Another glorious day, the weather has certainly be kind to me lately. Every time I get in the mood to go down to the plot and do some work the sun is shining and the birds are singing.
Today was the day that the big empty fruit cage (or at least that’s what i think was supposed to be) came down. A couple of reasons for this. Firstly it was sitting there empty and is a bit of an eyesore on the plot. Secondly I had now noticed that although primarily made with netting and canes it did in fact throw quite a shadow on the main growing area of the plot.
Now the dismantling process had to be done in a methodical way. starting at one end and working around. The old fella who’d erected it had done so using a load of canes and god knows how many little pieces of twisted garden wire; all of which had to be undone in order to remove the netting. I plan to re-use the netting elsewhere on the plot so wanted to minimize any damage. This took the best part of 2 hours and by the end I was left with a whole load of green netting that I rolled up for reuse later and a whole load of bamboo canes which I hope will still be in a good enough condition to be used as supports for beans and other crops yet to be planted.
As well as the work taking down the old netted structure there was also time to get on with some digging and planting. Finishing off the main growing area I stripped back the final area of black weed suppression matting and dug it over mixing in the last of the biochar. This now gives me an area of 7.5 meters by 6.0 meters less a small amount of area given over to paths.
Today was not to be just a day of grafting. I had come to plot with the purpose of planting out my main crop spuds (Cara). I also decided to plant a couple of rows of broad beans as I now had some following the bumper selection of seed packets given to me over by my mum at Easter. I can add these to the peas that were planted previously and the runner beans yet to be planted to give a bit of extra variation in the legume section. As a last minute decision I also decided to put in a row of beet root. I had originally planned to grow all my salad crops at home in containers but decided that with everything else and the lack of space and need to buy more compost and containers I should make use of the space available at the allotment instead. Who knows, I may even plant out some of the tomatoes down here once they have grown a bit more.
My Neighbor Adam turned up just as I was finishing and we chatted for a bit – he showed me around his plot and we looked the things that were starting to show on his which was great. I also let him have a couple of spears of asparagus seeing that they are a bonus from the previous occupant and also that his patch of asparagus is a lot bigger than mine and therefore he can probably afford to repay me soon enough. A nice end to a long day. The longest day I’ve spent on the allotment so far.