Hobbit Allotment!

[rustylady]

My advice would be do as you suggested and clear away all the dead grass. Either build or buy a compost bin and stack it all in there. Then start digging your plot. You will need to dig out the brambles one by one. If you want to plant overwintering onions then go for it. Take it slowly. Clear and dig an area big enough for your onions, and then carry on to the next area. From the comments about wetness I would assume that your plot is clay(ish). More reasons to make your own compost to be dug in at a later time. Forget brassicas till next year - then worry about the lime.

[Gro-Bag]

Raised beds made a big difference to my wettish clayish veggie plot. that and lots of home-made compost. Good luck : - )

[horticultural_hobbit]

Cheers, my lovelies.

Ma is now sulking, and making eyes at me. I shall be standing firm, in this parent-child scenario. What we have, is more than enough.

Cheers, Rusty, that is indeed the plan. I am going to clear my plot though, I'm finickity that way. So I can have a blank canvas, and I will most likely then complain about it. Start with the onions et cetra, and then have a bash at it properly in the new year. I have a few spring hero cabbages, that I might experiment with. If they come to nothing, it's all pennies, isn't.

I think it is clay, but the soil looks nice. I almost did a victory dance, when I saw wiggly woo the worm. Ma and Grandad Mike were also jabbering on about frogs. Apparently, Grandad Mike jumped and turned the air as blue as the...well, Blues. Froggy was unharmed.

Lottie Secretary did say about a leaf mold. So I will get onto that soon. There is a lot of waste, too much if ever that applied to be composted. Ma and mike counted up the bags, I'd given up counting.

Brambles are vicious creatures, dotted around the plot.

This is the whole thing again, I didn't take it properly yesterday. I'm standing on the very end. My bit, goes up to the bags are, past where granddad mike is stood trying not to fall over. There's a bit on the foreground that has been cleared a little.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?f...type=1&theater

[reetnproper]

That's a decent sized patch. You're going to have loads of fun and this time next year ..... tonnes of veg

Reet
x

[horticultural_hobbit]

Feels very big to me! Will be a serious mission to get it cleared and then ship shape. I will be much happier when I can see the dirt and turn it over. Making me, in the interim, absolutely terrified. Can dig up and dig in fishy bone and blood stuff. Reading about clay has some what scared me further! I would like to make the best of it though, im an optimist. There are lots of things in my seedbox and coming in the post. As long as i leave space for Palak and coriander-which Ma will think is her baby.

And i do want pumpkins and squashes. I'm all too bouyed by the one pumpkin I did get. Lottie secretary encouraged me to get cracking between now and Christmas. Just need to get it done!

[rustylady]

There's never too much waste to compost Hobbit. You'll be surprised how quickly it rots down to almost nothing. Don't try to compost the brambles though. Are you allowed bonfires? You could stack the brambles in a pile and burn them on Bonfire night.

[horticultural_hobbit]

There is loads, Rusty, and probably all of it is compostable. It's all being returned to mother earth and the universe. Brambles are the devil in disguise.

We can do bonfires, in Novemeber. The cretinous things are evil. Probably will have to burn them.

[HeyWayne]

Napalm, napalm, napalm.

[horticultural_hobbit]

Grass is dead, as the lottie secretary has doused it with weedkiller. Have to scoop the grass and then dig. S'like collecting the shed coats from a small population of tribbles. It's a small mercy that it's not alive with the sound of music or something. Once I find a wind up radio, that might change...but yes, I've not got it bad. Another plot had six foot high weeds.

[Florence Fennel]

Only just seen this Hobbit, congratulations and good luck with it all.

[taff]

many happy diggings
and don't waste the weeds that can't be composted in a normal heap, put a bit of plastic down, throw them all on that, cover them and leave for a year if you can...more compost for next year

[horticultural_hobbit]

There will be lots of diggings... All being well

[snohare]

I have to go all mad scientist on it

Nah you don't, just type the words "jam jar soil test" or something like that into a search engine. Or look for it in the indexes of gardening books at your local bookstore.

Being a proponent of raised beds (says he, nailing his colours to the mast) I can recommend them for drainage - basically what they do is change/accelerate the temperature and moisture/pH gradients in the soil, that's how they improve the growing conditions - but if you don't feel up to sourcing the timber and compost etc for raised beds as yet, French drains are probably what you need.
(1) Dig a hole 50cm square, as far down as you can. If the soil is very clayey (yes that is a word !) then you may have to dig down to hard pan - where the soil suddenly changes colour and texture and become more like a (not-always) crumbly shale. Break into this layer as deeply as you can with a pinch bar if this is so. That makes it permeable.
(2) Put all those stones that you have been throwing aside tidily as you dig, into the hole. Preferably biggest first, then in order of decreasing size. (Think Roman road here. A road is simply a well drained surface fit for travelling upon.) Once you have done this, you have created a soakaway - an area where the water will drain away faster than everywhere else. This creates a flow of water away from other areas.
(3) If needs be, create stone-filled trenches in a herringbone pattern towards the soakaway. They don't need to be deep, merely going downslope. (They don't do roadside ditches anymore, they only do French drains nowadays. Safer and it cuts back on spikes in waterborne pollution after rain.)
Paths are of course ideal for this sort of trench.
To change acidity for combatting club root, try using woodash from your bonfire. It will have to be kept dry before you add it though, and the effects will not last as long as lime. (Potash leaches out of the soil very rapidly.)
I hear tell that a comfrey leaf or a rhubarb leaf wrapped around the root ball of a brassica seedling will help it ward off club root in the soil into which it is being transplanted. Don't know if this is apocryphal, but I imagine the comfrey would contain lots of nutrients to help nourish a seedling, and rhubarb has insecticidal qualities...personally I would just let them get as big as possible before planting them out, that does make a difference.
And of course there are always these newfangled mycorhizzal thingymabobs to play with. I'm getting them next year...

[endymion]

Our soil's really heavy clay that gets waterlogged in winter through to March because the water table's so high. We spotted some bits of perforated pipe on a building site and went and asked it we could have some, and came away with enough lengths to make a mini-drainage system beneath our new veg patch.

The builders told us to just bury the pipe as deep as we could, try to make it slope downhill and to dig a pit at the lowest end and fill it with stones and/or rubble. They said to cover the pipe with weed membrane and then with soil, same with the top of the pit - to stop them getting blocked.

It seems to have worked, so far at least, but the double-digging, manure and cheap compost (split bags) that we dug in have probably helped a bit too.

[taff]

ot, if you can bear it, do as snohare suggested but make a pond for run off too. beneficial frogs and things will eat your nasties