Farcebook

Tag: Digging

  • Creating a covered planting area

    Creating a covered planting area

    After moving the shed I was left with a patch of ground that is relatively low in weeds and planned on using it as just another area for growing things. However, after getting rid of the other greenhouse I was also left with a greenhouse base that either needed giving away to the local metal fairies or reusing somehow. So I had an idea…

    If I removed all the grass, flattened a lump of grass that I built up after last year’s wasp incident and dug in the remains of a compost pile, I’d have a nice area for growing more delicate plants.

    Also it’d thoroughly dig up the ground where the wasps were, so future ones didn’t get any ideas.

    My trusty battery powered rotavator chewed the ground up fairly well, and after some mildly dangerous antics with the greenhouse base, I had an area that was enclosed which should help keep the weeds out.

    The next step was to actually plant things in there. The Range were selling strawberry plants, and after the demise of Wilko they also seem to have bought all their stock and are selling it off cheap. So Wilko’s 99p seed packets were 50p.

    The second photo is for my reference too. There’s two rows of beetroot, two rows of carrots and then several rows of parsnip. The ground had a really good chewing with the rotavator and now actually resembles something you could grow plants in, rather than a field that’s had the grass ripped out.

    The final stage was to set up a small plant cover I’d bought off Amazon. It’s one of those kits made from the tubular metal and plastic connectors that tends to last a season at best before something fails or the wind takes it away. I’ve tried to buy a more robust one so maybe it’ll last all year if I’m careful?

    It was a bit bigger than I expected too…

    The only irritating thing is the plastic cover doesn’t have many straps for tieing it to the frame. I hope it doesn’t explode in the wind the next time we have a storm.

    To prevent this I got creative. I was tempted to attach it to the greenhouse base, but once the parsnips and carrots have grown a bit I’m intending on moving the cover to another part of the plot to cover something else.

    Here’s the finished thing

  • Start of year tidying

    Start of year tidying

    We’re almost at the last frost of the year, which to me is the actual start of the year when it comes to growing things. Here’s a bit of an update since the last post…

    • November – it rained a lot and got cold
    • December – it rained a lot, got colder, I was ill
    • January – it rained a lot, was insanely windy and even colder
    • February – maximum coldness, even windier. The final week it didn’t rain, I managed to go and survey the mess.
    • March – now.

    So we’re in March, people down South have mentioned snow. Last year it snowed around this time and was -4c. I’ve at least bought all the seeds I want to grow and have been trying to clear and better organise the plots.

    During the insane wind one of the greenhouses tried to fold itself flat so one of the jobs I’ve been doing is removing the glass from it to put into the other greenhouse. I’m going to just have one, the space can be used for something else.

    I did try to see if the greenhouse would just stand back up, it is made from bolted together aluminium after all. However some of it snapped and other bits twisted out of shape, which just shows how windy it was – a greenhouse with no windows managed to get blown so hard it snaped in places.

    Intent on turning something kind of annoying into a positive situation I realised there was enough glass in both greenhouses to make one greenhouse be complete. This would save me quite a lot of money. I just needed to take the broken frame down. It’s been up quite a long time and came to me part assembled, and the aluminium bolts pushed into aluminium frames seem to have welded and corroded themselves together. It was not going to come apart easily.

    So I bought a new toy…

    And 20 minutes later it turned a wonky frame of a greenhouse into a flat packed stack of scrap metal. I was expecting some effort but once the blade bit into the metal it ate through it like it was nothing.

    I decided since it’s so windy moving the shed would be a good idea. It can go behind the greenhouse. This will shelter the shed from being blown over, and help prop the greenhouse up. It also means I need less glass to fill in the missing gaps.

    The first job was to clear the back of the plot. A place I’ve rarely gone and it’s mostly full of rubbish thrown over the fence from the houses behind and junk that I’ve abandoned and forgotten about.

    I put some weed matting down to try and keep the brambles at bay, and then moved eight pretty heavy paving slabs from elsewhere on the plot to make a base for the shed.

    When moving the slabs I managed to find all the frogs, and moved them to the pond out the way.

    The next jobs on the plot are to dig over the beds so they’re ready for planting, and to get the shed moved and the greenhouse ready. I’m going to use it for starting off plants until they’re big enough to go outside. Anything that needs more warmth can start on my kitchen window or something. Or I’ll put them in my shed at home with the grow lights if they still work.

  • Seed Planting

    Seed Planting

    Last year I farted about trying to start seeds early in pots at home. It never seemed that successful and involved more farting about hardening the plants off to the outdoor elements. So this year I just waited until the weather warmed up enough that they could go straight in the ground.

    There’s more onions, leeks, broad beans, parsnip, carrots and a bunch of sunflowers that I kept standing on. Hopefully they’ll grow and not get eaten by things. Dropping tiny seeds into vast expanses of soil and hoping they grow before the weeds take over always seems quite a risky process.

    Next door’s zoo watched on with interest and enjoyed the free greenery and the odd grub that I found hiding in the soil.

    And in what will become a weekly chore, the grass needed mowing. Was a bit easier this time, almost as if mowers are designed to cut shorter grass.

    Some things I’d forgotten about are still growing. There’s a forgotten about leek or onion and some rhubarb. I moved and split the rhubarb a few years ago and thought I’d killed it. I guess not. Keep going rhubarb, you’ll smother out that grass!

  • Jungle Clearance

    Jungle Clearance

    Due to the weather being quite rubbish I didn’t get over to the allotment much in the past month. And it seems things are now starting to grow! A lot! Before I could even start I needed to mow the space my car parks on.

    The knackered petrol mower I’ve had for years did actually start up, which was surprising. It got rewarded by being made to chew through thigh high wet grass.

    On the right hand side is a patch of ground that used to be clear and had beans on it. Now it also has grass. Some more vigorous mowing and then a chewing over with the rotavator soon turned it into usable ground. There’s two rows of potatoes in it now.

    Since that took up most of the time I had, all I managed to actually do on the main plot was plant some onions and remove some new weeds that had sprouted up.

    The trees are flowering nicely. Maybe the cherry tree will give us more than a small handful of fruit this year. I did mean to prune it, but that’ll now have to wait.

  • Planting Fruit Bushes

    Planting Fruit Bushes

    Poundland sells cheap fruit bushes, and if you pick the ones with leaves on, they tend to grow fairly well and make a nice hedge type thing. If you pick the ones with no leaves on… they’re dead, you’re buying a dead plant… They’re also not a pound each, but never mind.

    I’ve put them along the edge of the plot to make a sort of fruity hedge. I had a few spaere, so they’ve gone at the end of the plot next to a new rhubarb plant.

    The other job this week was to turn a big grassy part of the plot back into land I can grow things in. It’s an area of the plot that’s always been a messy lump of grass and rubbish. And not little tufts of grass, but great big mounds of the stuff. Clearing this has always been hard work and takes weeks of effort. It’s usually summer by the time I get parts cleared.

    However since I now own a rotavator, it was about half an hour’s work to get it all nicely turned over. The rotavator gets clogged easily on mounds of grass so the trick is to sneak up on them from the side. After a while the blades rip the grass clump out the ground.

    Before
    After

    It needs a bit more work, but the ground is more level and all the rubbish has been picked out.

    Since the batteries in the rotavator weren’t dead yet, I went over the other half of the plot to give the weeds a gentle hint they weren’t supposed to grow there, and cleared some space to plant the rhubarb from earlier.

    All the chopped up leaves and grass will rot down once the weather warms up. It’s between 2 and 7c during the day still, so not a lot’s going on. Except that onion, it’s already been mown over once by mistake, so I’m leaving it alone. You’ve survived my cack-handed gardening, you can live.

    The other jobs I did was to move the bin store from home to the plot, it can be another shed thing to store junk in. And then I attacked the triffids multiplying around the greenhouse. I don’t mind brambles, except when they snake off across the ground, rooting as they go. If chopping at them with the strimmer doesn’t make them go away they’ll be getting sprayed with weed killer.

    Yeah I know, it’s bad to spray nasty poisons on your garden, especially when you’re going to eat the produce, but you try removing brambles by hand using a shovel. Sure, you can cut them up but they’ll grow back a month later. There’s a reason they grow everywhere…

    And all of this was supervised by next door’s chickens and other feathered creatures. I like next door’s little zoo, he’s done two very helpful things

    • Removing the weeds from his plot – chickens and ducks eat anything green looking
    • Building his chicken pens using my fencing. Last year the fence blew down. Now it’s part of a chicken coop, it can’t go anywhere.