Dodging showers

I heard on a TV weather forecast this week that Edinburgh has only had 1.5 hours of sunshine so far this July.  It certainly feels like it.  We have almost given up expecting anything of this summer.  Getting any work done at the allotment has been a struggle:  June is always a busy month for us, and this year with the end of our daughter's schooldays it's been especially hectic.  But constant rain, particularly at weekends, has held us back even more.

The arrival of an order of brassica plants this week from Delfland Nurseries meant that rain or not we had to get to the plot at the weekend.  I expected that the soil would be waterlogged, but wasn't prepared for the depth to which my foot sank into the soil when I stepped on to the strawberry bed.  Actually it wasn't so much soil as liquid mud.


Still, a few strawberries had ripened despite the lack of sun.

A very kind work colleague who keeps horses supplied me with several leaves of hay to spread around my strawberries.  It was fun getting the hay home on the bus.  Of course I now realise after reading Monty Don's 'Ivington Diaries' that it would have been smart to put organic slug pellets down before I spread the hay.  So I may have created a snug home for slugs and snails, but at least the berries are raised off the soil mud.

Ideally we would have  moved the netting cage that is over the broad beans, peas and French beans, but the chances of being able to fix the poles in the liquid mud made us abandon that idea.  A floating fleece protection against pigeon attach was the best we could do, but we'll have to loosen it as soon as we can.  We're away from Edinburgh at the moment, so the plants will have to survive until next weekend.  Two types of sprouting broccoli, calabrese, two types of kale, spring cabbage and winter cauliflower.  Planting into liquid mud was a horrendous experience.  I'm not sure what the plants will make of it.  All instructions to 'firm the plants well into the soil, drawing it up round the stem' had to go by the board as I inserted them into the mud as best I could.
 

Otherwise, not a lot is happening.  One of the garlic varieties has rust.  The shallots, seen behind it, are rather thin and weedy and I can only hope for some sun to plump them up.
 

The broad beans, alas, are what we call 'couped' (pronounced 'cow'pd') in Scots, i.e. fallen over.  They were supported by twine, but since I only had metal poles to hand (ex-children's climbing frame) the twine has slid down the metal with the pressure of the bean stalks.  We had no time on Sunday to put things to rights, so this may be another casualty of weather and lack of time.  The beans on the lower part of the stalks are forming well, but higher up the pods have all shrivelled away into little black remnants.  Advice please, from any experienced broad bean growers!
 

For the moment we are up on Speyside, where conditions are pretty much the same as in Edinburgh.  Perhaps slightly drier, as there hasn't been the absolutely constant rain we've had, but everything in the garden is very backward and shrunk in on itself.  I have the left overs from my brassica order up with me to plant out in my Dad's garden.  The soil here is lighter, since it's on a river plain and was once good arable land rather than inner city goodness-knows-what.  It will be interesting to compare the fortunes of the two brassica plantings.

Almost digging

A very gentle start to the Spring dig last week.  I went to the plot with the week's kitchen waste, and to pull a couple of leeks for a cheese and onion bread pudding (Cranks recipe).  I loved it - the rest of the family was lukewarm about it.  All the more for me!

Because we've been so tight for time the thought of the backlog of tidying up at the plot has been nagging at me, and so I thought I'd dip a toe in the water, or fork in the soil, and at least make a start.   You can see the paltry results above.  The plan for this winter was to have a no-dig, or minimum dig start to Spring, by sowing all bare ground with green manure.  It's been a very mixed experience.  

Below, the wilted-down phacelia.  This has been a success again after a trial last year.  For most of the winter it's stood green and robust, only recently giving way to frost.  But it still covers the ground and inhibits most of the weeds. 

Grazing rye, of which I had high hopes, has been literally patchy.  This is the patch.  Another whole bed sown twice with rye failed to come through at all.  Interestingly, although the rye hasn't come through, neither has much in the way of weeds.  

At the front of the photo below you'll see the first shoots of garlic.  Although we've had hardly any snow, there have been some good frosts, so hopefully the garlic will have got the cold it needs to form bulbs. 

The lighter straggly stuff below is what remains of the white mustard.  It was useful to mask weeds in the most difficult bit of the plot - under sycamore trees, with shade from mid afternoon onwards in summer, a buffer zone between the blackcurrant bushes and the main access road, and prone to infestation by creeping buttercup.  I've tried daffodils, dahlias as a summer display, a wildflower mix, and am thinking of putting spinach here this summer.  The soil is in good heart, rich in leafmould.  Some escapee daffodils meantime are cheering up the rather desolate remains of the mustard.

As for this bed - this is the site of the complete failure of the alfalfa.  Unlike the rye, the alfalfa's failure to germinate seems to have encouraged a mat of lawn-like grass.  This is going to make for painstaking digging.
 

In the event I didn't dig long.  The ground was very heavy - 'clarty' is the Scots word that springs to mind.  A sticky, heavy consistency.  Not to be confused with 'glaur' (wet, squelchy mud), or 'dubs' (drier, forming clods, and often marking the passage of a tractor along a tarmac road).

Glaur

Pronounced 'glor', as in 'for'. Scots for mud of a particularly sticky kind. If it hasn't been frosty and too hard to dig, it's been sodden and squelchy with glaur. So not a lot happening on our plot, and life is busy elsewhere into the bargain. With none of the sorting of seed packets and first sowings that I'm seeing on other blogs at the moment, I'll just have to point out my cherished green Hunter wellies. They're quite a faded green now, in fact a trendy 1950's formica green. They date from 1981, and were a serious investment for a student. But Aberdeen that year had deep snow and low temperatures to rival those of this winter, and they were my daily footwear on the snowy cobbled streets of Old Aberdeen.

And they're still coping well with the glaur.

Destroy if found

Apologies - photo quality in today's post is even hazier than usual. I had to brace myself against the gale to take these shots. However much I tried I couldn't get this first shot centred. But after reading Rafael's post about earthworms at Un jardin potager en Languedoc, this notice in the glass case at the entrance to the site struck me afresh today. It was such a dismal, dark day that I felt sure I would encounter the dreaded flatworm, and even worse, have to deal with it. However, no worms at all, not even benign ones. Have they all gone deeper into the soil with the recent cold weather, or is our plot sadly lacking in nutrients?

Despite the weather, I dug. We have so much to get weed-free before sowing and planting start in the spring that I thought even a little ground cleared would be better than nothing. The part I was digging is nearest to the sycamore trees just over the access road, and the soil was full of the keys.



I know I should have picked them out, one by one, but I didn't have the energy. The rain was coming down more and more heavily, until I had to admit that it was too wet to dig. By that time everything I touched was covered in glaur (pronounced 'glor': sticky, semi-liquid mud, a feature of Scottish farmyards). Still, it was a small gain, and my feeling of virtue was increased by the fact that I was the only person mad enough to be out allotmenteering in that weather.

Gothic horror shed

It was so wet one day (I forget which - all the wet days are merging into one) that I was reduced to taking photos inside the shed. We REALLY need to spring clean our shed, but I suppose it has its own little eco-system. The very biggest spiders scuttled away when the flash went off, leaving their defunct prey/predecessors. The effect of the flash disguises the true gothic horror nature of the scene.





The small camera I'd taken to the allotment wasn't great for indoors, close quarters photos, but I wasn't going to risk taking our decent camera since this summer has taught me that within 2 minutes of doing anything my hands would be covered with glaur, which I would make anything I touched absolutely yirdit.