Do you have any yearly rituals for improving the fertility of your allotment plot?
Any good tips?
Andy..
Diggin in a tonne of manure...
:-X
I'll see your ton and raise you 5 ton. :P
The manure is an obvious (and very good) answer.
All organic matter will help so your own compost will add nutrients and humus.
Keeping weeds down will help in a small way.
Green manures such as clover can help (so I'm told).
Artificial fertilisers can be useful such as growmore as well as the powders "natural" ones such as fish, blood and bone, seeweed and chicken pellets etc.
My favourite is the manure / compost and rotavate it all in to the ground in spring after being dug over in winter.
Hope this helps.
Woppa
Cheers for the info!
Dance naked at the full moon!
Well, alright, not really...if only I had the nerve ;)
I did something last year that seemed helpful - where I had my dwarf beans, at the end of their season I didn't throw them out, I hacked them down, left them on the soil and covered it. I uncovered in the spring and planted onions there. I found that not only was it easier to dig over (I have also had less weeds in that bit) but you could see that the soil was full of organic matter. I will know if that was the right thing to do when I pull the onions :)
I also mulched the fruit with compost in the early spring and let it rot down, useful when you can't actually dig stuff into the soil.
I collect bags and bags of leaves in the fall and store them till they are rotted down. Makes the soil nice and crumbly and I'm sure it keeps it moister too (Not sure if moister is a correct word or not) ;D
oooh I did the leaf thing, I left them in a cage for weeks then when I got fed up looking at it, I scattered them over the beans + roots sections and sort of chopped them in with a mattock. I notice that now they must have been rotted down into the soil because they are no longer visible.
After reading about its benefits in Graham Harveys excellent book "We want real Food " , ive got some Rockdust to try this year, have scattered some on the beds and will continue into the season, just to see if it works. :)
Anyone else tried it?
http://www.seercentre.org.uk/
Although virtually everything I have read about rockdust is good I did read a report somewhere that said adding it to already fertile soils can do more harm than good.
Seer charges £70 per tonne for rockdust if you can get to a quarry that mines basalt you can buy the same stuff for £17 per tonne.
Leafmould is a great soil conditioner but it does not "feed" the soil.
It is very useful for adding bulk and mixing with other ingredients to make compost but there is no food value which is why in woodland you will see the trees and the fallen leaves but there is no grass and very few weeds underneath partly because the fallen leaves smother them and partly because there is no nourishment in the soil for them (the weeds) to eat!
I have never heard of rockdust - presumably it is made from the dust of rocks!?
What are the main benefits of this?
I use leafmould, home made compost, manure and seaweed together to make soil conditioners.
If like Antipodes says you leave runner beans and other beans roots in the soil they "fix nitrogen" in the soil and you can see that they have little nodules on the roots which apparently is beneficial.
Dancing naked at full moon is pretty much the ideal thing though!! I think we all ought to try it - next full moon!!
Can you imagine?!!!
Old Bird
;D
:o :o :o oooooooooeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrr ;D
Pootle and Old bird you sound like my kind of people, dancing nake, thats right up my street. :P :P :P ;D ;D ;D :-*
Yes Cornykev - only advantage of cyber talk is that we are invisible. You wouldn't be so keen if you could see what I look like!!!
Proper put you off for life!
Old Bird!
;D
The theory behind rockdust Oldbird is that the small rock particles spread over the surface by events like the last ice age have been used up (de-mineralised) by thousands of years of cultivation..... and this dust replaces the minerals...
might be a load of old codswallop but sounds plausible...
:-\
we do 4 beds with phacelia green manure per year, leave the roots of the beans and peas in, make leaf mould, mulch everything up with our compost and add manure for spuds, squash and things :)
Just to add that the rockdust is not the most economical method, nor easy to get hold of, so probably not a realistic long term answer for most of us, nor is it a green option transporting it from Scotland down South.......I just thought id have a little experiment with it so got one sack to give it a try :).
As for dancing naked at the full moon, well im Pagan so i do that anyway ;D
My allotement is on the southcoast ..........A very strong principle I,m begining to believe in for this area is..................Spread yer compost/manure from November to January........do ALL digging during this period too.....................my reasoning is ...to RETAIN moisture in the soil.........some years in fact many.......even February onwards can be dryish here.............If a lot of digging takes place in say March or April,the moisture is never replaced by the rain
There's an awful lot of very fine rock dust in our soils already, it's called clay. I really think that's a modern version of snake oil. If you're on boulder clay, you've got a wonderful mix of all sorts of rock which have been ground down to clay size by glaciers, and you know it hasn't all disappeared. The water won't sink through the stuff.
Thats a good point about clay and rockdust.
I have tried a couple of bags, but it works out quite expensive with postage
etc. Dunno about the naked dancing on plots but i guess it would be fun to watch!! ;D
I would not mind if it was loads of lovely looking fit blokes,but i,ll pass on it if it,s the blokes on our site. ;D
Is'nt there something about rockdust and that it has to be broken down by worms and microbes before it becomes any use to plants?
All the theory to it sounds fine, and if you see the veg they grow it looks
amazing. Be interesting to hear of more people who get the same results
with it though.
;D If u are going to dance naked make sure you don't have any high nettels :o i am sure that would smart a bit :'( and i would be embarrassing explaining why cannot sit down :-[
;D ;D ;D