Blazing

As end of weeks go, that was one damned fine weekend! I spent around 9 hours up at the patch this weekend comprising a good 4.5 hr  stint on Saturday and the same again on Sunday. Being typically British, I didn't think about the effects of hot sun on bare skin until it was waaaay too late.

As a result I've burned the top of my head, and probably fried a good percentage of what little brain tissue I have left that has not already been pickled by alcohol.

I started off very positively, by creating a base for my lovely new tool store - the eagle eyed among you will notice this used to be a hardwood fence at the top of my plot.

I got loads of great ground work done too. On the Saturday I  dug out and completed a pair of growing beds which joined at the end, covered all the new pathways with barrow loads of wood chip and started on a new bed.

As you can see I also found a place for one of my compost bins that I inherited. My intention is to use them for composting, and not (as per the previous owner) fill them with beer bottles, wire mesh, broken glass and other shit. Look at all the lovely wood chip on the paths. There's more than a couple of barrow loads here which got me breaking a good sweat transpoting it in the baking sun half way across the site.  This is not just aesthetic, it suppresses weeds, and over the course of time will rot down into soil below improving the soil condition....

It doesn't look like much but that took me hours as the soil is very hard, heavy clay. It begs the question of how I'm going to condition the soil in the shorter term, which is what I got up to on Sunday. Look at it; it's very hard baked clay...

I joined the SGAA on Sunday AM, jumping out of bed to get down to the allotment shop during the short opening period of 10am-midday. I wanted to see what goodies they had in store, and to submit my membership details and pay my subs.

In exchange for the meagre £4 annual fee(or £20 for 6 years - which I couldn't resist) you get heavily subsidised products for growing, seeds, soils, conditioners, sundries, tools and so on. You also get a newsletter and lots of advice from the shop. A bargain I reckon.

So I piled in there and bought myself 4 huge bags of multipurpose compost - the idea being to use them on my newly dug areas. Bear in mind that the areas I've just dug were the previous tenant's seating and structural area, so was heavily compacted from over 10 years of being repeatedly walked and sat on.

I was also given my membership number, which is 2. It didn't take long to realise that if there are thousands of plot owners in the Stevenage borough, and I was given member number 2, that there must have been an ex member who had passed away - a fact not lost on the shop staff.

*doffs cap*

Moving on, I took my new black gold to the plot and went about dumping it and mixing it into the existing soil. As you can see from the pics below there is a considerable difference in soil quality between the compost and my clay base soil!

 

So I dumped 4 x 75L bags of this gorgeous grainy stuff into my dug trenches and went about giving it a good mix in. As I shovelled it on, I was sure to break down any excessively large lumps of clay... but to be honest this whole quarter of the plot is comprised almost exclusively of excessively large, hard lumps of rock baked clay.

 

So you can see I have my work cut out for me on this section of the plot. Many years of being trodden down need to be reverse engineered and I suspect this won't be a 5 minute job.... just look at those lumps...

Still, I worked my way around and once I had finished I placed my 9 remaining bags of horse shit strategically in place ready for splitting and spreading.

*Phew* - hot work!

 

Now for the first lesson I've learned from previously spreading this muck out... take your gloves off! If you split and spread these bags, at some point you have to pick up the half empty bag and tip the remaining contents out. If you do this with gloves on, you'll get horse piss soaking into them. They then need washing. as they stink and are just generally minging. Do it with bare hands and you can quickly wash your hands once done. Simple!

Anyway, I elected to do some more digging first, to create the regularly requested Strawberry patch for my good lady. No point creating a smelly environment by splitting those bags before necessary!

I therefore went about digging a final bed, and grabbing 3 more barrow loads of woodchip for surrounding paths. Having turned over the final bed, I realised I have no compost....so I went about emptying the blue barrels of their lovely rich compost and dug it in. While I did this my good lady came to the plot, deliberately dressed in sandals so that she couldn't be roped into helping(!) and registered our patch on google maps.... so now we can check in every time we get there!

It's almost beginning to look like a tended plot! Just before I left, I broke out the horse poo and legged it.

Now we wait for the rains to come and wash through some of that manure - once that's happened I'll dig it all in. We wont be able to grow any root crops such as carrots, onions, etc in the manured section as they will taste of the manure for at least another 18 months, but we can grow crops which sit on top, such as courgettes, aubergines, tomatoes, sweet peas etc....

Its coming on very nicely, and while those big lumps of clay concern me somewhat, the good news is that the frosts should break them down for me to enable me to till them down to a finer size in the spring time

Here's hoping...

Thanks for reading!