Monday 20 January 2014

A Bit of Plotting

Sunday afternoon turned out to be quite nice after a drop of overnight rain had left us with a dull and damp morning. We made the most of the good weather to do a little bit of plotting.
This is one of the beds cleared and dug in autumn which had been planted up with our mini annual flower area last summer. My plan was to cover this bed with weed control fabric and then use it for growing brassicas this year. I can’t remember this patch of land growing any brassicas, as for many years it was part of our perennial dahlia bed where the tubers were left in the ground to overwinter, so I'm hoping that this patch will be club root free and our brassicas will grow unchecked.

In the picture above the soil doesn't look in too bad a condition but in this case the picture doesn't tell the whole story. January has been a wet month to date and the ground is very wet. Fortunately I'm able to cover the bed without having to stand on the soil itself working from the paths around the bed.
By the time the sun was setting I’d managed to get more bare ground covered than I’d planned. Barrowing the manure from the allotment stockpile to the plot was a bit of a chore. The stockpile of manure had soaked up all the recent rain and had turned into a proper squelchy heap sticking to boots, fork and wheelbarrow tyre and weighing about twice what you might expect. 

I just had some time to dig a few carrot, parsnips and leeks to finish off a fairly productive Sunday afternoon especially as Sue had given our Tayberry its winter trim.

2 comments:

  1. So nice to dig up some fresh vegetables in winter.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Lucky you having manure available on your site. I remember our site used to have loads delivered, but since I've been there, there haven't been any at all. I need to trim my tayberry back a bit too, it's quite long and straggly.

    ReplyDelete

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