The Newt on The Allotment

[allotmentnewts]

More progress made over the last couple of weeks!

I need to go steal some more fallen leaves - the amount shown here is almost all of the 6 sacks I got before, I think I might have about a sackful left in the leaf heap.  They certainly make a good mulch, and tamp down quite quickly, so I plan to add more layers over time.  You can’t see in the pictures, but I’m layering cardboard down before I cover with leaf mulch, so this should kill off the grass and weeds underneath, and rot down nicely over the Winter.

It took me several days and an eventual text to the allotment manager to get an opportunity to meet with someone from the allotment council to purchase some fresh compost for my beds, and in the end I was only able to get enough to put one sack down on each of the 7 beds that needed it.  But again, I can layer up as I go.  

Planted as of this weekend:

1 entire bed filled with 30 onions and nothing else

1 mulberry tree with a pair of polarberry blackberries planted with it as the start of a tiny mini guild

1 sweet chestnut tree with a single polarberry blackberry next to it for guild support

Still to come:

Raspberry canes, a plum tree and a walnut tree.

I think at this point in the year, aside from any trees and fruit bushes, I should be good to keep on making new beds without needing to worry about planting them up to keep weeds down.

Next weekend, I’ll try and get together enough newspapers and cardboard to plot out another 2 rows of hexagons, and hopefully get the compost to start them off, too.  Although I think an extra sack of compost needs to go on the garlic bed pronto, as the cloves keep pushing themselves out of the clay soil with their roots!  There’s one sack of compost on top of the soil and newspaper now, but it’s clearly not enough.

Oh!  And I also got another big harvest this weekend.  I was expecting the last harvest to be the final one before my Winter greens reached full maturity, but actually when I went up this weekend I was able to go through and thin out again and come away with a tasty heap of greens.

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Mushrooms!

The new design of my plot will be great for a lot of things, but one consequence of the design is that I now have a lot of paths running around my space.  And paths usually means grass to mow, weeds to pull and wasted space that could be used to grow things.

I’ve been inspired by the projects I’e seen done by the wonderful folk at Edible Acres, who maintain a thick compost mulch on their paths, generously seeded with edible winecap mushrooms.  

Mulched paths are a great idea.  Even aside from the benefit of getting rid of grass and weeds, there’s the increased moisture retention of the soil and an improved habitat for beneficial insects - one thing the straw mulch I used this year did was fill my allotment with spiders, crickets, bees, ladybirds and slow worms that all feasted on the less beneficial creatures in my space.  Building up mulch in the paths also allows me to level and raise them along with my beds, avoiding the need for permanent and expensive bed edgings, and helping compensate for the treacherously uneven and sloped ground I’m working with.

But this mushroom plan adds even more benefits to the design!  Winecap mushrooms are extremely easy to grow, edible and tasty, and the rich mycellium spreading into my beds will help provide nutrients and good soil structure to my crops.

Now, I sadly don’t have a small army of chickens to provide me with the mountains of mulch that the Edible Acres folks have, but I am confident I can make this work on a smaller scale.

I’ve purchased a good-sized bag of winecap grain spawn - that is, grain and hardwood sawdust packed with mushroom mycellium - as well as some rough hessian fabric and more hardwood sawdust.  I’m making use of the space created by the half-dug-out old compost heap, as it’s a shaded and very moist space.  (You may remember that from a much older post in January - it’s in a terrible position and was full of trash - I’ve been slowly digging it out with plans to move the mini shed into this space).

By creating lasagna layers of sawdust and crumbled up mycellium spawn in the folded fabric, and then covering it and soaking it, I’ll hopefully see the mushroom spawn spread out over the next few months and fill the fabric and sawdust with spawn.

I’ll cover my paths with cardboard and either gathered leaves, hay bales or sawdust, and once my fabric is fully mycelliated I’ll tear it into strips and insert these under the mulch and cardboard, to encourage the mushrooms to take up residence in the soil of the paths themselves.  If all goes well, then either next year or the year after I should start seeing rich flushes of edible mushrooms along with everything else!

[allotmentnewts]

October has almost bled into November, but I’m getting lots of tasty Autumn crops!

Some of the hexagons I assembled earlier in late September, I also decided to seed with Autumn/Winter crops.  This has the dual benefit of giving me some lovely, tender vegetables fresh from the allotment well into November/December, but also ensures the beds wouldn’t get clogged up with weeds before the cold weather hit.

I’ve planted these up with three concentric rings divided into segments.  In the outer ring are varieties of turnip greens, mustard greens, mizuna and land cress.  Then a thin border of garlic that will make for an early harvest next Summer.  Next are leef beet, pak choi and tatsoi, and in the centre a giant Winter spinach variety.

I’ve sown these far more thickly than I would normally, and this is intentional.  The thick carpet of leafy seedlings offers no space for weeds to get established, and as the plants grow larger I can thin them out and the thinnings, tender baby vegetables that barely need cooking, make for delicious early harvests.  Eventually the plants will be more appropriately spaced and I can let them mature fully.  But as you can see from the photos taken of recent harvests, I’ve been enjoying a bumper crop of baby veg every week!

Some other successes are also shown above.  Not everything died off in the heat wave - a couple of Autumn squash plants I thought dead have come back fast and are producing fruit.  These are crookneck squash, and I’m excited to see how they do.  My oca is also going well, and a brief exploration in the soil today revealed that they are producing tubers already!  These should be ready to harvest November/December, depending on when the frosts kill off the plants, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how well they seem to be doing given the Summer we’ve had.

Finally, my nasturtiums are thriving.  The clusters of them I planted around my mini pond are really bursting with life, providing a bumper crop of endless flowers for some late bees, and also providing me with tasty edible flowers, leaves and seed pods.

[allotmentnewts]

Allotment Update - October 2018

Summer was a bit of a bust for my allotment.  We had a heat wave, along with an extended dry spell, and unfortunately my water supplies ran out fairly quickly.  By the end of the hot, dry period, the soil on the allotment was so parched there were foot-deep, inch-wide cracks in it, and the earth was packed solid.  Very few plants thrived in that, or even survived, while the weeds had a bumper year for productivity, and I ended up making the decision to leave it be until cooler, wetter weather hit.

But now we’re back on track, and I’m re-working my allotment with a new design plan to make better use of the space, and also hopefully mitigate some of the issues we came across.

I’m using the excellent free website VegPlotter to design my allotment, and as it looks like the creator of the site is going to be working on companion planting soon, I’ll likely use it to help me plan my planting schedule next year, too.  My plan is to re-work the entire plot into a honeycomb of hexagons, each one with sides two feet across.  I’m still using the no-dig method to build the beds, and I’ll layer them up with good soil and compost, while building up the paths with deep layers of cardboard and mulch.

The design has some benefits to it besides looking really cool.  I’m a fan of companion planting and polyculture, but I know that the precise best way to combine several plants in a polyculture can vary depending on your location, soil, plant varieties and local pests.  By keeping my beds small and self-contained like this, I can experiment a lot more.  Maybe have one row of hexagons dedicated to corn and beans, and experiment with companion planting different kinds of squash, oca, huazontle and maybe even other plants, and see which bed does best.  I can try different fertilisers, feeding schedules, watering schedules and soil layering.  

Another benefit is that each hexagon, though small, is an efficient shape and can be planted densely.  Using the below grid pattern, I estimate a single hexagon could hold 13 corn planted radially, plus 6 huazontle in a ring in the middle, and 3 each of oca and squash planted alternately around the outer ring.

Another possibility would be to erect a tall pole in the centre with wires radiating from the top of it to the outer corners, and train tomatoes, peas, beans, cucumbers, grapes or hops up those.  This would still leave the rest of the hexagon free to plant other vegetables in.  I could also use some hexagons to plant mini polycultures to support fruit and nut trees, with a central tree supported by 2-3 bushy or vine-forming berry plants such as raspberries, blueberries etc, with the outer parts of the hexagon providing space for leafy salads and lettuce, inter-planted with radish and carrots and supported at the edge with a border of strawberry plants or low herbs.

Another great advantage of the hexagon honeycomb design is that I can build it up gradually.  Each week I’m laying down plans for more hexagons, and I’m able to build more as and when I have the resources for them.

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Once the weather started to get really wet, and cooled down enough to prevent the soil from properly drying out between rains, the plot really started to unsafe to work on.  We immediately realised that at this point, the much-needed work of digging out the compost heap and moving the water butts would have to wait, as the soil was so wet and slippery that we couldn’t get enough traction to do either without constantly risking injury.

Soon, the soil was so clogged with water that even digging over the beds wasn’t possible.  I was able to get 3 of them dug over before this happened, but didn’t want all the work on the plot to come to a standstill for the whole of Winter.

Figuring out a solution had to involve some research.  I didn’t know at first if the soil issues were caused by the issues with water and the poor planning of the previous tenant, or if there were underlying factors to consider.

This is where geology comes in handy.  The British Geological Survey has an incredibly detailed map of the UK, which you can use to zoom in on your location and get an idea of both the soil and underlying bedrock you’re dealing with.  

What we learned was that we were working on extremely clay-rich soil, over mudstone, with very little drainage.  While the set-up left behind by the previous tenant didn’t help matters, the soil situation was one we’d need to work around long-term.

As it happens, the solution to this would make it safer to walk on the plot, as well as make it easier for us to redesign the beds, with no exhausting work cutting turf.  The no-dig method involves minimal actual digging or breaking of the soil.  Instead, you layer over it with materials.  First, a cardboard or paper layer to block sunlight from reaching any grass or weeds.  Next, a thick layer of mulch such as woodchip, straw or leaves that would warm the soil and keep off weeds, and which once they finally decomposed, would improve the drainage and consistency of the soil at the same time as feeding it.  Then, on top of the beds only, well-rotted manure which, as it continued to rot down, would leech nutrient tea into the soil layers below until it, and the mulch, became the new topsoil.  The next year we’d repeat the mulch and compost, and the year after that, so that as each previous layer slowly breaks down, we build up and maintain a healthy soil.

Manure is easy.  The allotment has a free fortnightly delivery of horse poop and used horse bedding from a local stables, which simply needs to be allowed to rot down in a suitable spot.  I made moving the green compost bin into a good position a priority, and set to filling it with good stuff.  Mulch was harder to come by.  Woodchip is recommended, but it’s painfully expensive - it’d have cost over a grand to mulch the whole allotment with it.  Leaves are great, and free if you can get them, but we couldn’t locate enough.  Hay bales, fortunately, are pretty cheap.  A 20kg bale costs £3-£5 from horse feed and bedding suppliers, plus delivery.

We initially tried newspaper as the base layer for our no-dig allotment, but as we weren’t able to get the bales to the allotment in time, it... didn’t work out well.

Cardboard is much sturdier, thicker and less likely to blow about in the same way.  We had several large boxes of our own from Amazon deliveries, and asked around our friends, family and local shops to save their used boxes for us over Winter, and gradually we built up the mulch cover.

[allotmentnewts]

When we first took on the allotment, we had no idea what was going to be on it.  There’s never any guarantee you’ll have a shed, water butts, prepared beds, or anything other than a patch of dirt.  You’ve got no idea the condition of the soil, and no idea the kind of weather the space gets.  So it’s important to take stock of what you have as soon as possible.

In our case, we were really fortunate.  The previous tenant had done a lot of work on the space before abandoning it, so we came to a plot that already had a shed, a toolshed, water butts and compost heaps set up.  But we still had to take stock of those things to check the condition.

The first thing to notice is that the shed has a fairly pronounced lean.  It tilts to the South (to the right in the above photo) and also to the West.  As a result, the door is askew and doesn’t seal shut.  The previous tenant seems to have heaped up soil and pallets to form a foundation for the shed, but didn’t get it properly flat before building.  Next, we had to check the condition of some things around this.

Because the shed is raised, there’s a little portable step up to the door, which wobbles.  There were some stone slabs in front of and around this on the soil which, when we repositioned them, gave the step some stability.  More pallets hold one of the water butts, a run-off container, and a wheelie bin which - it turned out - was being used to store excess water when the butts overfilled.  Another water butt was at the front of the shed.  Fortunately both butts had guttering pipes running to them already, but the butts had been full for a long time and heavy rain meant the soil around the entrance to the shed, and the space in front of it, is a bit of a quagmire.

The large compost heap behind the shed (left side of the above photo) was the next thing to check.  Built from wooden pallets, the sides of it were clearly rotting and not in great condition.  So much so, that I was able to get the front pallet off by just pulling on it - the wood crumbled away.

Inside the heap, was not the well-rotted, healthy compost there should have been.  I suspect that the previous tenant shoveled a lot of unwanted soil into the heap at some point, given that it has the same thick, sticky clay texture as the rest of the plot.  He also, apparently, started using it as a trash heap at some point.  A short period of digging revealed some less-than-inspiring finds.

It wasn’t all bad news, though.  The small toolshed was in fine condition, as was the green plastic compost bin.  The shed was dry inside and free of leaks, and actually turned out to have some useful tools, equipment, little junky items we could use and handy toolboxes and containers!  

But we knew immediately that we had some work we needed to do.  First on the list had to be tidying the plots and preparing the land for Spring, as we needed to show we would keep to the lease and we also needed the beds to be in good condition ASAP.  But once that’s taken care of, priorities had to be:

Dig out the compost heap.  In addition to being full of clay soil and trash, and having rotten sides, it’s also positioned so that it never receives any direct sun at all.  This contributed to the rotting of the wood, which never warmed enough to dry out, and meant there was less heat and energy to encourage good, healthy break-down of vegetative matter.  Compost needs to get hot to kill off any nasties in it, which this clearly can’t do.  In addition, the heap extends back almost to the wall at the rear, and it’s clear there’s a lot of space going to waste there.

Move the water butts.  The constant splosh of overflowing water on the pallets has caused them to start to weaken, and I’m not keen on being present if/when the pallets rot through and the full water butts fall to the ground.  The same splosh of water is also creating a bit of a quagmire around the entrance to the shed, making the space unsafe.  From a practical perspective, the butts are also in the full-sun position where they will evaporate more quickly.  There’s space between the shed and the rear wall that, with some properly installed run-off butts to prevent overflow, could be used for this.  

We also needed to take proper measurements of the space.  The soil at the allotment is so sticky and soft that you sink in to the ankle walking over bare soil, and come out with an inch of it coating the sole of your boot.  The beds were huge and unwieldy even without this issue, and not an efficient use of the space.  In fact, taking measurements we found the plot is laid out something like this:

Paths get wider or narrower across their length, sometimes too narrow at one end for a wheelbarrow to safely pass, sometimes so wide there’s a foot of wasted space on each side of you.  On top of that, we suspect the small bed next to the toolshed was once as long as the one above it, as the soil around the shed is bare, muddy and soft.

A complete rethink of the beds layout was in order.

[allotmentnewts]

In October 2017, I took on my first allotment.  Now, 4 months later, I’ve decided to finally start writing the allotment blog I should have started the day I accepted my keys!

Spouse and I dream of one day keeping our own smallholding, but we really need to get some practice and experience on a more manageable space before we dive into that!  After years of council allotment waiting lists and failed experiments in our tiny concrete garden, we finally got our chance.

I’m aiming to run this as a no-dig space, using modern environmentally efficient gardening and farming techniques as well as using good traditional methods where needed, and hopefully spending money only where necessary.  

I consider myself a beginner at this.  I helped my grandparents and great-grandparents on their allotments and vegetable gardens as a child, but it’s been years since I’ve had real space to grow anything in myself and I’m learning it all over again. I’m hoping my blog will be fun for me, and useful for anyone considering trying these methods, as you’ll get to see all the successes and failures I go through as I learn what works on my space.

Over the next few posts I’m going to recap the last 4 months as though I’d started this blog when I actually should have.  I learned a lot since accepting the keys to the allotment so don’t want to skip out on any of that.