Out with the old, in with the new

It’s that time of year when there are plenty of leaves around on the ground, so time to stock up and start making next years leaf mould! Now many garden writers obviously live in the leafy countryside and never see a car. I only the other hand live in a city so inevitably end up picking them up from the side of a road that has many, many cars passing along it each day – completely against the advice of these rural-based writers. I figure any leaf mould is better than none, and it’s probably nothing compared to the crap kicked out here in the days when we had industry (and no clean air act) – there’s a reason why the stone on our house is black!

So after collecting 10 bin bags full I figured I’d better empty out the old stuff:

Black Gold!

It’s not fully rotted down, but it’s great to add as a mulch to the beds, and I put it over the bed where the old blackcurrants were and then covered it over with weed fabric. I can’t decide what to put in this new bed at the moment so covering it over will give me more time to decide. Maybe some more strawberries?

All tucked up for winter

Having emptied out the remainder of last years leaves, it was time to put in this years. Only after emptying the builder sacks I put them in, I discovered they’d excluded the light very well from the soil they were on. So I dug out the remaining roots (mainly nettles) and added a couple of buckets of compost from the compost heap to this area.

Blackcurrants here?

I’m thinking I might put some blackcurrants in here, maybe some Titania? Any recommendations?

I moved the leaf sacks to the other side of the  bath and put the leaves I have gathered in them. I also use Biotal Compost Maker with them which is supposed to help them break down quicker. And whilst it looks like a complete mess here at the top of the plot, this is a vast improvement to how it was at the start of the day! The plot slopes quite steeply here so is quite difficult to walk along here so I have leveled this part of the path past the leaves and generally got rid of a lot of the weeds

There’s a path here, honest!

Finally the first Brussels of the ‘season’ were ready and eaten for tea, the first Brussels I’ve successfully grown:

And very nice they were too!

Mulch = slug party

So now I’ve declared summer, I planted out some of my French beans: Borlotti to climb up the newly assembled netting and Major, a dwarf, yellow bean. I started both of these in toilet rolls a few weeks ago so they’ve established good roots now and with my new found confidence in the arrival of summer, they were good to go out. To grow up the other side of the net I planted a row of tall peas (Alderman).

Since it’s so dry and my water supplies are running low (I’m going to be forced to walk to the tap at this rate!) so my thoughts turned to mulch for the beans, following on from the fruit. So I put a good layer of leaves around the newly planted Borlotti beans. Some time later after I’d returned home I couldn’t help but think I’d just created the perfect environment for slugs to get to the bean plants. Hmmm, didn’t really think that one through when I put the mulch out did I? So today I popped to the local garden centre to get some slug pellets, hoping it wasn’t too late. Unfortunately I asked Mrs D if she’d like to come along, so it turned into the most expensive trip to get slug pellets I’ve ever been on!

Fortunately only one plant seems to have been attacked and the whole row has now handful of organic slug pellets to keep to little ******** away from my plants. It also has a couple of ‘windmills’ I nicked from the kids to help keep the birds away too.

Since I’ve got plenty of leaves, I mulched round a couple of rows of broad beans as well, lord knows they could do with all the help they can get to start growing.

The strawberries have far more flowers on than ever before. This weekend I’ll be ‘putting them to bed’ with a good covering of straw around them before the fruit starts to set, and I need to put the chicken wire over the top as well.

The loganberry is doing its best to take over the allotment. Whilst you can’t see it so well in the picture, what started as just a 50cm plant 3 years ago has now spread about 5m along the wall, and possibly over the wall too!

And this year it looks like it’s going to be covered in fruit.