2nd December 2022 - The festive month has arrived and it is now officially wet all the time
The long wait for the holiday season is over, and nice though that might be, it begins to call time on the allotment effort and of 2022.
What we have begun to appreciate is that really from the beginning of December the instances of wet weather increase, the amount of daylight available each day, and the continuous presence of dew, means that from now until at least February the ground is permanently wet. This means that working conditions become quite poor and with the exceptions of clearance work and maybe moving things about, what can actually be done is minimal. Construction, drilling and sawing wood all becomes pretty much a "no! no!" as everything is wet and of course, wood expands during these times. Best wait until spring is well underway for these things.
The wormery however only has the lid left to do, and this is breaking pallets apart as opposed to putting things together. So this little exercise is something that can wind up the current year.
On well drained parts of the allotment it is also possible to loosen the soil, pull out the weeds which are now normal kind of weeds, not the irrepressible bind weed and couch grass of old. Desi managed to sort 90% of this plot in a couple of hours. There are still some plants to remove, hence why not 100%.
Some clearance work to be done too… carrots and parsnips. We aren’t digging them all up, just 50% but as you can see the carrots are not the shape you would want. Both the carrots and parsnips suffer the same problem. The soil is so dense for these root vegetables, 2 years we have had this problem, next year will be on more sandy soil so that the roots can go straight down and not have to twist and turn. The taste of these vegetables is the same, just it is a lot more difficult to prepare them to cook.
All the beans and the sweetcorn removed and the support canes stored away for another year. We are going to use this same patch next year for beans and sweetcorn, but will be a completely different setup… watch out for that next May as we begin to construct and plant.
In this last picture Desi is clearing away some plants and disposing of them in the compost bins. The two avocado’s we may place in the cold frame there and let them take their chances with the weather, we’ve nowhere to put them anyway.
Notice the cladding now on the terrace on this side. We are all ready to build the path, we just need some more wood… just putting the request out there!
