On Monday we cleared a lot of weeds (back left corner of the front part) and were very proud of ourselves. Tuesday through to Friday I was in agony from my bum to my ankles!
Today we went back and I raked all the stones I could and dug up all the roots from the area we cleared on the Monday. It was tough work and the roots were the thickness of my thumb.
I extended the patch we had already prepared, dug the whole thing over with some organic compost and planted some pumpkin seedlings. Only three but I read that they need quite a lot of space.
My Dad popped up to have a look at what we've been doing and offered to help a bit after he comes back from his holiday in the middle of July. That's very nice of him, I had assumed he would want to stay as far away as possible! He didn't stay long so next I dug over a long strip to plant the swede seedlings. I figured that as they are root vegetables I would need to dig the ground quite deep so I went down about a foot and a half - this was the most time consuming job today and my back is sore! 4 hours later I dug in some organic compost and we planted the swede seedlings and marked off the area so we don't stand on them by accident.
The seedlings came from eBay as I didn't have time to grow them from scratch because we got the allotment quite late. I have a few things growing on the kitchen windowsill for when we clear some more ground.
Here's a pic of how we are doing
Here's a pic of how we are doing
A foot and a half is really deep! The general guide is if the soil hasn't been worked in ages go down 2 spade depths, and if it's ok, than 1 spade depth.
ReplyDeleteWhen we first did pumpkins on the allotment-we did it over an area we weren't going to get to--that way their leaves would smother some of the weeds.
Let me know what you want to sow--I may have extra seeds I can post!
And if you want to do root veggies the almost no dig way, just dig out an appropriate-sized hole where you're going to plant each one, and fill in with compost. It doesn't take much compost, you don't have to dig as much and the plant gets a lovely soft medium to grow in.
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