Slow Going

Well its been another hard weekend. This weeks deluge of water whether frozen or otherwise has made my life far more difficult, the plot being on clay soil.
My first phot this week show the progress I'd made by the end of Saturday, although I finish installing the second raised bed in the rain. I had thought the rain on Saturday night would make the plot unworkable on Sunday, but it didn't actually make much difference.




Just to show you what I'm up against I took some closeups, first of the couch on the plot so you can see just how dense it is, and then of the roots so that you can see how dense and matted they are.















With the ground as wet as it now is I've also had to change tactics, or risk losing too much soil from the plot, so I'm creating a couch root pile in the top corner. When the weather warms up and I've cleared the rest of the plot I'll return to the pile and sort it out - even if it means dowsing the lot with glyphosphate. I suspect I'm going to have to treat the new paths in this way to kill the couch under the bark chippings the council put down to mark the boundaries of the plot.



By the end of Sunday afternoon I'd completed the installation of the remaining raised bed that defines the lower edge of the plot. Next weekend I'll clean the excess soil out of the base of the compost heap and bring the soil level in the bed to the top; I can then plant the Jerusalem artichokes I was generously given in mid January.

Whilst on the subject of planting, I put my garlic in this afternoon. I'm just hoping it grows this year rather than just vanishing without trace like it did last year. Just as an illustration of the difference between the garden plot and the allotment it took me 15 minutes to fork through and weed the 2ft by 8ft section of bed for the garlic as opposed to 2.5 hours it took me to dig the 3ft by 6ft section for the artichoke bed.

I'm also indulging in another experiment. I acquired half a dozen steel waste paper bins 12" square and 16" deep from a skip before Christmas. Having sterilised them by soaking for 7 days in a strong solution of Jeys fluid and drilled 5 20mm drainage holes in the base, I filled two of them with compost and sowed Early Nantes. They are now in the greenhouse, with a sheet of glass over them. With a bit of luck I'll have a nice batch of carrots in about 12 weeks.

Anyway I'll leave you with another shot of the plot. I've set up a string line along the right hand edge of the plot in preporation for the big dig - getting a bed ready for my potatoes by Easter.