10th October 2022 - More Construction Holes And Soil Displacement!
Fortunately we needed some additional soil to make up the difference in the lower (of the two) enclosed beds we are now building. In the last blog you could see the difference and it is just visible again here top left of the first picture.
This is going to be where the second terrace is going to be. Why are we digging it out so deep? Well, we are going to put the terrace (pallets) on stilts (piles), which will allow us to easily level off the terrace and give us something to build on top of. Below the pallets we will be lining with black plastic to prevent weed growth and then filling the space up with all the rubbish we have dug up, bits of plasterboard, rubble, metal, plastic et al. We won’t be using these stones that you can see in the buckets. These we are saving to use as slightly decorative filler for another part of the construction… more on that later.
In the next picture Check out all that rubbish we dug out (center left)… that little lot, plus those bricks there, and two compost bags full of junk metal, plastic and other random stuff.
The melons were long harvested and here is another view of the construction. Now the second sowing of peas is doing well in the foreground (above picture), as are the radish behind them (it must be the 3rd or 4th sowing of those).
In the above picture you can start to see how things are shaping up. Gradually the plot and what we intend for it is emerging. Top right: the three pallets that will be forming the main flat surface of the upcoming terrace. They were acquired via a fellow allotment holder who he had 4 or 5 of them, and told us to use as many as we needed. We grabbed 3 as we wanted uniform pallets for this particular need. Some beetroot seedlings have been put in the foreground (notice the sticks that mark out the ends of the lines).
In the last picture. The courgette foliage has all caught this dusty white mold. We keep chopping off these leaves as it inhibits the leaves from doing their job… to the left of them, the swedes are going well too… although the white stuff appears to have spread to them and we might need to do some pruning to encourage “fattening up” during the remainder of the Autumn.
We have to wait for these plants to die off before we can seriously harvest the potatoes which are in the foreground within that box-like construction.
