June update: Underground biscuits and the beans have gone nuts

I earthed-up my potatoes recently, to ensure a greater depth of soil directly over the plants. I used my azada to draw soil from the edge of the beds to the middle. After the first couple of scrapes I found a bit of plastic in the soil - no great surprise there, I often find buried rubbish - so, assuming it was an old compost bag I gave it a tug. Up came half a packet of chocolate digestive biscuits. I'm not sure if I can adequately describe my shock at that moment, since they were actually quite fresh, a good 4 months off their sell-by date. I went and showed them to my neighbour, who was equally bemused. I can only assume some animal (squirrel? fox? the beast of Wolverton? The Moog?) has buried them there for safe keeping and will be disappointed to come back and find my potatoes instead.

Overall the plot is looking very healthy at the moment. The broad beans, in the ground since last autumn, have been threatening to produce useable pods for some time now. I kept checking but they were always too small, until about the second week of June when they finally reached maturity - all at once. So I have a bit of a broad bean glut on my hands. Luckily they freeze well whilst I find things to do with them! You can see clearly in the picture below the notches on the edge of the leaves, this means the plants have suffered the attention of 'Pea and Bean Weevil' again. These little beetles' sole purpose in life is to eat peas and beans. I wonder what they ate before I started planting peas and beans on this plot?

I have been quite careful to defend my crops from attack this year, but have still made some mistakes. My kohl rabi has been decimated by something, all leaves stripped to stalks. I assumed slugs, and liberally applied pellets until the same thing happened (quite literally, overnight) to my nice row of radish seedlings. they were coming up well, after I companion-planted them inside a ring of garlic. I called in my neighbour John for his opinion, and  he suggested birds are to blame, probably pigeons. This makes sense, and on checking my reference books I drew the same conclusion. So, more netting and wire have been employed, plus my rather jolly scarecrow has been brought out of his winter hiding place to look after everything when I'm not there.

Worms and horse manure soup

The worms have gone a bit quiet in my wormery, producing less liquid feed than I am used to. Really I need to face up to the job of emptying the whole stinking, festering mess out and returning the worms minus the compost they've made, but for fairly obvious reasons I've been putting that job off. Therefore I have been trying other ways of generating my own fertiliser. The first is to collect some of my comfrey and stinging nettles and submerge them in a bucket of water. I am led to believe the resulting 'tea' is a good tonic for plants. Second, I have put some horse manure in a trug and covered that with water too. Drawing off the resulting brown ooze is not for the faint hearted, and only marginally beter than tipping out the wormery, but I've started mixing that in to my watering can at a rate of about 1/4 brown ooze, 3/4 water. I got the idea from Terry Walton's book 'My Life on a Hillside Allotment', although the technique is not described in detail he does mention making fertiliser from bracken and sheep manure. Hopefully my version will do some good and not totally burn my plants, time will tell.