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. 

Oh no it's not

A new series of gardener's world and a slight warming of the air last week, shades of spring? No, hope was swiftly crushed again by the weekend as temperatures plummeted back down to zero, minus seven with wind-chill. Strictly not gardening weather!

I visited the plot to drop off a caddy full of kitchen compost and noticed that the garlic and over-wintering onions are all doing well. The daffodils are just about to start flowering as well, although not quite. The raspberry canes still desperately need cutting back and the beds I dug over in autumn need digging again. The ever-elusive cold frame has still not been built. Still, if a job's worth doing, better not rush it, I say.

I ordered my seed potatoes last week. I have gone for Sarpo Mira (late maincrop), which I have grown before. They stored well last time. I hold out no hope for a dry summer this year so it is no coincidence that they are best known as the most blight-resistant variety available. I've also chosen Mayan Gold, an early maincrop which I heard someone enthusing about on Gardener's Question Time, so thought I would give them a go. The potatoes are supposed to make fantastic chips.

At the same time, I ordered my parsnip seeds, and along with them got the usual envelope full of catalogues, adverts etc. - including a leaflet for converting my bath into an easy-access walk-in number. Thanks, Thompson and Morgan, what are you trying to say?! Then again my back does get sore after digging, and I do have a milestone birthday on the horizon this year, maybe I'll send away for the full brochure... Argghh!

In other news, Wise Mike has procured an Autospade, and offered to lend it to me for digging the plot, so watch this space for a full report, just as soon as the spuds arrive and the temperature gets above freezing for once.

A bit chilly

The whole country has been stuck with sub-zero temperatures for a while now; no point in writing about that when so much has been written and said already (Google News returns over 5,500 articles on 'cold Britain') - the British obsession of talking about the weather knows no bounds when a couple of snowflakes arrive. I can stand the cold by wrapping up warm, and it can be a very pretty time of year, but it's the lack of daylight that really gets me.

As I haven't ventured out much lately, the kitchen scraps for the compost heap have been building  up at home, so I was forced to venture to the plot to empty the overflowing caddy. It was five degrees below zero on my car's thermometer so I didn't stop long.

Everything was covered in a thick frost except for the pile stable manure that the council have dumped near the entrance, which was gently steaming and adding to the mist. I did take a couple of barrows of the stuff but it is mainly straw and wood shavings - the latter I have been warned not to use as soil improver as they actually decrease the nutrients available to plants while they rot.

I took the opportunity to retreive some more parsnips. Being so large I have only used a couple of them so far this winter, leaving plenty left for Christmas dinner. I expected the ground to be frozen like concrete but was pleasantly surprised to find there was just a thin frozen crust. Underneath it was, well, just soil. I turned a couple of spades over so the local robin red breast could have a go at finding some worms, then made my way home to defrost with a cup of cocoa.