Pig Sty Avenue

Was kept away from the plot through work and weather for a week, but got there yesterday evening to find three bags of guinea pig bedding, (mostly straw and saw dust) and a bag of florist's off-cuts waiting for me. I put these with the compost, and buried them as I turned them, so the new stuff is on the bottom.  Assuming that the guinea pigs and the florist continue as they have been, I'm going to have plenty of compost in due course, though I'll need to keep it turned to speed it up, else I'll have more compost heaps than I'll have room for. Also noticed a lot of creeping buttercups, Ranunculus repens. Briefly, I hoped they might be beneficial weeds like comfrey or plantain. Alas, no, as this paper explains, (links to a pdf download) , it really is a weed, with no discernible benefits except to pollinators, is a bugger to get rid of, and an invader of damp ground. I really need to get on top of this weed situation, and plan to get busy with the hoe and the burni...

The area in between the pond and the Eastern boundary - about 6x12ft - has never been cultivated by me, and I don't think it's received much of anyone's attention, ever. Last year, mind, I was away during July, the whole plot was under siege from weeds, and that area in particular went "stark staring mad".  So this year I'm going to work that bit of ground. No corner of the plot should be neglected. I'm collecting plenty of compost material, getting the off-cuts from a florist, a neighbour's guinea pig bedding, our own kitchen waste, and of course waste material from the plot itself, such as the winter field beans. On top of that, there's a lot of comfrey, which I've already cut down and composted twice this year. An area 6x12ft is big enough to heap it all up and then turn it. I'm going to add my old compost heap, (in the far NE corner, where gorse is to be planted), but I'm waiting for some turnip seeds to ripen - they're grow...

I notice I started working on this area back in September , I got it clear then, and used it to pile up excess earth. That pile at last got cleared and has all now been through the big riddle. I lost count of how many barrows full it involved; a lot, anyhow. But now that it's clear, this morning I've rigged up a new improved version of the big riddle on the old greenhouse floor, and when Storm Doris has done her worst and moved on, I can at last get started riddling out the rubbish and glass infested no.5 bed. That will likely take up most of March. Already, following a few days of mild weather, the weeds are re-appearing. I get a bit stressed about this, but tell myself that 2017 just isn't going to be pretty. Dad said, when I first got started on this plot back in summer 2015, spend a year just getting rid of weeds. And that's what I should have done, but decided instead to plant a potato patch and a few rows of other crops, which got trampled by the dogs, or choked...

Also yesterday, I got that area of hedgerow hoed, running North and then East from the ash tree up and along to the central path. As I hoed away, cutting off ground elder, grasses, and clover, uprooting a comfrey volunteer and some small docks by hand, it occurred that it's going to be several years before the hedgerow shades out most of its competitors. That's a lot of weeding. The boundary is 70m long.  April to October, 5m a day means it would all be done every fortnight, which would be enough to stop it running away with weeds, as it did this Summer. That's in addition to hoeing all the beds. But, keep at it and it gets easier, mostly because hoeing 30mins to an hour every day for six months gives you forearms like Popeye. This from Cornell is good on hoeing , as it is on weed management generally. All of which I'm taking careful note of: next year, I manage the weeds rather than they manage me.

Lovely big poppy, apologies for misframing. Six weeks of work in London came at just the wrong time of year for the allotment. I managed to get back for just one weekend, and spent a few hours of emergency weeding, which just about kept it from going to jungle on me. Been home three days now, and spent everyone of them, a few hours, at the plot. It wasn't as bad as it first looked. The whole SE bed, formerly known as the midden and the East side of the old-greenhouse-foundations is choked with weeds. Which is an improvement, actually, it covers up the rubble and the rubbish that has been there in ever so slowly decreasing quantities since I moved in. When I get this corner sorted, particularly the old shed, a last piece of the puzzle will slip into place. And that old shed, oh my goodness me, is sliding blissfully westward, at the rate of maybe a millimeter a day.  It means the new shed is becoming a priority now, I doubt the old shed will see the other side of the approac...

It's mostly weeding, this time of year. Sowing direct has not been a great success, but it's not a complete wash out, either. Hoed between the rows, and then got down into the rows of coriander, sage, neeps and beetroot to thin and weed. It's extremely satisfying to stand back from that and see a row of well spaced, weed-free plants. And getting down and doing real fingertip weeding means you're getting to know your crop, and all the bloody weeds that invest them.

This wee chap and a number of its fellows were reporting for duty today. As you can see, so are a number of weeds, a seed from the ash tree, a fragment of brick, another of glass, and various bits of woody-ish vegetable matter. Good soil this, but wants work. And I'm looking forward to the tatties being all a bit more visible, so I can get to work on those weeds.