Much muck

I think the allotment fairies came back to help us this week (no not Pat and Nic who came down to help today, although now you mention it…)  because we needed a big pile of manure to add to our freshly cleared space on plot 118 where the soil pile was and yesterday I heard loads of it being delivered from the stables next door.  Job number one today then was Pilla and I grabbing lots of it which involved several trips with the wheelbarrow and ingenious use of a big rubble bag and two wheeled trolley.  We got plenty enough to cover the ground and with the help of Nic and Pat we dug over all the soil, removed lots more weed roots and glass and worked in the manure.

We then decided to cover the ground with green manure, something I’ve been wanting to do for a while and finally persuaded Philippa into doing it.  We planted stripes of four varieties so hopefully it shouldn’t just look like a mass of weeds and will add some much needed organic matter back in to the soil in the spring.  It should also help break up some of the soil with the plant roots and I think will make the plot look better through the winter as it avoids a sort of brown desert across the plot.  Pilla disagrees with me on the last point so expect lots of posts through the winter on how nice I think it looks!

I finished off the fence at the back, although it does still need a gate.  We also cleared up a bit around the back of the shed and covered it up with some tarpaulin to stop the weeds from coming back.  On Saturday I went to pick up a few more of the 3×2 flags from Wigan.  Those things are incredibly heavy to move and taking them out of the car on your own is an absolute killer.  I put a couple of them down to extend the path, I now can’t put any more down as I’ve run into where we are currently storing the greenhouse.  We suddenly feel like we have done loads on this plot, so we looked through a couple of the old photo’s and we are pretty pleased at our work:

Back on the old plot we harvested quite a bit from the greenhouse including another 57 chillies!  We’ve also discovered another handy thing about people coming and helping us out – we’ve managed to give away quite a lot of our courgette supply!