Rain starts play

It’s not often that rain brings on activity – most of the time we huddle up under duvets and watch old films, but if you’re an allotment holder, this week’s heavy rain will have been a blessing.

Our clayish soil is like terracotta – once it gets dry you can’t get a fork into it. Where we’ve already double dug, and especially where the spuds have been, it’s fine, you can turn it even when it’s bone dry, but the undug part of the allotment, where it’s full of grass and perennial weeds, is literally impenetrable. Our Jerusalem artichokes finally flowered and they do a good job of breaking up the soil too, but they are getting attacked by thistles.

So this rain will help. I shall dig up the old strawberry bed this week, and put all the old plants out to compost. Then the new strawberry plants will go in a raised bed that’s already prepared. But we’ve given into circumstance and will have the top quarter of the plot, that we never got to this year, strimmed and then rotovated. I’ll cover it with weed suppressing membrane and plant through it in the spring – courgettes and squashes will do fine there and planting through the membrane means we can get some value out of the ground while still keeping the weeds underground and under cover so that they weaken. I know it’s the fool’s option to rotovate, but with half the plot still to dig by hand, I know I’m just not going to get to the wasteland unless I give in and go for mechanised assistance.

Good news is that the Swedes Len gave me as seedlings are putting on a fine show in the raised bed that had lettuce in all summer. They are planted through membrane too, and as I can’t remember a year when we ate more than nine Swedes, I reckon this will take us through the winter comfortably.

Labels: allotment-jerusalem-artichokes, allotment-rain, allotment-rotovating, allotment-soil, allotment-swedes

Allotment Tasks – Warming the Soil

Of the not-very-many things to be done on an allotment in January, warming the soil is perhaps one of the most important and most neglected. And we’re just starting to think about warming ours, having finally dug enough of it to actually think we might get some crops in!

The point about warming the soil is that it helps germination by two means: it absorbs the warmth of the sun in the day, and slows down the loss of that heat at night, which can protect from frosts. If you have hardy crops like carrot, they will germinate in the soil at around 8 degrees Celsius but tender crops like French beans won’t germinate until soil temperature is 12 degrees Celsius – and remember that air temperature tends to be at least a degree above soil temperature and may be as much as three degrees higher than clay soils. Dry soils warm faster because water holds the cold, so having raised beds with good drainage can improve germination if you have a heavy soil

There are two ways to really warm your soil: the first is adding compost or manure which both breaks up heavy soils, giving them less water trapping, and tends to change the albedo (surface colour to us simple folk) making it darker and therefore more inclined to take in, rather than reflect back, the sun’s rays.

The second thing, of course, is to cover the soil with glass, plastic or cloches. Clear plastic is reckoned to be the best option, and this kind of cloche can be lifted easily to hoe out the weed seedlings, which will germinate very fast, and that’s always great news because once those seeds have germinated and you’ve chopped the seedlings in two, they can’t come back to strangle your plant seeds when you do put them in the ground. So quite obviously, the ideal situation is to put down your cloches a couple of weeks before you plan to sow seed, and get ruthless with the weedlings when they appear.

So why, I wonder, don’t we have any cloches … possibly because we are ill-organised and spend too much time chatting. Oh dear, oh dear, I can see allotment-holder-failure on the horizon!

Labels: allotment-cloches, allotment-seedlings, allotment-soil

New allotment – the ground we work with

My allotment federation has the following advice: Allotments that have not been worked for many years or have had nothing put back in to the soil would benefit from an annual application of manure or mushroom compost. If supplies are limited, concentrate it where you intend to grow potatoes or members of the cabbage family. If you practise crop rotation you will gradually improve the whole area. Start a compost bin immediately and recycle as much organic matter as possible.

Well, our soil is really not that bad. Wonderful Duncan dug a whole lorry load of manure into the first half of the plot and it’s produced fantastic potatoes and onions, and the courgettes are thriving, so that’s good. The second half of the plot though, is still ‘unimproved’. We’re rough digging a couple of rows every time we go up and mainly trying to take out as much couch grass as possible (it is definitely our best crop so far!) – I’m spreading the removed perennial weeds out on a slab of carpet to dry, as several books say that once it’s totally desiccated you can just stamp it to smithereens and put it in the compost. Stamping on couch grass could become my favourite hobby!

It seems to have good water holding capacity and it definitely clods up when wet so there’s a lot of clay in there, but its not chalky, which was a big worry as many allotments in our area are. All in all I think we’ve been very lucky. The test will be when we establish an asparagus bed … maybe next year!

Labels: allotment-digging, allotment-improving-soil, allotment-manure, allotment-soil