ruminate vb. to chew (the cud)
I’ve had my allotment since April 2013 and have been a committed no-digger since about two years in. I could see what was happening to my soil, the good structure (aggregation into granules) that it had when I started very quickly started to break down. I stopped digging and divided the plot into beds about…
Continue reading ➞ Soil, getting it good and keeping it that way.
Eight months ago I spread the compost from my heaps onto my allotment and resolved not to make any more. I would simply shred everything that came my way and spread it back on the ground. I wrote a blog about it at the time. It seemed a slightly radical course to take and I…
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…
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…
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 seems like bad form to blatantly take someone else’s blog idea and go off on one with it. On the other hand, it’s presumably the case that you hope your blog gets other people thinking or better still, doing something. When I read The Propagator’s blog about hot composting on November 7, it got…
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…
I meant this to be a monthly snapshot, but there has been slippage, my last allotment post being at the end of July. That was just after we'd had the first rain for ages but before anything was showing any benefit from it. My runner beans had cropped well through the hot spell, sustained by…
It's a day under four weeks since my last allotment blog and it was the comparison in the pictures above that prompted me to do an update. The growth rate in the last few weeks has been something to behold. I am now harvesting quite a range of crops and a few more are very…
