Hacking into the SW bed
Bah! I was up early this morning and should have gone to allotment - I would have got a couple of hours work done before it started raining...
But yesterday was good work, despite some heavy showers. I tidied up the site of the Last Big Bonfire somewhat - though I'll need to go through it more carefully at some point to separate out the bits of metal from charred wood and what not. It was mostly all the crap out of the shed: rotten doors with their hinges still on, that sort of thing. That whole SE corner: the shed, the midden, the fire site, the eastern end of the old greenhouse, it all still needs doing, but it'll have to wait until the cultivated beds are planted out. If I get it done and ready to plant with perennial vegetables and herbs before June, the 1st anniversary of starting work, that would be splendid.
Anyway, I hacked away at the compacted nettle-rooted earth of the SW corner, and it's fluffing up nicely. Plenty of bricks. It's interesting, how I can tell now when bricks have been a path that's gotten covered by earth, or just a line of bricks, placed there God knows when or why, and then somehow covered by earth. The bricks slowed me down somewhat, and I didn't finish that area, but it's another couple of hours work, and it should then be ready for planting. Onions, as I've got 3 bags of onion sets from Lidl, (49p each! So that's less than 30 bob for approx 400 onions). Carrots, parsnips and garlic in that bed too.
Lot of ground elder there. People say tatties are a cleaning crop. I think that just means, you're weeding a lot, raking up the soil round the tatties, so that perennials get hoed/raked out. Also, I've noticed, ground elder seems to work in symbiosis with other plant's roots, such as nettles in particular. But if some of the root systems I've dug up are indeed the ground elder's own, oh my God! They're colossal! But this makes me hope that, whilst it will always hold on anywhere, because it can grow back from a tiny piece of those enormous root systems, in a well ordered, frequently weeded allotment, it will go the same way as the docks, for example. Always there, always kept from being a particular nuisance.
But yesterday was good work, despite some heavy showers. I tidied up the site of the Last Big Bonfire somewhat - though I'll need to go through it more carefully at some point to separate out the bits of metal from charred wood and what not. It was mostly all the crap out of the shed: rotten doors with their hinges still on, that sort of thing. That whole SE corner: the shed, the midden, the fire site, the eastern end of the old greenhouse, it all still needs doing, but it'll have to wait until the cultivated beds are planted out. If I get it done and ready to plant with perennial vegetables and herbs before June, the 1st anniversary of starting work, that would be splendid.
Anyway, I hacked away at the compacted nettle-rooted earth of the SW corner, and it's fluffing up nicely. Plenty of bricks. It's interesting, how I can tell now when bricks have been a path that's gotten covered by earth, or just a line of bricks, placed there God knows when or why, and then somehow covered by earth. The bricks slowed me down somewhat, and I didn't finish that area, but it's another couple of hours work, and it should then be ready for planting. Onions, as I've got 3 bags of onion sets from Lidl, (49p each! So that's less than 30 bob for approx 400 onions). Carrots, parsnips and garlic in that bed too.
Lot of ground elder there. People say tatties are a cleaning crop. I think that just means, you're weeding a lot, raking up the soil round the tatties, so that perennials get hoed/raked out. Also, I've noticed, ground elder seems to work in symbiosis with other plant's roots, such as nettles in particular. But if some of the root systems I've dug up are indeed the ground elder's own, oh my God! They're colossal! But this makes me hope that, whilst it will always hold on anywhere, because it can grow back from a tiny piece of those enormous root systems, in a well ordered, frequently weeded allotment, it will go the same way as the docks, for example. Always there, always kept from being a particular nuisance.
Comments
Post a Comment