My legs are aching. There is still dirt under my fingernails. This was the best weekend I have had in quite some time. After weeks of rain, my corner of the country was blessed with a fine weekend of actual, recognisable summer weather. And in my corner of my corner of the country, this:
Also, this:
Quite a lot of this:
A respectable quantity of this:
And a great deal of this:
This last picture is of bindweed, which occupies about half of the available space on my allotment, and has designs on taking over the entire plot; and then, perhaps the world. I am reliably informed by several other allotmentiers I met on Sunday that bindweed is a menace that must be destroyed, and that this is just about impossible. It cannot be destroyed, only contained. There is much work to be done.
The thing is, it's really quite attractive.
And not only aesthetically, but also to bees:
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| Bee porn. |
Bees are good, bees are good! Without bees we would all be dead. Something to think about. But anyway, to work...
The two beds you can see in the first picture above are 4 x 16 feet and 6 x 16 feet respectively. The bed on the left has just been cleared of potatoes, grown by the previous user of the plot, who had not being paying much attention, hence the state of it. While digging through the soil I kept coming across potatoes in excellent condition, enough to make a meal of on Saturday lunchtime, in fact, accompanied by the obligatory microgreens. And mustard, because I like mustard.
Delicious. The second plot needed a good deal of weeding, so I set to that on Saturday afternoon. Among the weeds and bindweed I came across several poorly looking rosebushes, which I am reluctant to destroy, as well as these chaps:
Perhaps I could use this bed for more ornamental purposes, or explore the possibilities of companion planting edibles with inedibles. I am undecided. As for the first bed, I've wasted no time in getting some things planted out there, as time is ticking on towards the autumn. I've grown several pepper plants from seed indoors this year, and they seemed ready for the outdoors to me, and thus:
Some seemed upset by the move, and drooped at first; others bucked their ideas up more or less straight away. We'll just have to see what happens here. It could be that it's too late in the year to get anything from these. But after asking around it looks like there's plenty I could sow now: lettuce, cabbage, onions, garlic, which will survive the winter if I find the right varieties. This will be a project for this week.
In all, I'd say there's room for about four of five beds of the size of the two already in place, once the bindweed has been contained and I've weeded out the soil. I estimate the total area of the plot is about 1600 - 2000 square feet. These are my feet, as opposed to actual, objective feet. Perhaps I will measure the plot precisely, or perhaps I won't bother. To clear it, anyway, will take some time, but I'm working on a "little and often" way of doing things. Over the course of Saturday and Sunday I transported the contents of my compost, which went straight into the soil; and my wormery, which went inside the former compost bin, and into the shed:
This took four or five trips, my grubby rucksack on my back, filled with bin bags of compost and worms. The allotment is four minutes walk from my home, so this was fine, and good exercise. No need for indoor composting any more, and I can take all my food scraps over every couple of days. Everybody wins. The worms were initially confused by the transportation, but settled in quickly and without much fuss. Moving them in this way was a perfect opportunity to add layers of straw and shredded newspaper to the bin, giving them air, room to work, and a sense of variety, which is the spice of life, even for worms.
I could go on, and of course I will, but I'm anxious to get things online, so I'll pause here for now. Comments, advice and questions most welcome as always. More to come.
Related posts
Get On My Land
How I Compost and Keep a Wormery Indoors
Microgreen Crop Rotation
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