Pig Sty Avenue

Von Engeln, O.D., 1914. Effects of continental glaciation on agriculture. Part I. Bulletin of the American Geographical Society , 46 (4), pp.241-264. Von Engeln, O.D., 1914. Effects of Continental Glaciation on Agriculture. Part II. Bulletin of the American Geographical Society , 46 (5), pp.336-355.

It's amazing how quickly the weeds appear, even towards the end of the season.

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...