The Bindweed has gone......Long live the Bindweed !!!!

Just as you start to think that you've beaten something, it creeps up on you and gives you a swift kick in the goolies and then laughs in your face just to let you know tat it's still there ! That is what the Bindweed has gone and done.....oh well not to worry. We thought that we'd got bed two clear of the dreaded stuff, we filled bags and bags with roots through digging,digging and then some more digging until the soil was clear this winter gone, but........

I think the mistake I made, was being lulled by the appearance of the soil , there must have been some roots I'd missed and then the tiller did it's work of propagating the bits I'd missed ! So the onion sets were planted out and were just starting to poke some green growth through the soil when guess what ?

Yes up popped some bits of green and purple spear like foliage, damn it's back !

So this weekend has been mainly spent carefully lifting the onions then digging down about 2ft deep over the whole bed and removing the roots of the Bindweed that had started growing again.
The onions have gone into one of the new smaller beds I dug down near the shed, only time will tell to see if they will now grow having been moved ?

 
The bed they came out of is not going to see the tiller again.........ever ! I'll just rake and break the clods down.....to be honest the soil is pretty good anyway in that bed and fingers crossed we will at least get the growing season out of the way before the Bindweed gets a grip again.
All the stuff I've read just says to stick at it and eventually the Bindweed will be beaten..........There was only a couple of spots in the bed this time which no doubt would have spread if not attacked again.........I've taken out another garden bag of roots , there can't be much left ,if any, I've taken every single little bit that I could see and if I felt the root snap I dug, until I got the other end. I will no doubt have missed some bits but I'm hoping that each time I dig there will be less and less until eventually it is all gone.

So bed number two has taken three steps forwards, two backwards......but at least that is still one step better than it was before the winter digging started. That bed has now been dug over four times this year.....it won't be getting another until the autumn now.
The plan has had to be changed, bed two is now going to be our Brassica bed, so that the crops are above ground and away from harms way from any Bindweed roots.

The rest of the weekend has been spent doing a few of the easier jobs.....my back was aching after the dig,pick,dig,pick routine on bed two. So I decided to get the Raspberry bed boxed in with some treated boards. It will mean that cutting the grass path around the bed will be easier and it looks neater.
                                                     

Before:                                                                                          

I've mulched around the Raspberry canes with some freebie compost from the allotments bins in the hope that the mulch will help keep the moisture in the soil.

After finishing the Raspberry bed it was a quick whiz around with the lawnmower and strimmer before we dashed off to Sandhill Garden centre for a spot of lunch and to buy a few bits and bobs as well......well you can't just walk around without buying something can you ?

After Sandhill I got changed again and went back to the plot to finish off the bean frame, I bought some more canes whilst we were out as I'd run out, oh and some teasle twine to fasten them together with. We now have a sturdy frame for our French beans and Butter beans to grow up. The beans are coming along nicely in the pots at home so should be ready in a couple or three weeks or so.

That's about all ....as if that wasn't enough !   I've now got some more seed trays and so I'll be sowing some of the salad leaf veg this week and bring it on indoors before planting out. I might even get round to building a cold frame next days off.   

Well just over a year on !

I can't believe how quickly the last year has passed us by.....2013 had a lot of up's and down's , with more down's than up's it seemed. That meant that we ended up neglecting the plot and the bind weed beat us into submission.
Anyway we've knuckled down over the late winter period and hopefully the bind weed won't be so much of a problem this year. We've filled bags and bags with the dread bind weed roots but it really does feel like the corner has been turned.
There are new neighbours on both sides this year and all of them are cracking on , so hopefully we won't get overwhelmed by weeds invading from either side this year. Our neighbours seemed ok to start with ....well two out of the three are ! The lad who has taken over the bottom corner plot though is a tool that you don t need on the allotments.I said he could help himself to a few of the left over pallets that I had stacked at the side of the shed,but he decided that he would help himself to all my stock of wood, a metal drum and our burning bin.....along with helping himself to the society manure pile......he's been warned and he will definitely be getting his fingers wrapped if he can't keep them off our stuff !

We've got all the ground dug over and instead of us having just one bed working , we know have six beds !
Still a lot of work to do over the next couple of years improving the quality of the soil with plenty of manure to be added at the end of this year. However the ground is workable, if not perfect at least we will be growing this year.

The top pic is roughly a year ago, then as is now.....a bit of a difference !

We have a Victoria plum tree just planted, then two of the new beds I have just dug . I had to strip off the grass and then dig the beds over, then dig in plenty of manure and compost and finally rotavate over both beds. The grass patch in the fore-ground (above pic) is where we are going to put a picnic bench so that we can enjoy a nice glass of wine on a sunny day.


To the right side we have just planted a couple of trees that are being trained as Espalier's. There is a Comice pear and a cherry tree. We've put a couple of posts in and strung sturdy wires between for the branches to run along. It will be nice to have a bit of a natural screen to shield us from the tool next door...lol

We got some raspberry canes in quite early on and then we had a lot of rain and so we didn't know if they would grow or not. Thankfully they have started to throw some new growth up and so it looks like we might get some raspberries at some point,

I'm going to put some boards around the edge of the raspberry bed to box it in and hopefully keep the weeds at bay and make it easier to strim around the bed without risk of damaging the plants. I was going to do that today but ran out of energy after the previous two days of full on digging etc.........I was pooped so gave in......always tomorrow before work to get the boards in.

In the ground we have sown some peas and planted out some onion sets, oh and planted our selection of potatoes.....a sore point..lol
Kim had sourced a selection of blight resistant spuds and had them chitting away in trays in the shed. Come planting time and I tipped them all into a bucket to take to the plot ..........oops ! They had been in trays of different varieties , not any more ! So we now have lucky dip spuds ......as my mate Trev said, " Never mind lad as long as they don't grow downwards they'll be fine !" I like his train of thought.....Kim on the other hand was not impressed ......lol

The spuds have gone in where we had the bed covered with the black polythene , it had been covered over for a full year and boy has it made the soil good. All the weed growth was dead and when I turned it over it was just like black gold.....time will tell if the spuds like it or not .

Bed Two is where the spuds grew last year. The bed had been heavily manured last year so we haven't put any on this year. That is the bed that is going to be home to our onions, leeks, parsnips and swedes this year.
We've got a few rows of onions in up to now, they've been in about a week now and are just starting to poke some green growth up through the soil. I've set the paving slabs in as well to give us a better path in between the beds, we need a few more now for the other paths.

Bed three is going to be our pea and  beans bed, up to now we have a couple rows of peas in. I ve sown them quite thickly and followed some advice I read that instead of sowing them thinnly with two to three inches between them , I've just sprinkled the peas along the drill and so we'll see how they come up.....if they do at all. The remainder of the bed is going to house our broad beans and maybe a few french beans, we'll see.

So that just leaves our Brassica bed to fill but first there is a bit more work to do to try and improve the quality of the soil in that bed. It is very heavy clay at the moment. It has been dug but needs some compost working into it before we plant out the cabbages and sprouts.

The paths are all mown and the edges of the beds strimmed so that's just about all for the moment on the plot. At home we have the raised beds all readied for the strawberry plants and plenty of salad plants but we are just holding back a bit until the last of the frosts are gone.

So what a difference a year makes and this season we are full of confidence that we'll actually have some crops instead of just weeds. Watch this space.