Pig Sty Avenue

The weather and domestic responsibilities keep me away from No. 5 Bed and its recovery. But I've had a bit of time to think about facilitating the recovery once the riddling's done. Mycorrhizae - always on my mind. I'm riddling every inch of the bed. What will that do to its structure? Reshuffle it, at least. But it should leave spores intact and ready to go(?).  I found a good overview of where-we-are-now with AMF here: (Berruti et al, 2015) . Armed with search terms like "host trap plant culture"  I was enabled to find Liu and Wang 2003 which suggests that white clover makes an excellent AMF host. I've got a big bag of Trifolium repens which I was planning to use as a cover crop on No. 5 Bed anyway. So that's beginning to look like an accidentally good idea...

I've advanced only a foot or so northwards, that's leftwards on this photo . The weed situation around my baby hedge has become scandalous, so I've had to put time into that; (though I'm not finished with it yet, a-job-begun-is-half-done and all that). I resumed work on the 5th bed yesterday for a few hours. I'm coming to the edge of what was formerly covered by the old shed. The side nearest the middle of the plot was a rough and ready potting shed, clay floor. Near the gate, an adjoining structure had two old doors as a floor, but they were badly rotted. Beneath that, a lot of industrial clinker mixed with soil. I suspect that this part was built on top of someone else's idea to lay a hard standing or work area with the clinker.  It could have come from a domestic coke fire, built up over years. The potting shed was added later, maybe by a different hand. The clay floor here is heavily compacted, of course, people have been standing on it for years. Ther...

I know photos of, basically, the ground, don't show much but let me take you through it. To the right is the gate and the path. I've put up a couple of sheets of tin as edging, (involved digging a narrow trench way down into the clay, bloody hard work). I did that because the path was a little low, and the bed was in danger of spilling out onto it. In the centre of the photo is riddled earth, from the 1st section (approx 7x7sq feet), but now spread across the 1st & 2nd sections, (so that's about 7x13sq feet).  The earth from section 1, by the dead shrubs at the top of the photo, contained a lot of industrial slag or clinker. The second section, nearer the central path, (which is the foreground of the photo), was mostly compacted clay topsoil. "Clay topsoil" is the greenish stuff which I've found in the largely uncultivated areas of the plot, for example under the path, and here under the old shed. It's topsoil clay to distinguish it from the rea...

Anything that exposes the earth, whether weeding or digging, brings me the company of Mrs Robinson; (I don't know if it is a female, but call it Mrs R anyway). She finds grubs in the disturbed ground I'd never spot with the naked eye. And she's very bold, hopping around inches from my hands when I'm weeding. I took this photo by the arbor, where I had idly turned over the earth to test out an old spade, and horrified to see a vast quantity of bindweed roots, which you can see gleaming white in the photo.

I'm relaxed about how things are going at the allotment, that's the whole point. But the state of the hedgerow does prey on my mind. Planting the gorse so early in its life was a blunder. For future reference, hedgerow trees and shrubs grown from seed need at least a year in a pot, growing to 1ft or so, before they're ready for planting out on the hedgerow line. But anyway, here's a 10ft section of the hedgerow, in the middle of the Eastern boundary, before and after weeding. The weeds consisted of ground elder, nettles, thistles, and a few mares' tails. After weeding we're left with gorse, (which was not thriving amongst the weeds), with brambles and suckers from the cherry tree's rootstock, (neither of which gave a shit about the weeds). The hedgerow on the western boundary, in particular, is getting choked by grass, and I really need to put a few hours aside to deal with that and save the gorse there.

Just raking it wasn't cutting the mustard. So I've divided the 5th bed into 12 sections, and will dig out each one to a spit's depth, riddle the spoil into the barrow, and then back into shallow trench. As you can see, I've started in the SE corner, by the gate. Since taking the photo, I've done 5 barrows-full, which I'm estimating is about 25-30% of this trench. 15-20mins per barrow-full. Which means I can do each trench in 6 hours, that's 3 allotment "days" of 2-3 hours. That's 72 days to do the whole bed. Blimey. I usually get there for 4 days a week, so that's 18 weeks, which takes us right up to the autumn. I can't see any way around this. The photo below shows a barrow full of riddled soil on the left, and the amount of rubble and glass I got whilst riddling it out on the left. And this is just the medium riddle, so there's still a lot of gravel in it. Most of the rubble is what looks like clinker, the slag you ge...