ruminate vb. to chew (the cud)
A few years ago I took on an allotment. It was a new site and had been operating only a year when I started; I took over a plot that had proved too much for the first tenant. At the start it had been shallowly ploughed, turning the grass over but not effectively burying it.…
It's a funny old place the internet, full of information about absolutely everything and providing an equal opportunity for complete idiots and world experts to put forward their views as if they were of similar value. The distinction between fact and fiction has never been fuzzier. On almost every topic under the sun you will…
I grow a dozen or so named Dahlia varieties in the garden and three or four up the allotment. For the last few years I have collected seed from some of them and sowed them in March of the following year. I grow them on and plant them out on my allotment around May. They…
It wont have escaped the notice of any UK gardeners that it’s been very wet lately. I try to stay off my rather fragile silty soil in such conditions as it’s structure is rapidly degraded by my big feet. Today though was the third dry day we’ve had in a row, practically a drought, so…
The picture above is of some carrots that I dug up on my allotment two days ago. As I explained back in June, I have taken to sowing carrots in deep pots and planting them out as an undisturbed pot full once they are a couple of inches high. I started to do this because…
I haven't had much to say about my veg growing this year and I have to admit that the weedy appearance of the plot suggests my enthusiasm for it has faltered a little. I don't think it has by much but I have probably not done as well this year as last, mainly because I…
If you followed this blog for what I had to say about my allotment then I'm afraid you've had thin pickings this year, this being only my second post about it. It seems to have been a year where everything has been done in a very fragmented way so there never seems to have been…
It's been a while since I posted anything about my allotment. We've had some very mild weather and things are maybe a little ahead of where they'd usually be, but not by much. Last year I sowed peas on 13 April; today I sowed this year's, three days earlier. I'd sown a strip of Italian…
I claim no special knowledge of growing plants from seed. I’ve done a lot of it and I think I’ve had reasonable results, but I’ve had my share of failures too. There is an abundance of information available online about seed sowing, to the point that I wonder why I bother writing about my own…
My alloment is divided down the middle by a windbreak. Each half is further divided into two, creating four sections for my four year crop rotation. It happens that this year one side of the windbreak is almost empty, summer crops having been removed and nothing put in to replace them, while the other side…
