Entries from April 2007 ↓

These two pictures really give you a contrast with the recent bit of the plot that was rotavated. It doesn’t seem to have bothered the plants.

Anyway, you can see that I have put collars round the strawberries to stop slugs and also to keep them clean when it rains. Yes, that might not happen for a while if they are right about global warming, but you have to try. This is the first year I have really bothered with strawberries, so we will see how well they turn out.

Below is a better picture of the netting over the cabbage. It’s a good way to keep the birds off your plants. Of course the slugs still make for it, but the netting gives them a headache. I found a few slug trails on the netting and a few dead ones boiled in the sun. They had left trails as though they went round in circles until they gave up the ghost and just died.

You can also see how I improvised the hoops with wire.

Well, as you can see from the rest of my plot, I haven’t given much time to rotavating or getting too fine a tilth of soil. It’s not that I’m lazy, just that it is a lot of work to do with that and my garden at home. Yes, while it would be good to have a good fine soil, it is not always necessary. Also it kills worms down to a good depth and worms are good for the soil.

In an ideal world I would give it a double dig every five years, but the soil is good and I add manure, compost, hops, etc., so I don’t need to. I also leave different areas fallow year on year and follow the rules of crop rotation.

I didn’t rotavate last year and everything was fine. However, as summer has taken over spring and there has been little rain, if I didn’t get some of the soil turned over, it would be nigh on impossible later on.

So, I bribed someone with beer to do it for me.

As you can see, they did a good job. It will really help me to plant things easily as and when I need to.

Today I planted the late potatoes in my new patch of allotment. I had to wait for this area to be cleared of overgrowth and can now see that it is in need of some TLC and nutrients.

However, not enough time to do too much as I wanted to get the potatoes in.

These potatoes have been chitted in the light for a few weeks and have good buds ready to grow. I placed them bud up as you can see.

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Once I placed them in the soil at a good even distance apart (45cm), I then covered them with some nutrients. I’m sure all you beer drinkers out there are jealous of my ‘compost’. And yes, it did smell of beer.

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I then covered the potatoes with soil. You will notice that I didn’t build up the soil too much yet. You only do that as the shoots begin to appear, this forces the potatoes to reach for the sky and gives you a better yield.

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Today I planted some summer cabbage.

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Once I had planted them I netted them to make sure that the birds wouldn’t get them. I also put down some slug pellets to keep away our slimy friends who would like nothing better than to munch away on the tender leaves.

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Having been back to check on them, they are doing fine, though a good day of rain would be nice to save me having to water them

Here you can see that we just placed the cut up spinach in the composter. There is no need to do much more to it, it’s fine as it is.

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In this weather, it will break down quickly. Though I am hoping for a bit of rain soon.

Here we cut up the spinach root we dug up.

The important thing about composting roots is that you cut them up into smaller pieces. This aids the breakdown process and we will soon have some lovely rich compost to bed some more plants with.

Nature is so good to reuse itself and so perpetuate the life-cycle. If only humans were the same.

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Today we dug out some of last years spinach. It has over wintered surprisingly well and we were able to get a few salad leaves from the plant we dug out.

There are still a few plants left, but we will have to have these out soon as we have set some spinach seeds for the new crop.

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You can see that it takes a lot of effort to dig it out as the root is quite thick for something that gives such delicate leaves.

Today we planted some onion sets.

Don’t forget to nip the tops off to stop the birds thinking they are worms and pulling them out.

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Today I checked how the parsnips were doing. They seem to have grown a little and are doing well.

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I also point out how you can tell the difference between a weed and your seedling as it comes up.

We decided to check the Dahlias we had over-wintered in the cold frame to make sure they were good to plant out later on.

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Unfortunately we found that a leatherjacket grub had also over-wintered with the Dahlias and had been feeding on it.

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It was nice and juicy fat when we found it, but didn’t last long – if you know what I mean 😉