Pig Sty Avenue

I seem to have gotten lost in the ivory tower, can't find my way back to the Applied Linguistics department, (which is fine, as it goes), and have stumbled into the outer fringes of soil science and horticulture. I could do with a BSc in botany or bio-chemistry, but I've left that a bit late in life, so I'm going to have to catch up as best as I can, extra mural, Jude the Obscure. A 2nd hand copy of Fitzpatrick arrived in the post today, and I've started reading that. Also today, I looked into the question buzzing around in my head since I saw an episode of Gardeners' World last year, about plantain fostering mycorrhiza. I managed to get in touch with @zephaniahlindo from Gardeners' World and he gave me the Francis et al reference. That was interesting. Long story short, Plantago lanceolata and Festuca ovina can help link mycorrhiza to other plants, thereby increasing said other plants uptake of (P)hosphorus and (N)itrogen. F ovina is sheep's fescue, a ...

See, this is one reason, on top of climate change, why we get flooding in Britain. Too much bloody paving, not enough well cultivated land, hedgerows, and trees. This is the view from google earth. This image is before my time, I'm guessing it was taken a couple of years ago. That's my plot edged in green. To the left is the raised beds area. You can see by its proportions that it's two plots joined together. A large part of it is paved, (that near circular area in the middle, and the paths between the beds, and that area in its bottom right corner. The red arrow shows the direction of the slope. It's a gentle slope, probably a couple of feet from the bottom left to the top right in the photo. But the thing is, almost all of the rain that falls on that area, about 5400sq ft, just trickles slowly over the paving (and the impacted grass areas), and into my plot.  I don't know when the two plots were paved over, and presumably nobody thought about the effec...

The very morning that I was flying home from Jeddah, that very morning, I got the email from our Community Allotment Association's Secretary asking what my intentions were regarding an allotment. The last conversation I'd had with her, face to face at the allotments, she told me it was normal to spend a couple of years on the waiti ng list, and then get a quarter plot, or even just a raised bed, and later a half plot, and one day, eventually, a full plot of your own. "It's rare to walk straight into a full plot... In fact, it never happens." That was fine. I was just keen to get some fresh air and exercise and grow vegetables. But I knew I wanted a plot to myself, and would wait as long as it took, and take whatever came my way meanwhile. I wanted my own allotment, a whole one, all ten poles of it . I'd shared an allotment with Dad, and that was fine, we never fell out over anything, but what we were going to plant and where it was going to be planted, and ...