A Busy Week

It has been a busy week. Bill Callaghan and I gave Terry Goody a hand to start cleaning up his overgrown allotment. As you can see from the picture it had started to get away on him.

It was basically a scrape off the top with a spade method and moving soilfrom some of the beds that had been raised to form a pile for the planned boarded raised beds at the top end of the plot above the flooding level. Having moved the soil from one bed the plan was to sow grass seed on it and later plant some fruit trees. However, we thought as this would give an instant usable planting area that it would be better to wet it and then rotovate it and get some plants in.

Weeds were scraped off the top of a couplr more beds before the rotovator was brought in and two raised heap beds created ready for planring some brassicas kindly donated by Nev. We ended up putting in almost 80 brassicas including red cabbage, cabbage, cauliflower and sprouts.

Behind the netted brassica bed are the garlic nicely hoed, and in the far background the compost bin has almost been filled.

A second brassica bed planted and netted. in front of it Terry has set up a number of short rows, you can just see the white marker tabs. Two spare gardener's delight tomato plants on the end of the row. In the foreground another bed scraped off and waiting for rotovation, probably next week. Planking frame to make the box raised bed will probably be made next week and filled from the pile of soil behind the netting.

Having made good progress on Terry's plot we rotovated a large area on Bill's plot and then got his sweet corn bed ready for planting. In the meantime my own plot was in need of a bit of weeding around the Parsnips and then resowing of the Beetroot that had been savaged by the sparrows. I covered the sowed areas of beetroot this time to keep the birds off when they germinated. Friday was spent moving the contents of the compost heap by the fruit cage and levelling the area to take some brassicas I have waiting to plant out. It is raining this morning so that is why I am sitting here writing this blog instead of being out at the plot getting the brassicas planted, maybe this afternoon.