Allotment – too much rain!

I don’t know about you, but our winter digging programme has been totally derailed by the amount of weather we’ve had this week. Every time we’ve tried to get to the plot to dig, it’s either rained heavily just as we’re about to set out, or we’ve got there to find that the ground is too wet to work.

It’s very annoying, as winter digging is one of the things that we failed to do adequately last year, mainly because we were still pulling out six foot thistles and enormous clumps of rampant horseradish and suckering raspberries, so we were determined to get everything properly double-dug and manured this year. I can only hope that as November continues it will get colder and less wet or we’re going to have to rethink our plans – we have so much unworked ground still to dig that it will take us all winter to get it into reasonable shape.

My seedling globe artichokes are looking a bit sad – I’d hoped to get them into the nursery bed this week too, so that they can have it as a bit of winter protection before being transplanted in spring to take their place with the plants I set out last year. I really have to get that done this weekend, as well as putting the strawberries in their new raised bed, which at the moment resembles a paddy field surrounded by wooden walls!

Labels: allotment-artichoke, allotment-digging, allotment-strawberries