Mulching Gooseberries

A sunny winters day with blue skies…. I didn’t have much need to go to the allotment but it seemed silly to miss out on the good weather. I started by tidying up the bean poles which always fall over from where they are stored and each week I pick up. This time I slotted them inside the edge of a pallet, a simple solution which maybe I should had done many months ago.

I pulled up the sprouts last visit and had left the stalks next to the compost. Since then they had soften a bit and so I was able to chop up in to small pieces using the spade so that I could add them to the compost properly.

The spring cabbage had been attacked by pigeons last time and silly me that I had not done anything about it and covered them. Today there was little left and so I decided to pull them up, I say ‘them’ but really there was only one viable plant. Better luck during this year.

I finally got round to mulching around the gooseberry bushes with some of the free manure (the last of the current free manure). These have been hard to weed due to the roots of the bushes being near the surface and the massive big spikes they have on them. To reduce weeds I put down cardboard first before the manure. I also hoed around the chard which we haven’t picked much from lately but is still growing well. I picked off some of the worst of the leaves in order to both tidy them up and to give them a need to re-grow.

The kale has started to go to seed, possibly due to the time of year but maybe also because I haven’t been picking leaves off of them (although the pigeons seem to have done so).

The left over manure I spread over a bit of one of the beds, along with some coffee grinds that we picked up from Starbucks the other weed. I am all out of manure now but I have around three beds which could do with a covering of something. The free manure I don’t think at the moment is rotted down enough to plant straight into and is containing quite a lot of sawdust and so I might go to the paid mushroom compost route instead for these last ones (still cheap).

I was at a bit of a lose what to do next and it seemed a pity to go home with it being so nice, so I started to clear the fence which faces the field of ivy and old brambles.


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