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,…
I seem to have killed off the section on my home page entitled 'blogs I like', which is what happens when you start fiddling around without knowing what you're doing. I wanted to remove a link from the list, having received an email yesterday saying the blog in question had been taken down. I'm not…
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…
Sometimes with vegetable gardening you get in a bit of a rut, repeating what you did the year before, dropping a crop because it's repeatedly unsuccessful or you don't ever seem to eat it. It starts to get a bit boring. I had two plots, one of which I only took on because I needed…
Continue reading ➞ Allotment shenanigans, 5th September 2024
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.…
It is very frustrating that I have so many problems with direct sowing on my allotment. Most things seem to germinate then disappear, presumably due to nocturnal predation by slugs. I dare say there are other culprits too, voles, snails maybe, but it hardly matters. I managed to grow carrots successfully this year by direct…
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…
garden ruminations 