The local farmer I mentioned in my previous post has turned up trumps. I phoned him on Monday morning and within the hour he turned up at the allotments in a big digger, with two tons of compost in the front bucket. A bargain at £25, it is composted green waste collected by the council and rotted down in huge, steaming silos on his farm.
It is a bit coarse, having bits of stick and branch in it, so I have been sorting it through an old shop bread crate before adding it to the beds. I've been adding about four wheelbarrow loads per bed, and I still think that I could probably add more, but that is about as much compost as I can stand to sort through the holes in a bread crate in one go.
The onions I planted have started to come up, and it turns out they are shallots. That's good because that is what I wanted to plant first. The rest of the onions went in last week, red and white.
This evening I planted my first potatoes of the year, ones that survived The Moog's efforts to eat them raw, called Blue Danube. I also dug over another bed in less than 30 minutes, with my azada purchased from Get Digging. It would have taken me at least a couple of hours with a spade, and I would have aggravated my back too - no such problems with the new tool. I have yet to decide what to call it; one of my neighbours called it an axe-hoe, which I think suits it a bit better than azada. Apparently there is an ex-Ghurka here who has one very similar, and he reputedly dug his whole plot barefoot using it, after turning down the loan of a British spade.
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