Off to the allotment after work to do more fencing. I now have the first 6 sections encased which is good because that means that when the carrots and salad leaves come through, and the leeks (when I get round to that overdue task!) the rabbits shouldn’t be able to destroy them. If only this mesh kept slugs out as well. I also started to dig over section 5 where the leeks will go. I had read that onions need a soil that is manured in the autumn and left to settle as they do not fare well in recently manured soil or soil that hasn’t naturally compacted. So that is how the onion section is. The trouble is that I presumed that because leeks are also alliums, they would prefer the same. They don’t. I read in the book my wife bought me that leeks need a well dug soil. How I missed that I’ll never know, I’ve had my head in that book for weeks. The trouble with not digging up our soil is that bindweed is rampant and so by the time today that I got forking, I was teasing out quite a pile of bindweed roots. Bindweed has broken the surface on this section, and the onion section unlike all the other sections which were well dug at the end of winter. I will have to come back regularly and rake and break up the soil I dug as there are quite a few clods. So far I have only dug over enough for a seed bed area for the seeds to be started off in. Once that is accomplished and the seeds are in, I can work on the rest of the section, oh, and weed the onion section as well.
Next post: 26th April
No comments:
Post a Comment