Pig Sty Avenue

I don't like the term "green manure", it summons up an image of verdigris horse shit. And non-gardeners are completely scoobied by it, leading to tedious explanations. Cover crop it is, then, from here on in. It's essential this year to get the ground riddled, the shed and poly tunnel built. Trying to grow any actual produce this year, even tatties, would be counter productive: frankly it would just get in the way. (Not that I haven't agonised over this, in particular every time I go into the Tesco and pay good money for agro-industry reared vegetables). With a whole year to play with, I can experiment with a range of cover crops across the five beds. Sow them, chop or hoe them down, sow another one... Mostly, I'm for leaving them on the beds as mulch. This is preferable to the black plastic in many ways. In particular, the riddled soil will have had all of its mycorrhizal structures broken to pieces. Cover crops will re-establish them before I plant act...

Things have moved on a lot since a post last year when I blogged that the riddling would take a few weeks , [laughs hollowly].  Now, it's clear that getting all the stones and glass out by riddle will take at least up until the summer of this year. So here's how the riddling and the nae-dig work together. I have no choice but to riddle, because the ground is currently dangerously infested with broken glass. A beneficial side effect of getting rid of the glass is that I get rid of all but the smallest stones, thereby improving the till. But there's another side-effect, crucial in getting me started more quickly on the auld nae-dig. I have the usual suspects as perennial weeds: docks, nettles, ground elder, bindweed and mare's tails. The standard advice on removing these from the ground before starting a no-dig is to cover the ground in heavy plastic for a year. It would have to cover all 5 beds, about 100m2, and that would be expensive, (£1.29 per metre) . But even...

The nomenclature varies, depending on which side of the Atlantic you are, Americans saying "till" where we say "dig".  And a person or persons unknown, heedless of others using search engines, fixed on the wheeze of substituting "zero" for "no", (ffs). And there's confusion involving "shallow" and "minimal" too, because you may have to hoe the ground, (say, slicing through the top couple of inches), but that's still "no"-dig - I mean, you're hoeing, not digging. As for the hyphen, don't get me started. Wikipedia uses it, Dowding doesn't.  Well, then. On Pig Sty Avenue, being a Geordie Glaswegian blog, it's "nae-dig", (and notice the hyphen). But, just in case anyone is googling for the craic, I'll include all of the commonest terms, whenever I'm blogging about this, as labels. So, if you're leaning comfortably on your spade, we can begin...

I notice I started working on this area back in September , I got it clear then, and used it to pile up excess earth. That pile at last got cleared and has all now been through the big riddle. I lost count of how many barrows full it involved; a lot, anyhow. But now that it's clear, this morning I've rigged up a new improved version of the big riddle on the old greenhouse floor, and when Storm Doris has done her worst and moved on, I can at last get started riddling out the rubbish and glass infested no.5 bed. That will likely take up most of March. Already, following a few days of mild weather, the weeds are re-appearing. I get a bit stressed about this, but tell myself that 2017 just isn't going to be pretty. Dad said, when I first got started on this plot back in summer 2015, spend a year just getting rid of weeds. And that's what I should have done, but decided instead to plant a potato patch and a few rows of other crops, which got trampled by the dogs, or choked...

This is Bed No.1, this winter a workspace; (I fret somewhat about how trodden it is, but hope that digging and riddling will restore it). Right foreground, the finely riddled earth. Left of that is the 22 barrows full of horse manure, about 2 tons. That arrived on Saturday, 2 trailers full between 13 of us. It was offloaded at the far end of the allotments, so quite a bit of walking, heavy laden, about 3 hours non-stop. Behind the oomska, the woodpile. This has been there for some time now, providing a wild-life refuge over 2 winters. The plan is, this spring, to chop it into stove-sized lengths, and then pile it up beside the compost heap. It will be well and truly seasoned and ready to burn by the time I get the shed and the stove, sometime this year.

That's the corner of 5th Bed, just by the gate. The pallets I got from the old railway cutting, where rubbish is dumped; (though why anyone in Glasgow dumps rubbish is a mystery: just leave it outside the house, and the council pick it up). The blue one is bloody heavy, I had to go back with the barrow to get it. To the back there's a living privet shrub on the right, the others you can see are all dead. I'm hoping a compost heap next to decomposing wood will be good for invertebrates. To the right will go the woodpile. I thought at first it would be ok to leave this area unriddled, but after having a look have decided to move the pallets temporarily and riddle the ground here because, like everywhere else, there's plenty of broken glass, and I don't want that through the compost. So I'll start the process of riddling the beds here, and work my way through the 5th bed. I said I couldn't give any time estimates for the riddling, but mid-March would...

This is the big riddle as I left the other day - the cover is to keep any rain off the riddled earth, stop it clumping. The fish box is to catch stones and glass as I scrape it off the riddle. After this, it takes the medium riddle over the barrow to get the worst of the glass and smaller stones out. The advantage of putting it through the big riddle first is that I throw a shovel full of earth at it, and then gravity and momentum break up aggregated lumps. Just now, I'm half-way through the heap of surplus earth pile up in the old greenhouse area. It's taken much longer than I estimated back in October, (but then I have been diverted somewhat, demolishing and burning the old shed, and then ground-breaking the 5th bed). Estimating how long it's going to take from hereon in, I'm not even going to bother. But I'm not going to plant anything but green manures this year.

Actually, it hasn't rained that much in the last couple of weeks. The main brake on allotment attendance is all the glass, which debars the dogs. Sorry to whinge about it . But I have to share my free time, such as it is, between the allotment and the dog-walking. When all of the pigging glass has gone, I can combine dog-walks with allotment visits. So it's an almost Catch 22 situation. I will get the glass riddled out, but it's taking much longer than I would like.

This is what's left in a shovelful of earth at the end of the 3-riddle process, the bigger stones, glass shards and perennial weeds having already been extracted by riddles #1 & #2. So, that's about a tea cupful in a shovelful. My dilemma now is whether to bother with the hand riddling, which removes this last cupful. I'm wondering if there's any point, and indeed if this amount of gravel could actually benefit the soil. Gravel helps with drainage, which is a serious point in its favour. It helps break up heavy clay - and I do have some of that in the diggings from drainage works. There's an immediately pragmatic issue here. I need to get the really nasty glass out of the soil asap, so that the dogs can come back to the plot; (the little bits of glass you can see in the photo are unlikely to do any harm ). And, I would like to get it ready for planting by spring, of course. #3 riddling is by far the most time-consuming and laborious part of the process....