Pig Sty Avenue

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...