ruminate vb. to chew (the cud)
I cannot pretend that there is much happening on my allotment so this will be a short post. As I have explained in earlier posts, I am trying to keep as much growing in my soil over winter as possible and have been filling every available space with cover crops for the last few months.…
At this time of year growth has slowed a great deal and not a lot changes from one month's end to the next. Or so I thought, perhaps wrongly. Perhaps it just seems that way. The bed in the picture below was cleared of maincrop potatoes and sown with green manure seeds on 22nd September.…
The traditionalists around me at my allotment site have cleared away their summer crops and dug the ground over to be left rough over winter for frost to break it down. NOT my plot I'm not a traditionalist and have come to regard such behaviour as sadly misguided. For me they are damaging soil structure,…
Three weeks on from my last allotment post and I'm quite surprised at how much has changed, given that we're approaching mid October. I'd cleared space between my new tunnel and the end of the plot. On the 24th I planted strawberries that I took from my abandoned plot 3. The foliage was pretty skanky…
OK, let's keep this brief. The allotment post I did a week ago was the first since October 2022, a gap of nearly two years. The seeds I reported on in the tunnel last week are growing apace and I have planted out small lettuce plants beside them. Three have been eaten by slugs but…
Here we are in the middle of October and this is how my allotment is looking. The plot next to mine (the one behind me) is all but bare, just some cabbages and Brussels sprouts, the rest cleared and dug over. This is Cornwall; it is not natural for ground to be bare in winter.…
Much is made in certain quarters of the merits of getting early crops out of the way so that a second crop can occupy the same area for the remainder of the year. It doesn't seem to work out that way on my plot. There are overwintered crops like spinach, chard and brassicas that are…
I’m in the middle of reading James Rebanks’ ‘English Pastoral'. A chapter back he was expressing a concept which struck me as particularly insightful. “the field” he says, “is the base layer on which our entire civilisation is built”. It is not a natural thing, it has been created by land clearance, perhaps thousands of…
I was chatting over the gate with another plot-holder on my allotment this morning; he was telling me about rebuilding his compost bays, I was telling him about getting rid of mine for good a year ago. We agreed that it is good soil that grows decent crops, not a tidy plot. At least we…
I have been an adherent of a no-dig philosophy on my allotment for around six years now and have written the occasional piece about my experiences. I’ve also written several other pieces that are still in the drafts folder on WordPress, if they even made it that far. Much of the time it all feels…
Continue reading ➞ Soil, the never-ending no-dig, no compost, green manure experiment. 14/11/2021
garden ruminations 