More warmth, more work...

A spell of decent weather and lighter evenings have meant a few extra trips to the plot of late. I have now started digging and preparing for the potatoes to go in, as well adding some manure to other areas where I think I will either grow salads or squashes. I'm deliberately limiting what I grow to things that store well or that I know will be used at home. To accommodate about 40 potato plants this year, I've started to ditch my bed system, that has been in place since I started in 2007. The aim is to reduce the amount of time I spend on maintaining infrastructure and increase the time on the plants. I've also tried to continue with my new found technique of actually doing something when I go to the plot rather than just standing around looking at it. I think I usually get more done when I'm on a short time limit, than when I have all day.

I've now finished pruning the raspberries but the supports for the netting have fallen down so that's another job for the future. I've also had to re-plant some of the onions I put in which have been strewn about by birds, spoiling my neat rows.

I'm fairly relaxed about when my crops will be planted this year. Most stuff can't go out until after the last frosts anyway, and in this part of the world that means the end of May. It's difficult to find the space and time to get seeds going at home so I may well cheat and buy some small plants at the garden centre when they become available. They can then go straight into my new cold frame, which, um, I still haven't begun constructing. But Rome wasn't built in a day, was it?

Soil (no pictures)

It's mid-April and it looks like it's time to start catching up with all the jobs I should have been doing in February and March. The cold has kept me indoors and nature has taken a break too, with most plants only now springing into life. I have noticed they wake up with amazing speed when the time is right. Last week I (finally) started pruning my raspberry canes, a job usually done sometime just after Christmas. The longer you leave it, the harder it is to tell which canes to prune. Well, last week they were just canes. This week, most of them have buds or small leaves on.

Last year's onion sets were planted in February and were well-established by April. This year with two weeks of April gone they're not even in the ground yet. I don't mind because I have some over-wintering onions which all seem to be doing OK - therefore it won't matter if my main crop is a bit late, I'll have some to fill the gap. 

So one of my first jobs of spring has been to prepare ground for the onions. I decided I ought to add more pictures of this sort of thing but being quite a fussy photographer I find it hard to capture images I'm happy with. Also, being easily distracted, I rarely remember to stop what I'm doing and take a picture when I'm working on the plot. I'm sure some of the mundane things I do would be best described by a picture. But I seem to have developed a strong urge to post pictures of bare patches of soil. I've taken some pictures and then realised when I got home that it's just an empty bit of brown earth. It's like getting home from a walk in the countryside and finding the picture you took of that brilliant view doesn't really do it justice. Perhaps another allotment gardener reading this blog might understand the feeling of having created something that goes with gardening. When I've prepared a bed I keep going back and looking at it. It feels good. Unfortunately, to the casual observer, it probably doesn't look like much.

There's a huge amount of satisfaction involved in preparing a vegetable patch. I start with a weedy square of vacant ground then remove as many weeds as I can by hand or by digging them up with a spade. I try to get as much root as possible. Then I begin turning the soil over, digging out big stones and other rubbish, and roughly chopping the big clods of soil, trying to avoid murdering worms in the process. Then I go to my compost heap and sift a wheelbarrow full of compost and return to spread it over the surface. Then I mix the compost into the top layer of soil (the worms can do the rest). I find the rake is my favoured tool for this stage, it is also used to bash big lumps of soil into smaller ones until the whole thing turns into a fine tilth ready for planting.