Spring cleaning the allotment

I love this point of the year, when all of a sudden, after weeks of rain-sodden trudging, frosts, grey clouds and dark mornings and dark nights and dark tree branches blackened by the rain, suddenly spring creeps up on you. It’s spring! The sunlight is so bright and sudden that it almost seems boastful. And everyone frolics in every park and garden they can find.

So of course, I’ve been frolicking at my allotment, trying to steal a march on the weeds before they too notice that spring has crept up on them and they too start dancing around and taking over everything. I’ve already cleared the weeds in the raspberry beds, but I’ve been eyeing the pumpkin patch and the pumpkin patch has been eyeing me back for a couple of weeks. It was too cold, too rainy, too miserable altogether to try to weed such big beds. But in the fresh spring sunlight, everything seems possible. And so I settled down to a couple of hours of pulling and tugging and digging, until the beds looked as though they too had been freshly laundered.

I’m particularly pleased with this bed as it was the lasagna-type bed that I made two years ago. I stacked up turf from the beds I’d dug out, layered it with GroChar, kitchen peelings, horse manure and comfrey leaves. I also grew a thicket of mustard as a green manure on the top and chopped that down and layered it as another layer. Then last year I grew squashes on the top, and now the soil is ever-so crumbly and rotted.

Normal practice is to leave lasagna beds untouched forever and keep stacking them up as they slowly deflate with the rotting process. But I had always planned to use this more as an open lasagna compost heap which I could spread more widely over both beds. And that’s what I’ve done. I’m incredibly pleased with how it has worked out, not least because the soil had very few weed roots in it, save some pretty easy-to-spot bindweed roots.

I know that the weeds will catch up with me: they always do on an allotment. But for now, I feel as though I’m a little ahead. And these beds are ready for a short-term green manure before the big business of growing begins.