Pig Sty Avenue

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...