Finally, we plant!

Yoinks, it has been aaaaaages since I had anything to report! It has been incredibly hot and dry all summer, so I haven't even had the opportunity to turn over the manured sections - I've been waiting for a good dousing of rain to flush it through and loosen the hard soil up.

I've also been away for 2 weeks and have only been back a week meaning I haven't had much opportunity to do anything at all.

So anyway, I made it to the plot yesterday having been up to the local garden centre to buy 300 litres of compost and some glyphosate weedkiller (just for the weeds growing in the paths)

I wanted to see where the weeds grew back after my initial clear up and to blast them with something which attacks the root. As mentioned before we have dandelion and bindweed aplenty up here.

£31 for a pump action spray and 5L and Tracy my lovely lady assistant was happily blasting the hell out of those pesky beggars.

During this time I got the opportunity to finally clear out the crap from the blue barrel sections in preparation for planting some pre-bonsai material. My good friend Mark is moving out of the country and is shifting most of his considerable collection of young and older trees. I snapped up a number of nice bits in development, which should take me at least ten years to get anywhere near a pot.

Due to the fact that it's not the optimal time to be planting out, I didn't do any root work at all, I just slightly loosened the rootball and effectively just slip potted them into the new soil. I'll take them out at the correct times next year for rootwork

A nice beech with terrifically short internodes and tiny leaves

Mugo Pine

Trident Maple (just a sapling)

 European Larch, with loads of lovely low branching

 Scots Pine

This is a great start bonsai material wise; I wanted pines to work with, and I've always wanted to have a crack at developing Larch as they are reputedly very forgiving and fast growing. Also the beech is a really cracking bit of material. This has a major flaw at the bottom, but I have plans for it which I'll explore in more detail over on dj-bonsai.blogspot.com. Finally, I've always wanted to have a go at a classically styled sumo Trident.

Bing!

We also took advice that the strawberries which were growing in the raised beds have sent out runners all over the shop. I was told that now is a solid time to plant some of these runners out, for fruiting next year so we conditioned the soil, and set about finding 20 or so that looked suitable to plant out.

As neither Tracy or I have the faintest idea what constitutes a decent one to take a cutting then plant, we opted for the ones which were throwing out the most root. We made finger sized holes and planted them firmly in new compost, spaced around 6-8" apart. We then watered carefully around the bases. My rationale is that if they are still alive in 2 weeks, we've successfully accomplished out mission. If not, we have tons more to choose from in the raised beds. If they do survive I can then get to work clearing the raised beds in preparation for planting tomatoes and hopefully onions next season. Tracy then finally put down loads more woodchip to clean up the appearance of the plot.

Here's our very first planted stuff!

 

Finally I turned over the whole plot with a fork, which took around an hour or so, mixing in that manure and compost. it's well mixed now but little sign of rotting. I'm sure winter will assist me in that regard!

I'm delighted to finally have some stuff planted out!

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!

Phew and *phew*

Shovelling horse poo really stinks. I'm talking the non-rotted stuff which is freshly bagged at point of dump, and then you are the first lucky person to split that bag open, which is exactly what happened in the back of my car....

Anyway, back to the plot... I'm making real progress, as I've now cleared the rubbish and started to prepare sections for soil conditioning. As you can see below, the bottom 2/5ths of the plot are now either ready for soil, or turned over. The section below has now been dug and broken up and is ready for some manure to be spread over it, and then left until spring.

Apparently by then the worms will have dragged most of it under and broken it all up, the dirty little beggars.

While I turned the soil over, I was keeping a vigilant eye out for bindweed roots. That stuff is all over this site and so with every single spade full I turned over, I broke up the sods of earth and extracted all of the fleshy roots I could find. In the small section alone there was 2 full wheelbarrows full of that bindweed root.

As you can see below, the section my spade is leaning against is rock hard clay, so I've broken it down leaving a ridge. Between this ridge and all the way around the blue barrels(up to the raised beds) I'll fill with woodchip to supress weeds. I measured it with a wheelbarrow to ensure that it could fit through, and there was the perfect amount of room.

 

 

 

So off to the giant poo bags. These badboys are heavy. There were approximately 20 or so, so I dropped one bag on top of the broken soil with roughly a 1.5 metres between each one, covering the whole surface.

Once the whole area had been covered, I split the bags open one by one covering the whole area and then raked it evenly over the whole top. the great thing about using un-rotted compost is that it will break down by spring, but it will also keep any bindweed / dandelion root I missed in check in the meantime as it's quite poisonous at the moment.... once it rots down it'll add loads of vitality and nutrients. Win-win!

 

I then grabbed 2 barrow loads of woodchips and filled all around the blue barrels. No weeds here, and over the course of time this will rot down into the soil, improving the humus..... apparently. (Makes sense to me!)

You will notice that the blue bins and raised beds have stuff in them(weeds, gravel, once laden strawberry plants). I'll do the hard work sorting the soil first, before I tackle these. These will have special soil in them (compost / Molar clay etc) so can be done at any time - but I want to get the hard digging work done during the nice weather and get that much spread out as much as I can before the rain comes later this year. It's not going to be fun standing hip deep in horse shit and mud, when I could be standing on dry soil and not going home stinking....

I'm also using them as quick bins for large stones/weeds etc. I'll clear them periodically as I improve the site.... they'll then be ready for planting in spring.

I'm really chuffed. When you look at what this place was like just 8 weeks ago, I'm making genuine progress. I have until soring to get things sorted, but I'm getting the hard work done now.

Phew - it is labour intensive but I feel great after a solid couple of hours digging.

*Phew* - that stuff really stinks.... but I'm having so much fun doing this!

A heap of shite

I cannot be the first, nor will I be the last to use this tired old joke, but today I'm off to somewhere I found on freecycle to pick up a load of manure. I'm not ashamed to use that pun, oh no. You cant take it away from me, it's my first time and I'm exploiting it to it's fullest extent!


Anyway, it comes in sealed bags apparently! How very posh for poo.


So naturally, rather than taking the works van, I'm taking my car and am going to fill it with as much as possible, which I'll dump on my plot later.


What could possibly go wrong? In fact I'm that confident there won't be any air pollution in the car, that I'm taking my good lady friend with me as I wont have time to drop her off first....


I'm such a catch!


*guffawtle*


(nb: If you are unsure about the above word, it's somewhere between a guffaw and a chortle. Think George from Rainbow - that's a Guffawtle. Zippy is more of a guffaw. A guffawtle is not quite as committed as a full on guffaw, but it's somewhat less controlled than a chortle.)


So anyway, this evening is basically comprised of a load of shit, followed by unloading a load of shit. I'm making somewhat steady progress on the plot, all rubbish having now been cleared and I've now dug over approx. 1/4 of the plot. It was, to be honest, pretty backbreaking work especially in the 28c heat of the weekend - but do you know what, it felt good. I like the feeling of doing hard work. Without a shadow of a doubt, I'll undoubtedly be looking back on this post in future years laughing at how naiive I was - but for now, even digging is enjoyable to me. It's all new, and shiny(or shitty) and exciting.


I've pretty much decided on the positions of certain things on the plot - and I will furnish this blog with some long overdue pictures this evening....


Of, amongst other things, heaps of shit.


In the meantime feel free to let your imagination run like a forgotten bath....


D x

Did somebody say sun?

Wow, what a blindingly lovely couple of weeks! I've been very busy clearing the plot of buried wooden planks, digging up weeds, digging up gooseberry bushes, clearing car loads of crap and even got to take down that rather weird structure this weekend.


I did all of this with a tee shirt on, so can confirm I now have a classic farmers tan. Hell yeah!


The ghetto shed is now no more, and the rather odd boxes which comprised it's base have also now been dismantled. I have to say, that I have never seen so many slugs, snail, woodlice and other beasties. It's a fairly decent indicator, that wherever you have rotting/decomposing wood, you have a veritable smorgasbord (yes, I did just use that word) of beasts just waiting for sundown to come and munch on your delicious crops.


A thing to make a mental note of for the future for sure.


So now, I've pretty much dismantled the whole site, bar the two raised beds at the bottom and 85% of it was rotten/rubbish. Some visits to the tip sorted that....


I now want to build a soil sieve. You won't know this (because why would you?) but the soil on my plot is profoundly rocky. Id say that it's almost ten percent rocks and stones. so no other reason than it doesn't make sense to me to NOT deal with it, I've decided I want a soil sifter.


I have a hand sized one, but it's not big enough. This is a 62.5m plot, which means I have to go 1m at a time.


There are plenty of options online but I dont' have many tools so I have to be conservative with my plans.


Historically I'd go for the biggest, all singing all dancing one but then fail at doing it.


This one looks like a great idea but do I have the tools and experience to build it? Probably not but I might still have a go....


http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Make-a-Dirt-Sifter/


I'll post up some pics soon.

Nothing to see here

....please disburse.


Here are some potatoes. I dug them up in the plot, while clearing. There are shitloads. This is likely to be the last success story on this plot for at least 9 months....

This really is a nothing post.

Ahmin Yashed....

....checking your tomatoes.


I found this hilarious reverse troll by an internet savvy Asian guy and chuckled hard at the idiots trolling him. Turns out he had the last laugh. Very amusing....


http://metro.co.uk/2016/03/04/heres-everything-you-need-to-know-about-amin-yashed-facebook-banter-5732967/


Anyway...I'm taunting myself with shiny things. I'm still deep in green eyed mode when it comes to horticultural workspaces...


I can't decide between a shed, a greenhouse or a hybrid potting shed. I figure a shed doesn't give me the flexibility of being able to grow seedlings or tomatoes(which I eat in huge quantities), and I'm debating whether or not a greenhouse gives me the security for my tools that I want.... so I'm veering towards a Potting shed which is the best(or is it worst?) of both worlds.


These are the ones I'm pondering right now. This seems like a good price.

This looks like an awesome solution, but I don't have the experience to know if these are a waste of time. It does seem like a cracking solution though?

Does anyone have any opinions?