Moon phase: Week 4 (waning)
Since it's the last week of the moon cycle and there was no planting to do, today seemed the ideal time to get on with general maintenance - and luckily we were blessed with lovely weather for it!
First off was a trip to the recycling depot at Chittering, where the company that collects our green bins makes compost available for free to anyone who can be bothered to bring sacks and shovel it up for themselves! Obviously it's not fantastic quality and probably not suitable for raising young plants, but it's great for soil improvement on the allotment. It was a bit weird to be shovelling up steaming hot compost, but I guess it was still warm from the "in-vessel" composting process!
After lunch we went back to the allotment and I forked over Bed 4, where the onions and carrots had been last year. There was a layer of soft grass and weeds, and a few invasive couch grass roots, so I tried to clear it without too much disruption to the soil - just turning over the top 5-10cm to remove the weeds. Then I dug a shallow bean trench on either side of one half of the bed, lined the trenches with cardboard and newspapers, drenched them in water and added the leaves and chopped stems from the frost-damaged romanesco that needed clearing up, and covered it with soil. Finally I sprinkled some general-purpose organic fertilizer along the trenches and on the other half of the bed, and we dumped five bags of compost on the whole lot. So, that's one bed cleared and rejuvenated - only seven more to go!!