As the good weather shines down on us, the work proceeds unabated. The plot is starting to fill up although there is a long way to go.
The potatoes are doing really well, some flowers even beginning to show on one or two. The outside tomatoes are doing well, as are the courgettes and butternuts. Hard to tell at the moment what is what in the Brassica section but everything seems to be growing well, with only the odd one or two signs of slugs…
We have a small mound of sifted soil, on the fire quadrant and we still have the last dregs of manure left to move from where it was piled up as work will start there soon, after the compost heaps are finished.
Another picture of the top ⅓ of the plot. We have now relocated the pallets to here and arranged 5 of them into our basic structure for the compost heap. The other two still laying down are for the doors which will close the structure and keep everything inside. We will need a further two pallets for the two lids which will sit on top of these vertical pallets.
You can see the remains of the manure we had which was piled up from the water tap to the remnants you can see here. The rather nice looking long leaved green plant on the leftmost side of our plot is Horseradish. It is the root of this plant that you harvest (if you can wrestle it out of the ground), peel, mash, add some other bits and pieces and you've made a potent condiment for beef or eggs, or to add a bit of oomph to something like mayonnaise. Anyway we’re not harvesting any right now. It’s a bit of a prolific grower, so getting rid of some of it might be the first port of call.
Notice the sheet of corrugated plastic roofing material inside the polytunnel - an innovation designed to keep some furry intruders out who seem to have developed a penchant for seeds pots inside. 3 sets of courgettes needed sowing as previous attempts had been systematically consumed.
In the next picture the runner beans finally have taken and are reaching out for their poles. You can see the compost heap construction a little better in this one: just pallets tied together with electric wiring, but will be screwed together as more work is undertaken.
The last of the dehydrating couch grass, bind weed, and horseradish on spare remaining pallets. Most of this has now been dried, burnt and returned to the soil in the form of ash. These weeds are not easy to compost and we’ve had a lot of them!
Note the horseradish is going well over here as well. We can see us doing battle with this little lot during the summer / autumn seasons. Our seating area consisting of pallets and buckets has been relocated now to this area, away from the growing sections.
