Allotment Update

A good 5 or 6 hours on the allotment today.  It felt...right.  The more time I spend outside, around plants, feeling the air, listening, the more right it feels.  This could be where I am supposed to be.

I pruned the blackcurrant bush, and marked its territory with a circle of bricks.  Mulched it a bit.

I started a wall to mark of the edge of the path and what I call the 'inedible bed', which I have been gradually filling with shrubs and the like.

Build that wall!

I think I'll grow thyme in the cracks between the bricks, next year.

Earlier this week I moved my acer tree from the indoors to out, as it was looking very sad.  I hope she fares better out here.

An anti-ladybird from another dimension has been to visit the compost bin.  I've never seen one like this before before.  I've started to collect the pictures I take of creatures I see on the allotment into an album, which you can view here.  To such tiny things we owe our lives.

I've been thinking about colour a lot recently but have nothing to say about it yet.  Some labour: I've removed the wood chips and the nasty black plastic sheet beneath them from the space between the beds and the shed.  It was tiring, so I did it in short bursts, punctuated by Carlsberg.  But look at all this new potential growing space:

Black plastic sheeting would seem to be an allotmenter's staple, but I don't like it.  It suppresses weeds.  I've even heard it referred to as "weed suppressant membrane".  That just sounds so...unnatural.  Clinical?  I understand why you might wish to use it, but I want my allotment to be a garden as well as a farm.  A work of art.  Weeds are welcome here.  What is a weed, really?  Who cares?  Here's another, more conventional ladybird, probably from this world:

In my own little, and still artificial, space, I am trying to listen to nature.  I don't even know what that means yet.  You have to be very, very quiet, and still.  Something humans are not innately good at.

The onions I sowed two weeks back have sprouted!  The broccoli too!  This is happiness.

I thought it would be interesting to 'greenhouse' some of the shoots inside re-purposed plastic bottles, and leave some of them to the elements, to see what difference it makes.  The unnatural world has its uses.

Related posts

Allotment Update (26-08-17)
Going Organic
Orange is the New Green
Allotment Update (and some brief morning whimsy)


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