Pig Sty Avenue

The bloomin' rain lasted until an hour before dusk today, so no chance of getting to the plot. Been a dry January, so no complaints. Gave me time to think about all that gravel which is left over in the hand riddle. For every spadeful, (and a spadeful = a hand riddle-full), there's enough gravel to fill a half-pint glass, or thereabouts. Was it always there in the soil?  I did a bit of research as the drizzle fell from a pale grey sky. Allotment research is a relief from what I was doing for "real" academic research for the doctorate, in that it's fine to yield to a temptation to wander off-topic. On one such detour, I learned that it is opined that adding sand to clay is a really counterproductive thing to do, and will result in concrete.  I also learned from the RHS the definition of "heavy clay"; (to summarize, if you can roll it into a ball, thence to a sausage, and, after giving it a rub, if it's shiny, that's heavy clay - no, really .)...

After the interlude caused by demolition and burning of the mad old shed, and turning over the 5th bed, it was back to the riddling-out of stones and glass this afternoon. I've now got a 3 riddle system, which might seem a little OTT, but it works well. First comes the big riddle , which gets out the bigger bits of rubble, and glass shards bigger than a credit card. It also gets out perennial weed roots.  Then the intermediate riddle. This is a wire grid with smaller mesh than the big riddle, just the right size to lay over the top of my builder's barrow. This gets everything but gravel - that is stones, say, the size of a pea or bean, - and glass as big as thumbnails.  Finally, the hand riddle, which lets through only stones small enough to call grit, and, so it appears, no harmful glass at all.  I'm using the Rubik's cube analogy because the process entails a lot of moving around the plot with two barrows and a shovel, having places to put heaps of earth at vari...

Et... voila! Photo taken from the top of the allotment, at the S end. That's the 5th bed to the right of the path. Roughly dug over, and frankly the iPhone camera is being quite kind to it, because I think it looks much better than the reality, where you can see that even on the surface, there's a lot of unwanted matter in the soil: wood, stones, bits of plastic. And of course, broken glass. To the left, in loose stacks, some of the bricks and bigger bits of concrete. I also got 4 or maybe 5 barrows full of rubble - mostly brick fragmentsand glass. That's gone into the French (or rubble) drain which runs beneath the route of the skinny path on the edge of no. 2 & 3 beds, (and then across no. 3 to the pond). I'm taking a few days off - that digging-out of all those bricks was bloody hard graft. And then back to riddling-out all the smaller stones and bits of bloody glass.

Abeliophyllum distichum in winter This is the tree I took the cuttings from, assuming it was a willow, and planted as willow whips a month or so ago. I can only assume, now, that I thought it was a willow because its structure resembles, (but not that closely, when you look with an uncluttered mind), a weeping willow. It's said here , that Abeliophyllum distichum " can be cut and brought inside in early spring for forcing in vases", and I can attest to that, because this plant is indeed A. distichum, also known as white forsythia, (it's closely related, but not a true forsythia).  And during Xmas week, as I was planting the "willow whips" I had a Proust like recollection of willow in vases in my primary school, growing catkins. So I brought half a dozen home, and put them in a vase. Sure enough, they were successfully forced thereby, and began to grow leaves and buds, now flowering.  Except that, it hit me a couple of days ago, these aren...

Imagine there's an exam in allotmenteering you could take. At the simplest level, you would have some elementary horticultural questions: differentiate between peas and potatoes from their foliage, say. A trained examiner with a clipboard would watch you digging and raking, pushing a barrow-full of oomska around an obstacle course, and make an assessment of your ability. If anyone suggested I take such an exam, I'd respond with what I can only describe as a scornful guffaw. Gardening is my hobby. I've been doing it on-and-off since childhood. Sod off. Learning to play the piano is a hobby, too. Admittedly, there aren't too many parallels between the 2 activities, but they have this in common: I do them in my free time, with no thought of reward or praise or anything else but enjoying the doing of them, and aware that doing them is part of a process. By that I mean, the allotment will look different and be more productive, some years from now; and my piano playing ...

Six rows of garlic were planted during the 2nd week of October 2016. I regret to say that I didn't make a note or blog post to record when they germinated, but from memory it was approximately 4-6 weeks later. 3 rows of softneck Picardy Wight to the left, and 3 of Carcassonne Wight to the right. The Picardy were first to appear, couple of weeks earlier than the Carcassonne, and are now about twice the height of the hardnecks. There's a (North American) discussion of the difference between hard- and softnecks here . Essentially, softnecks produce more cloves and store longer, but are more difficult to peel. This last point I don't take lightly: I love garlic, but find peeling it the most tedious possible job the kitchen can offer. (Cooking for myself alone, I don't bother; but family and friends don't like the skins, I've found.) There's something magical about garlic. We associate it with the Mediterranean, where of course it's a staple of most...

Well, it's kind of a year old. The first inundated panic driven hole in the ground was dug in December 2015.  It was taking shape early last January . And it was assuming it's current shape before the end of that month. During a lot of the intervening year, the levels have been much lower. 48 hours of steady rain will fill it. But from full, it takes about 2 weeks of drought to drain - but even after that there'll be wet sediment in each of the 3 main ponds. That happened once all year, back in May. Most of the time, the 3 ponds are spearate, each of them maybe 1ft deep. There's a 4th, very small, pond at the SE end, (top left corner in photo. In the photo above the water is as high as it's been since last winter. It gets no higher than this, because of the overflow into the Council drain, (at the red marker in the very forefront of the photo) is set to this level. I'm curious to see how it's flora will do next Spring when the level drops again. Fo...

A clockwise rotation. Next year, 2018 that is, peas will follow onions and roots; eventually, some years from now, chickens will follow potatoes. This year, beds 2 & 5 will be green manures, give me time and space to get on with riddling.

During the 1st few days of 2017 I made a start on the 5th bed. One of the things I love about an allotment: it's mutability. This area was somewhat wasted with the misplaced shed, an earth path around it, weeds and rubbish. But clear the shed and rubbish, dig it over, and it's transformed into a bed for growing things. Kind of. This is going to take some work. So far, I've dug over about 75% of it. I've got 40 full wall bricks out of it, and a barrow-full of rubble, but it wants riddling before I could plant anything except a green manure. For example, the corner by the gate, 2 or 3 sq yards, is full of what I'm guessing is crumbled tarmac. Of course, I take out what rubble (and of course the ubiquitous, bastarding broken glass) I can by hand, but an awful lot will have been left behind.