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oh no, how frustrating. i’m sure more mulching with compost will help the drainage in general. it might be worth planning over time to raise the level of the allotment with high raised beds etc to flood-proof your site as who knows whether this is how our climate will be from now on!
until i got access to this land my garden consisted of one raised bed in which the surface of the soil was 2 feet above a permanently swampy lawn – and the plants were happy in both drought and flood.
haha, thank you for enlightening me. i look forward to dizzy times next year when we start on our salads
hi, i have had JK in a city yard – it can damage foundations, the roots are that strong. but relentlessly cutting it back whenever you can does keep it from spreading further. as it was coming up from cracks in concrete and between the concrete and the house, we couldn’t get to the roots.
you can however eat the young shoots, there are lots of recipes on the internet, it can be treated like rhubarb. you will never be short of young shoots!
i’m struggling to picture how you spin the leaves in the crates? please could anyone describe this to me? thanks
round here the council compost includes autumn road sweepings, so it’s full of plastic – harvesting my garlic there was a toffee crisp wrapper wrapped around the roots, metal ring pulls, plastic bottle top etc. these bits of litter kind of work their way to the surface over time so you can remove them but it’s quite disgusting. i think it is also cooked/sterilised in some way so it’s weirdly dead and wormless though it does fill up with life quickly once it’s spread.
it’s been ok for my own single raised bed but now we’re making a whole market garden. if we run out of the lovely hay and manure that we’re using to mulch i feel very torn about whether to get some council compost – the plastic bits would continually break down and leave nasty stuff in the soil, i’m sure, and cancel out our organic approach!
great so it could be used on windowsill tomatoes? i will try this. also on my other houseplants!
ah, i was about to post a related question.
we have access to a 4 ton heap of sheep manure/bedding that we’re told has been sitting there for 2 years. the top and bottom are nice and crumbly (top is covered in nettles) but the whole heap is sodden wet and with no heat being generated, and the middle 3 feet are unrotted, strawy and slimy. there are loads of worms in it though.
so would it be ok to spread it 6″s thick on top of our pasture (thick grasses, some buttercups, docks, thistles) without cardboard underneath if we don’t plant in it til spring? it would be great not to have to bother with the cardboard.
we have started moving it in rubble bags (no access to tractor!) which means that it is ending up in its new heap in wet, probably quite airless clods about 1/3 the size of a rubble bag. i find it hard to picture how much will be left after we make our 6″ deep beds, but if there is lots – should we turn/treat the heap in some way to help it rot down, or will we have turned it sufficiently in the moving process?
also i should cover the heap asap to keep out further rain?
hi, i have had rust on my garlic this year in extremely wet conditions. the very expensive ‘white solent’ variety succumbed first, but now the supermarket garlic is too. it’s good to know it’s not that harmful, the permaculture forum people seemed very upset about it!