Pig Sty Avenue

Over 100 beds! Each will be 1 yard square. The colours here are random, but I'll need to work out a system to show plant species. The squares could contain annuals or perennials, or biennials for seeds. The possibilities for variations of colour and plant height are almost limitless. A square yard could be transplanted, or hoed out, or left with mulch for a year. For annuals, I'd grow, say, 9 potatoes to the yard, or 12 turnips, or 4 beans, or 1 cardoon... Imagine how it will look on google earth! I could be growing 120 varieties at any time - though more realistically 70 or so. Oomska and compost would fit in - taking up a yard for a small heap, 4 for a big one. It's a fan-bloody-tastic idea.

One of the great things about an allotment is the way it fights one's ordered mind. I had planned 5 beds of roughly equal size. The reality is 4 beds of different sizes. The previous system was designed so that I could literally rotate crops, (clockwise, for goodness sakes!) around the plot. One needs more subtlety. I'll be thinking from hereon in about patches rather than beds. So long as I mark (and blog), say, where a tattie patch is, then I know not to plant tatties or tomatoes there for 3 or 4 years. Bottom left of the plan is the long bed, currently about 20% riddled. The white rectangle is the poly-tunnel, but that is going to be moved every year, (counting as tomatoes/tatties in the rotation). The shadowy ovals are the shadows cast by the cherry trees (bottom right-ish) and ash tree, (top left-ish). The purple-ish oval is the pond, (maybe not to scale, I haven't measured it). The dark red areas are paths, the skinny paths will all be removed except for the on...

Here's the latest version of the plan, tweaked to indicate the skinny path, and the actual width of the beds. The three beds at the north end are all 11x22ft, which is nice. My Paint2 skills are not up to showing the couple of wee kinks in the paths.

Back at the plot for an hour or so this morning, did a bit more measuring and now I can tweak the plan, which is more or less to scale. I managed to get the newly (re)discovered path cleared as far as the fence, as you can see. The concrete actually stops about 1ft shy of the fence, so enough room to fit in some hedge plants. I've started hacking north now, in the direction of the ash tree on the top right corner of the photo. The bank of earth must've been there a while, because the tree has put roots through it, 1.5ins thick, some of them. I could have finished this area this morning, got as far as the tree, except for the shenanigans of Dixie, who I've been dog-sitting the last few days. Her most persistent misdemeanor has been barking. She loves the allotment, it's a kind of terrier heaven, with the odour of rats and foxes, and piles of earth to dig in. So she became immediately proprietorial and showed off by barking at any passer by. Anyone visible, in fa...

This is what blogging about allotments is all about: getting something up into the cloud so that you can come back in the future to see what you were doing, and this is really important, of course, for crop rotation. Above is a plan, running South - North/Left - Right. A lot of it is to scale, especially the beds, I did some measuring yesterday. It's 10 pixels to the foot. The SW bed, "carrots and onions", is a bit squashed up because of the oomska and wood piles to its left, and newly discovered path to its right. Carrots, parsnips, garlic and onions don't need much room. And I had to be careful with onions: latterly, apparently, The Predecessor grew them as a mono-crop, but this area was uncultivated for some years, being mostly nettles last year, and, " Possibilities for crops succeeding nettle are potatoes (Solanum tuberosum L.), sugar beet (Beta vulgaris L.) and other root crops", Vogl & Hartl, 2003.  The southern end of the Midwest bed was ...