that I'd noticed when I was away in 2016 that that area got heavily weed infested, not to say jungle-y, and one way of scuppering weeds is to make their corner of the plot into a work area, in a "these boots were made for weeding" kind of way . This heap was made up mostly of the florists offcuts, and guinea pig litter, which seems to have led to a really good C: N ratio because it composted really quickl...

  A very, very brief search has given me the refs below for initial reading. I'm starting with the grammar and pragmatics. Haven't even tried to search, yet, for CDA angles. Aikhenvald, A.Y., 2013. Imperatives and commands (Back Pages; Appendix: Imperatives and commands: how to know more: a checklist for fieldworkers), Oxford: Oxford University. Press. Anderson, J.M., 2007. The grammar of names . Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davies, E.E., 1986. English vocatives: A look at their function and form. Studia Anglistica Posnaniensia , 19 , pp.91-106. Downing, B.T., 1969. Vocatives and third‐person imperatives in English. Paper in Linguistics , 1(3), pp.570–592.  Formentelli, M., 2007. The vocative mate in contemporary English: A corpus based study. Language resources and linguistic theory. Milan: Franco Angeli , pp.180-99. Zanuttini, R., Pak, M. and Portner, P., 2012. A syntactic analysis of interpretive restrictions on imperative, promissi...

I visit the allotment most days, with the dogs. I take down the tattie peelings, tea bags and eggshells for compost. And deal with any bags of florist's off-cuts - I've been laying them on to the SE quarter of the bed as a mulch, together with the guinea pig bedding: You can see it on the left of the photo, with the riddled area, sown with WFBs, to the right. As a method of weed control, it seems to be working, in as much as raking a section clear reveals good loamy earth beneath. That whole area is thickly mulched now, down away to the left, (north), past the area of old greenhouse foundations.

Von Engeln, O.D., 1914. Effects of continental glaciation on agriculture. Part I. Bulletin of the American Geographical Society , 46 (4), pp.241-264. Von Engeln, O.D., 1914. Effects of Continental Glaciation on Agriculture. Part II. Bulletin of the American Geographical Society , 46 (5), pp.336-355.

It's amazing how quickly the weeds appear, even towards the end of the season.

Maybe I should call it, now, the Old Shed Bed? Above, a photo taken in May 2016, when I decided it really had to go . Since then, I have learned to my cost that it was sited there probably because one of my plot-holding predecessors decided the ground there, being full of clinker from a coke fire or blast-furnace was ungardenable. Well, look on my works, ye predecessors, and despair. It took the entire 2017 growing season, the plots' 100th birthday, but it was done: from ungardenable to a marvellous tilth, now sown with winter field beans and over-layered with a thick coating of oomska. Even as I type this, anecic and endogeic earthworms are packing their bags and heading for this delightful new location to hob-nob with their epigeic cousins, the bloodworms, who have themselves recently arrived with the oomska. Like most new migrants, they'll work hard and procreate prodigiously.

Another hour or so today, and here we are, almost done. Probably 5-6 barrows full left in the heap of riddled earth (see photo below) to go back in, and that should be just about right. I know it has no structure, but the tilth, man, the tilth! It's absolutely lovely clay loam. Which is marvellous: it means the whole plot will be good clay loam in due course - in fact most of it is now, if a little heavy on rubble and glass, and there are also areas with more clay, for example where there's spoil from the excavated path and pond.

The Picardy wight got finished off quite quickly, I gave a lot of it away to colleagues and family. The Carcassonne got harvested a little later. And that's how much we've got left. Watching BBC Gardeners' World I got a good tip, (like all the best ones, bleedin' obvious, when you stop to think...) plant only the biggest fattest cloves, and natural selection would suggest you get big fat bulbs next year. We shall see. I notice that ALL of the retailers of this variety refer to it as having "pink covered cloves" but, as you can see, that is not the case. Hardneck varieties like this are said to store less well than softnecks, but this has kept well on a sunny windowsill in the study since harvesting in early July. In the photo you can see 70-odd fat cloves ready to be planted in the next few days. At the back, a dish full of the smaller bulbs and cloves, which should keep us going into the winter. This is the last bit of planting this year. Once done, I...

This last week I've been mostly re-filling the bastard trench. The earth was stacked up high at the end, so there's also been quite a lot of raking to level it. I've been infilling it with earth I got from the "old greenhouse area", also riddled, (a lot of it hand riddled, really fine). It's, technically, I know, not true bastard trenching, and I could use a stronger adverbial, given how much work it's been. 16sq yards or so of ground - less than a 10th of the plot's growing space. I've given over almost an entire bloody growing season to it. Which, objectively, is excessive, and has meant other jobs have been left to one side. All that time has produced those spit-deep 16 yards, and I must say, it looks and feels beautiful as I rake it: lovely clay loam, where before there was a rotten auld shed standing on a bed of clinker, stones and glass, with compacted ground and weeds. Maybe I didn't need to dig down and riddle to a whole spit's ...

Bit of an unintentional tilt on that photo there, I was probably a bit shaky after moving the shed floor from the Southern boundary where it's been propped against the fence since March, to its intended berth under the ash tree, because it's bloody heavy and awkward to move. I was reminded of the way large sheets of metal, maybe 25mm thick, would wobble as they were hoisted by a crane around a shipyard, appearing deceptively delicate.  I dragged it on its edge down the path, a few inches at a time, after manoeuvring it out from the fence, perilously close to the still active wasps' nest. It needs levelled up - the rubble base is uneven.  Nontheless, this feels like a significant moment. This area under the tree was a kind-of raised bed for the predecessor, his last crop, onions, were growing there when I took over, and we had them with our Christmas dinner in 2015.  The soil was awful, full of stones and glass. I removed the mortar-less wall of the bed. I excavated...

Socket: 40x43x32mm Ordered a new handle. Essential kit for every permaculturist.  

Plastic sheet removed at 6.30, without drama. Returned with dogs at lunchtime. It appears that the nest is inside the manure heap, and there are multiple entrances. I know I'm being very subjective, but the wasps have a forlorn aspect to them. I didn't want to take any liberties, though. When I finished taking this video, Cleo joined Sparky on the heap, and they chose that spot, of the entire allotment to have a play-fight. At that moment it began to rain, so it felt like a good time to retreat. Hopefully, the plastic sheet covering gone, any rain will hasten the nest's demise.

Another lovely autumn afternoon, sunny, but thick black clouds intermittently passing overhead, shedding only a few drops of rain, and then the sun again. Here's how the area I was working today looked back in March. That's the manure heap covered in an orange plastic sheet in the background. Since March, it's sunken to half that height, and accumulated a lot of bits and pieces as I've worked: the shed's roof timbers, a lot of bricks dug up during the year of more digging. I cleared away all of these odds and ends, lastly the bricks holding the plastic sheet down onto the heap. The activity seemed to communicate itself to the wasps, and I was glad to finish and leave. Maybe it was my imagination, but activity at the entrance to the nest began to increase.  I read somewhere that autumn brings a whole load of crazy shit to a wasps' nest. The queen leaves to hibernate elsewhere, and, leaderless, the wasps turn to fermented fruit and cannibalism to pass the ...

Yesterday afternoon was really pleasant, something about the air in autumn casts me back 30-odd years to the start of the new University year, youth blooming through regardless of the season. I wound up the hosepipe and put it on top of the arbour. Collated and rolled up the inherited bird nets, (including the fish nets: would a dunnock get through that gauge?). All bits of rope collected up and stashed. So: safe for dogs, nothing to play tug-o-war with? Hmm. There's a plastic sheet over the heap of riddled earth... And then I realised: the wasps' nest is between another plastic sheet and the dunghill. It's quite clear that the dogs would love to drag the sheet away, and thereby get into an unlooked-for show-down with the wasps. Professor Google suggests that the wasp queen will have, winged her way to find a hibernation spot. (I found one last winter when I demolished the old shed - thought, 'that's a bloody big wasp!'). But the rest of them will hang aroun...

The SE quarter consisted of the site of a defunct shed, a midden, and the base of an old greenhouse. There's a patch maybe 9sq yards which may once have been cultivated but was weeds when I took over, and I used it to keep flammable rubbish pending bonfires - and it saw several of them. The former shed's site has now been riddled down to a depth of 1ft, and boy did it need it. I suspect the shed was there because the ground beneath was more slag or clinker than it was earth. It took me all of this year's growing season, but it's done: all good topsoil, albeit without structure, for the time being. That area makes up about a quarter of that SW quarter. I planned to riddle it all, but that would involve struggling on through the winter, and giving up all of next year too, and maybe not being finished by end of 2018, for goodness' sakes. And the more I read and thought about the soil and permaculture, the more unnecessary and even barmy this toil began to seem. T...

Half a dozen barrows-full of hedge trimmings, and a few bags from the florist, were piled up on the area to be riddled. I had another couple of bags from the florist, too. That whole bed, formerly the 5th bed, is thick with weeds, poppy and borage and comfrey, just to name the volunteers. I chopped them down, and then spread out the heap and other florist's green material over the bed as a mulch. Plenty of organic matter, but it will kill off the weeds and make them easier to deal with as I dig and riddle my way through this stretch... Which is, frankly, becoming a thought. And think I did this evening. At the rate I'm going,  - held up by wet weather, paid work and domesticity, - it's going to take months, years, to go through the entire top-soil of this stretch and get out all of the glass. The point is, to keep the dogs from cutting their paws. Otherwise, I can cope with some glass in the ground, picking it out bit-by-bit as I garden there, especially if I'm diggi...

When I get started with a yard-square bed rotation system, it's going to get complicated, and I'm going to have to keep records - here, I suppose. So I've got a colour coded system. Ten families should cover all but the most exotic alloment needs, eh?

Carrots and French beans sowed in the top NW corner were a complete failure thanks to the birds. The lesson there: nets. But that's another story. I went to work on that corner, trimming the hedgerow, mostly bramble in that stretch. A sucker had grown a few feet into the bed, and it was perfect for filling a gap. Brambles in the hedge have caused head-shaking and a sharp intake of breath from a gardening relative. I get why, but the point is, it's worth the extra work: digging up suckers, pushing back the canes into the hedgerow, tying them to the fence... All the fruit, the nesting for birds and goodness knows what other wildlife, and a barrier impenetrable to humans. I pulled weeds from the hedgerow, not being too fussy as it IS a hedgerow, not a prissy garden hedge, and needs must look after itself. I also dug up the ill-advised skinny brick path. The weeds I threw onto the bed, not even hoeing it, though I dug out the docks and comfrey. Where the brick path was, is now ju...

Over 100 beds! Each will be 1 yard square. The colours here are random, but I'll need to work out a system to show plant species. The squares could contain annuals or perennials, or biennials for seeds. The possibilities for variations of colour and plant height are almost limitless. A square yard could be transplanted, or hoed out, or left with mulch for a year. For annuals, I'd grow, say, 9 potatoes to the yard, or 12 turnips, or 4 beans, or 1 cardoon... Imagine how it will look on google earth! I could be growing 120 varieties at any time - though more realistically 70 or so. Oomska and compost would fit in - taking up a yard for a small heap, 4 for a big one. It's a fan-bloody-tastic idea.

The first time I saw this video, I thought, she's kidding isn't she? Barefoot, digging, in Australia! All those snakes and funnel-web spiders and bloody hell! I won't be going barefoot in Riddrie very often, but I have started to use gloves less, enjoying getting my hands in the earth. As I've been digging out the spuds, I've noticed how dark and loamy the earth is looking, how big and fat the worms. This was the view yesterday, looking South up the slope. Bulrushes foreground, and there are two more little-uns have sprang up in the last couple of weeks; behind them the yellow flowers of the unplanned tansy, and behind them again heaps of beanstalks. To the right, the netted chard, and the blue tarp with I-don't-know-what beneath it, (and I-don't-know-when it's going to get lifted, either... in time to be sown with winter field beans, anyway). It's all still very weedy, but I'm getting more sanguine about this. With no-dig, lots of mulch...

Actually, I don't want any more beans. I've got a lot of beans. Look: That's my winter field bean harvest, with gloves to show scale. Most of the pods have four beans in them. Not quite a hill of beans, but, you know. Should be more than enough to fill 4/5ths of plot this winter, putting N in the soil, and all kinds of goodies drawn up from the subsoil to go into the topsoil when I hoe them down in spring and leave on surface as mulch.

Also yesterday evening I got the tape measure out. The pond is actually 18x10ft. And the rubble for the shed base is 12x10ft. The above plan reflects this, and I've shown the old 4th bed area in purple, site of the proposed florist off-cuts mulching.

With a lot of water still in the riddling trench, I spent a couple of hours yesterday beginning the WFB harvest. Not a day too soon. The pods have almost all turned black and the beans inside are almost dry. But some have decomposed enough for the beans to fall out, or maybe they've been pecked open by birds. I hope the latter, because I don't want another crop of field beans in that area, following straight on from this year's. I cleared about 8sq yards, 1/3 of the bed, or thereabouts, half-filling the big old fish-box. By the time I'm done, there'll be several kilos of beans. These will be sowed throughout the plot, firstly in the newly riddled earth in the long bed, which badly wants structure. As last year, I'll scatter on plenty of them, and then cover with a couple of inches of oomska, so that's killing several birds with one stone, and that soil should be good to go next spring. Which left me wondering: what to do with the old 4th bed, now the nor...

One of the great things about an allotment is the way it fights one's ordered mind. I had planned 5 beds of roughly equal size. The reality is 4 beds of different sizes. The previous system was designed so that I could literally rotate crops, (clockwise, for goodness sakes!) around the plot. One needs more subtlety. I'll be thinking from hereon in about patches rather than beds. So long as I mark (and blog), say, where a tattie patch is, then I know not to plant tatties or tomatoes there for 3 or 4 years. Bottom left of the plan is the long bed, currently about 20% riddled. The white rectangle is the poly-tunnel, but that is going to be moved every year, (counting as tomatoes/tatties in the rotation). The shadowy ovals are the shadows cast by the cherry trees (bottom right-ish) and ash tree, (top left-ish). The purple-ish oval is the pond, (maybe not to scale, I haven't measured it). The dark red areas are paths, the skinny paths will all be removed except for the on...

As plants and animals move from continent to continent, so do language speakers. Ideas can move across academic disciplines, too. So can people. Whilst researching English language education and assessment, Bonfiglio (2010) kept inserting himself in my thinking, (even though that work was only peripherally relevant to the specific area of research, language examinations for New Scots).    Native, natural, nationalism: just three etymological siblings in a large family. And during the Trump campaign in 2016, I encounter the concept of nativism, nicely defined by Huber et al (2008) as " the practice of assigning values to real or imagined differences, in order to justify the superiority of the native, to the benefit of the native and at the expense of the non- native, thereby defending the native’s right to dominance."  The nativist critical framework is not confined to the US: see for example Smith, 2016. Until recently I would have said I wanted a garden or allo...

Arrived last night to find the riddling trench waterlogged. Which was not surprising after Monday's rain. The pond is half full - the deepest it's been since last winter. A serious bout of riddling being out of the question, I turned two of the compost heaps, (there are three now: the old one in the NE corner, un-turnable due to its proximity to a wasps' nest; the main compost heap nearby, and a new one on a still-to-be riddled stretch of the long bed, (formerly the 5th bed). Then I trimmed the tops of all plants in the hedgerow along the N and W sides. This was the first time in a while that I've had a look at the hedgerow. It made my heart glad to see how well it's doing. The gorse are at least 1ft high, some of them nearly 2ft. Other plants such as elder are belly-high. Overall, median height I'd guess is 2ft - about twice as high as I expected. At this rate, it could have its first bird nests next spring. One question now is, do I weed and mulch it this...

Eighty-something gorse, and a dozen or so brambles. Three of the figs - abandoned in their module tray - turned out to have survived. When I was working at Greenwich University last summer, I uprooted several tiny holly volunteers, and brought them home in coffee cups and some SW London earth. I potted them on earlier this year. Three of them have taken root. They, and the figs, will go in the ground a year or so from now, maybe winter 2018/19. The gorse and brambles will be planted some time this coming winter. They'll be joined by a row of white forsythia, referred to here . I put them across the west bed when I was still bothered about dividing the plot into five beds of equal size. AND to help there with drainage, but between the rubble and french drains, and the hedgerow, I don't think they're required for that now. So they will join the hedgerow, too. All of which means, the hedgerow is a done deal, and 100% decommodified. I will probably grow another hundred o...

Skinny brick paths were a mistake. They get weed infested, and weeding them involves lifting bricks, much more difficult than going at them by hand or with the hoe. I'll lift them all this autumn, and use them to make a hard standing area in front of the shed. Earth paths thereafter - organic in a metaphorical sense, much easier to weed. The classification of five beds, I don't know if that's not somewhat style-cramping. I could rather have just one big long bed down East side, from the gate to the pond. A little bed to the SW, between the SW boundary and the shed. A medium sized bed from the shed down to the NW corner, interrupted by the brick path which covers the rubble drain.  See, I want flexibility because I want to include the polytunnel and eventually the chickens in the crop rotation.  The polytunnel I'm going to build myself with scaffold tubes, 50mm MDPE pipe , polythene, duct tape and cable ties. It's part of decommodifying the process of allotment ...

Weeds have grown on the unriddled section of the 5th bed. There's a patch of borage and poppy which I'm happy to leave for now, but the rest were real weeds, which needed dealt with before they went to seed. So I set about them with the billhook. More satisfying than a punchbag in a gym, by far. Then to a more peaceful pursuit. When I potted on the gorse plants from modules, I put a dozen or so into the heavy plastic fish basket, and the rest near the edge of the 4th bed, where they've since been overwhelmed by the comfrey on one side, the field beans on the other. The comfrey I want for compost, and the seed pods on the field beans are at last beginning to dry-out and blacken, ready to harvest. So the gorse needs moved out of the way. I weeded each pot, and chopped the tips off each gorse plant. The tips are new and soft, which made me wonder, are they food for deer?  If that's so, trimming the tips would be part and parcel of how they grow in nature. I got a dozen...

Patience! I get a bit narked, sometimes, - well, jealous really, - when I read my fellow allotmenteers' tweets about the lovely things they've harvested this day , often with a photo of washed vegetables in a nice wee trug. They rarely mention the bloody weeding. Two years in, and I still feel like a Roman General, subduing the local population so that he can tax the buggers, and make their descendants learn Latin and take regular baths. It's not that I'm not winning. Look at how it was 20 months ago , most of the northern end of the plot under water; I'm still very proud of the drainage works I undertook back then, which have been a great success. But there are still serious flaws. Apart from the glass and riddling situation, which is holding everything else back, there's the constant threat of weeds getting the upper hand. And what planting I do manage to do is frequently destroyed by wood-pigeons, because I haven't yet got a good system of bird-proof ...

Was kept away from the plot through work and weather for a week, but got there yesterday evening to find three bags of guinea pig bedding, (mostly straw and saw dust) and a bag of florist's off-cuts waiting for me. I put these with the compost, and buried them as I turned them, so the new stuff is on the bottom.  Assuming that the guinea pigs and the florist continue as they have been, I'm going to have plenty of compost in due course, though I'll need to keep it turned to speed it up, else I'll have more compost heaps than I'll have room for. Also noticed a lot of creeping buttercups, Ranunculus repens. Briefly, I hoped they might be beneficial weeds like comfrey or plantain. Alas, no, as this paper explains, (links to a pdf download) , it really is a weed, with no discernible benefits except to pollinators, is a bugger to get rid of, and an invader of damp ground. I really need to get on top of this weed situation, and plan to get busy with the hoe and the burni...

As I riddle my way north through the 5th bed, far more slowly than a snail or a glacier, I keep wondering if I've yet gotten past what was the floor of the old shed. My reasoning is, the Predecessor probably sited the shed on a place where the earth was inhospitable to cultivation - that is, where it was filled with old clinkers. Maybe, just maybe, beyond that is soil which was once cultivated, and will therefore be less stony, and easier to riddle. Above we have a satellite image of the plot taken just before I started to work it, back in spring 2015. And the technology tells me that the (now defunct) shed's north edge was 3.6m from the boundary fence. So I'll check the distances when I next get to plot, in respect of which the weather, work, and family commitments all congregating to keep me away. Riddling 5th bed now looks likely to last up to Christmas or even beyond. But I'm still on course to have fully functional allotment next year: all beds cultivated, s...

I was fretting somewhat back in March about this genus, and worried that its absence meant my allotment mycorrhizae were not thriving. Which was of course baloney, as you can see, I have this fine plant, and several other specimens around the place. It's a weed to be tolerated, given its hyphal nutrient bridging abilities. The fact is with plants, if they're common and have unspectacular flowers, they just don't get noticed per se, beyond a vague notion of "I need to hoe these weeds". But this one's been noticed, now, and I'm going to gather seeds from it and deploy it as a companion plant next year.

There isn't a vast body of literature on my foolishly stamped on but new best friend, T. subviridis. Gray (1922) caught my eye for several reasons. It refers to the finding of the leech in an allotment, in South Shields, of all places. This would appear to be the most northerly example at that time. The allotment exhibits similarities to mine: "As there is no drainage system, the land has been trenched to the depth of one and a half spits, and a well sunk in the clay in one corner, into which an endeavour is made to collect water in winter", though my endeavours at drainage have been more successful with the Council's drain operating as an overflow to my pond, also "sunk in the clay".   A population was studied in a stream in Bristol by Hartley (1962). The stream was subject to sewage contamination, and this chimed with the allotment in Gray, which was treated with "night soil". (I can say that in 1922 most houses in south Tyneside did not have f...

The problem with tweeting about one's allotment adventures in an hour or so after they occur, is that if you've made a proper Charlie of yourself, for example by crushing a blameless leech beneath your Dr Marten's boot, you're revealed to the entire twitter-sphere - in particular your fellow allotment tweeters - as the aforesaid proper Charlie. This afternoon, with a combined sense of contrition and curiosity, I've been researching this whole flatworm and leech business. It's now pretty clear to me that this was a leech, more of which in a moment. But I have learned this about flatworms, there's no evidence that they are causing damage to earthworm populations in the UK. Fear of them appears to be another aspect of the hysteria regarding almost any "invasive" and "non-native" species. Grey squirrels and their persecutors are perhaps the sharpest example of the phenomenon in the UK . A whole host of beasts prey on earthworms in ad...

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...

That's neeps at the back, beans to the left, carrots to the right. Don't know why I've broadcast the seeds in this way, rather than rows. Something to do with making it more creative, but I'm still just mixing the paints and cleaning the canvas. Planted all in rows, like soldiers on parade, might have its place but shouldn't be the norm. Several times as I hoed and raked the ground, getting up the weeds, spreading the oomska around, I thought: if anyone thinks no-dig is a lazy option, forget about it. All of that hoeing, particularly, is bloomin' hard work. This is it, though, I've started no dig. There were some stones and glass, but I got them out fine with the hoe. It was forecast to rain in the later afternoon, and right on cue, about 5pm, it started. Which was absolutely perfect to water-in the seeds.  By then I'd finished the sowing, and was filling the comfrey-liquid barrel with water from the allotment tap, with a 10 gallon container and a...

The 3rd bed, (the bed formerly known as the NW bed), has become a miniature allotment in its own right this year, as I'm so invested in the resurrection of the 5th bed, and don't have time to cultivate the whole plot. There was a heap of oomska, now greatly diminished by usage. The garlic there has now been harvested. The tattie patch is thriving, in the southern third of the bed, and will continue to do so for another month or two, being planted in mid May. This afternoon, apart from working some more on the 5th bed, (which shows progress, albeit very slow), I'm going to hoe the other two thirds of the 3rd bed, incorporating what's left of last winter's oomska, and sow neeps, French beans, and carrots. I should mention (for my own future reference) that this was, theoretically last year's brassica bed, but that actually only involved 2 rows of neeps at the far N end, and so of course I won't be sowing this year's in that part of the bed. And I'm...

Lombardi et al (1997) found very high germination rates of T latifolia at a fluctuating 20-30C, with plenty of light. They suggest each cat-tail contains 1000s of seeds. If the anticipated invasion of the pond doesn't materialize next year, in the October I'll harvest a few and then sow their seeds in the poly tunnel the following spring. A few dozen plants should be enough. Eventually, I want the whole pond to be a solid mass of 8ft tall bulrushes. Lombardi, T., Fochetti, T., Bertacchi, A. and Onnis, A., 1997. Germination requirements in a population of Typha latifolia. Aquatic Botany , 56 (1), pp.1-10.

The area in between the pond and the Eastern boundary - about 6x12ft - has never been cultivated by me, and I don't think it's received much of anyone's attention, ever. Last year, mind, I was away during July, the whole plot was under siege from weeds, and that area in particular went "stark staring mad".  So this year I'm going to work that bit of ground. No corner of the plot should be neglected. I'm collecting plenty of compost material, getting the off-cuts from a florist, a neighbour's guinea pig bedding, our own kitchen waste, and of course waste material from the plot itself, such as the winter field beans. On top of that, there's a lot of comfrey, which I've already cut down and composted twice this year. An area 6x12ft is big enough to heap it all up and then turn it. I'm going to add my old compost heap, (in the far NE corner, where gorse is to be planted), but I'm waiting for some turnip seeds to ripen - they're grow...