Not rotten enough yet

The council have delivered some stable manure to the allotments. My neighbour John pointed this out to me in the late Autumn when he started to add mounds of the stuff to his beds. I went and inspected the pile, but to me it looks a bit too fresh to be incorporated just yet. There's hardly any muck, it's mainly fresh straw and wood shavings. In his book (that I have mentioned before here) Terry Walton notes that manure with wood chippings and sawdust is to be avoided, as it takes too long to break down, making plant growth poor. So, I have opted to stack a few barrow-loads in my new compost heap and maybe use it next year.

Roll on to January and John has now covered virtually all his 10 poles in the stuff, and I was a bit concerned to see another experienced plot holder, Roy, wandering off with barrow-loads of the same. However, when I spoke to Roy (a dangerous thing to do if you've got less than half an hour to spare), he volunteered that he wasn't using it on his plot, but was stacking it 'for a year, maybe two' before using any. Great, at least that's two of us with the same opinion. We mused a bit on the worn state of the ridings, and Roy told me how they used to bring sewage and waste from Wolverton Works down for allotmenteers to use. That was, until they discovered that due to the industrial processes it was full of poisons like lead. Hardly what you want on your vegetables. In those days, enterprising gardeners used to stack up the sewage (animal and human I guess) into a smelly pile, set a fire in the middle and let it burn for a couple of days to dry it out enough to use. I went away fairly pleased that we don't need to do that any more!

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.

Nodules

Green Manure Final update. I thought I would share this picture of the super duper nitrogen nodules that have grown on the roots of my green manure. Nice to see something with my own eyes which I'd only previously read about in books.

Since chopping back these winter field beans I have discovered you have to cut the roots pretty short or they start to re-grow.

Green Manure Update

Only about half of my winter field beans have germinated, although some have germinated some distance away from where I actually scattered them! I suspect that birds (or as my neighbour John pointed out, mice) have stolen some of the beans. Either that or I was not very careful when I planted them; both are a possibility. They may also have just decided not to germinate due to conditions not being quite right.


I expected them to have grown a bit bigger by now and to have blocked out the weeds, but the weeds are much more numerous than the green manure. I think I planted them rather too late in the season to be truly effective. They were planted at the end of a very wet summer/autumn, and really only just before winter set in, so I might try again earlier in future, and I might protect them with some mesh whilst they germinate. I know that birds like to pull up seedlings, but that was a risk I was prepared to take this year as they weren't an important crop to me, just an experiment.

Green Manure and free turf

I am very proud to say I have now had time to do my first proper digging on my plot. It is bloody hard work, because although the soil is actually quite nice it is full of thick roots, stones, bricks, and tiny bits of rubbish, everything from sweet wrappers to sheets of glass (see below).

First, I cleared the edge next to the riding and sowed some grass seeds to re-establish the verge now the weeds have gone. While I was doing that, another new allotmenteer (I prefer the term allotmentalist) came along and started chatting. He noticed I was seeding and offered me a couple of square metres of turf for free. Moog likes free stuff so I accepted, even though it was looking a bit dead to me Moog thinks it might re-establish when we get a bit of rain.

The second bit of digging was over toward the centre of my plot, where I have dug two squares and planted some of my green manure seeds. On Saturday I had two willing helpers to help clear the soil, where we were delighted to find a massive sheet of glass, buried under a big piece of plastic sheet, and shattered into a million pieces in my soil. We got quite a bit of it out, but I think I'd better be careful what I plant!

Moog thinks I could always open up a sideline selling glass-spiked veg to secret agents, stalkers, animal rights activists etc. but I think he is being silly again.

Bored of carpeting

Moog is distinctly bored of carpet collecting now, not least due to the fact that it is turning into a fox's public convenience. The fox must enjoy the soft carpet pile against its butt.

So to relieve Moog's boredom, and mine, I have ordered some green manure to plant on my plot. Green manures are grown on spare soil, to be dug in as fertiliser when you're ready to start planting. I've ordered winter field beans and grazing rye from http://www.nickys-nursery.co.uk/. They arrived quickly despite the postal strike - good service, and a good website - highly recommended.