Starting to dig

On Monday we had aimed to get to the plot in the morning but the heavy rain stopped this, it’s not good for the soil to be dug when waterlogged. So as Tuesday turned out to be sunny we hit the plot. This is how it looked at the start of the day

A small amount of the left side bed dug and the wood from the boarders is all rotted and full of rusty nails, not what you want when you have four adventurous children running around.

So Kate started on the digging of the left hand side bed while I started sorting out the borders on the right hand side bed. I had some breeze blocks at home and thought that these would do as a temporary fix. In the above picture you can see the long roots of a dandelion that was pulled out of the left hand side bed, this has made us really want to grow our root veg in this area.

So this is the progress that Kate has made digging, about half a bed. The soil here is lovely, so much easier to work with that the hard clay soil on the fruit bed. We are hoping to have both beds more or less dug over by the end of January. As you can see from this picture in November the plot doesn't get full sun, due to being on a hill and having trees surround the site. However this shouldn't affect the growing season too much.

This is my quick fix border, I had to dig out the wood, dig a channel for the blocks to sit in and then try to arrange them in a straight a line as possible. It will stop the soil eroding at least, even though it may not be pretty. 

We also did some work on the fruit plot, harvested some spinach and weeded this bed. Before and after pictures. The kale is growing really well and we have some purple sprouting broccoli at the back. Also removed the rotting rhubarb leaves to the compost heap and pulled the grass surrounding it up. Must place some mulch in this area.

While we were on site a neighbour gifted us her boysenberry runner, so we have planted this on the fruit plot to have boysenberries next year. They apparently fruit early and are a dark tasty fruit!

We did also venture to the top plot and weeded around the plum tree, to try and kill off pests in the ground. We need to mulch and tie grease bands around it, maybe we will get this done next week. Also on the top plot is were there are leeks are and were the garlic is hopefully going to be grown. 

I think we did well for a mornings work. I have a busy weekend so might not get to the plot this weekend but am aiming to go Monday.

Thank you for reading

Rachel