A kind of bastard trenching gives way to permaculture: a revolution in 16sq yards...
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 depth. Maybe. But it's done now. It would take years, several years, a decade maybe, to systematically work through the whole plot like this. So bugger that for a game of soldiers. I clear 6ins deep every time I clear a square metre for planting, and will get down deeper with spuds. This riddling is the antithesis of no-dig, involving intensive digging to the total (if temporary) destruction of soil structure, but it was done to get the glass out and make it safe for the dogs. Ironically, I've now found a way to achieve the same object by uber-no-dig permaculture, laying on a thick layer of mulch in the form of florist off-cuts and guinea pig bedding.
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 depth. Maybe. But it's done now. It would take years, several years, a decade maybe, to systematically work through the whole plot like this. So bugger that for a game of soldiers. I clear 6ins deep every time I clear a square metre for planting, and will get down deeper with spuds. This riddling is the antithesis of no-dig, involving intensive digging to the total (if temporary) destruction of soil structure, but it was done to get the glass out and make it safe for the dogs. Ironically, I've now found a way to achieve the same object by uber-no-dig permaculture, laying on a thick layer of mulch in the form of florist off-cuts and guinea pig bedding.
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