Spuds in!
Spent a couple of hours on Friday night digging. Got the Pink Fir and other first early (can’t remember the name!) in. Also got the shallots into the ground on Friday including the stack of ~40 that were in the shed left un-planted from last Autumn (the rest of the pack already went in the garden at home).
Amusingly on Gardener’s World on Friday night, Joe Swift was starting off his allotment, from one minute going on about how he was going to dig the plot over properly, to the next rotovating all the grass roots into the soil … Well, I don’t have a filming schedule for home, so digging out the grass as we go is still on the cards, and we aren’t desperate to use the whole plot this season!
On Sunday evening, I popped over to the site for an hour or so of preparing the site for the main crop King Edward’s. Had a chat with the neighbouring allotmenteers, they mentioned that the bottom of our plot had been covered for a long while with plastic sheeting and hadn’t been properly dug for some time. I think I’m going to try and get some plastic sheeting on the way home to recover it for now, I’m still not sure if it will kill the couch grass properly, but at least it’ll stop other things popping up for the time being. I’ve read that plastic covering might be really bad for the soil, and other places that it should be fine. Given that its been covered for a while and the soil has a high clay proportion, I don’t think being covered for a bit longer is going to hurt, and it’ll keep the soil from becoming too waterlogged and so difficult to dig.
The people next door also mentioned they have a band of heavy clay across the plot, which seems to run across ours too (more than a spade’s depth, it becomes solid clay anyway).