Spring Cleaning the Allotment
Well, not really spring cleaning, but trying to get it looking organised and tidy – if you take photos from just the right angle, so that you miss out the huge top area of rough scrub, thistles and dock, it almost looks as if our plot is going great guns.Stand in the wrong place, of course, and you can see the heap of rubbish still waiting to be collected by the council, the mouldering heap of compost, threaded with bindweed and nettles, that we’re trying to level, and the mound of holly branches, old pallets and general tat that isn’t going to be collected by the council, or be of any use to us, but is too green or wet to be burnt in the incinerator. Oh well!
So we put up some bunting around the raspberry canes, just because we could, and set a couple more raised beds in place, so that even though there’s nothing in most of them, it looks as if we’re productive - six beds down so far (does that make me sound like Henry VIII or something?). Then, hurrah! The council lorry turned up without warning (as it always does) and dropped off a huge load of wood mulch made from Christmas trees. So now, between our raised beds, we have a lovely fragrant carpet of pine chippings. And because John and Anita on the plot next to hours wanted some chippings too, I was busy with my barrow, wheeling heaps of chippings around the site. Quite the little paragon.
It was committee meeting weekend too, so I’ve been busy typing minutes and drafting letters – it’s a funny thing, but when I took on an allotment I had this mad idea that it would involve LESS sitting at the computer, not more …
Labels: allotment-appearance, allotment-cleaning, allotment-raised-beds, allotment-raspberries
Posted by The Allotment Blogger on Saturday, March 14, 2009
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4 Comments:
I wish I had the space to grow asparagus (per your post below this). Perhaps sometime, in the meantime we just buy and eat it when in season.
Which is a round about way of getting to a question :)
Beetroot leaves, including the rainbow beets I've planted - are the leaves edible? They look not much different to spinach and silverbeet?
Are my rainbow beets like beetroot? That is they're going to have the bulb at the bottom I'll cook and eat? I just bought a punnet of six at the nursery and planted them because they looked 'nice'.
The leaves of beetroot are edible but not at all special, rather like the roots of rainbow beets (which are very fibrous and earthy tasting and often hollow) although they are the same family, they are varieties which have been bred for opposite purposes - beetroot for their roots so the leaves are bitter and coarse, and rainbow beets (also called chard) for their leaves, so the roots as small and fibrous.
Oooh, will your council collect rubbish from individual plots? What bliss. We've inherited a weed heap that is never going to compost down.
Well Linda, in THEORY they will. In practice it hasn't been known to happen in the past 12 months. But we live in hope.
Re weed heap: try getting a big piece of old corrugated iron, spreading your weed heap out on it and letting it dry in the sun until it's completely crisp - then burn it in an incinerator. Worked for us!
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