on the love-ages and love-aches of digging four a, four b and four c
Allotment - Plot B top - January 2016
The 23rd January found us slipping and sliding around the top of a muddy Plot B. We were intent on completing some new raised beds on the former site of some wooden pallet built compost bays. The map or plan above shows the new raised beds as the very dryly named '4a', '4b' and '4c'. The easiness of those labels contrasts with the moist, sticky and arduous heaviness of the soil that had to be shifted to create the new raised beds.
A lot of compost from the old bays was left on the site of the new raised beds. The very wet weather so far this 'winter' has water-logged many areas of the site (Plot B included) and so completing the journey from 4a to 4b to 4c found me contemplating the aches of my age and the wisdom of setting out on a such a strenuous digging journey. It was the paths and ways around and between the raised beds which required most of the digging. To have dug or not to have dug, that is the question I asked myself; considering our intention of turning 'Plot B top' over to a much lower maintenance perennial garden - something that has been happening in part via the cultivation of globe artichokes, dwarf fruit trees and our beloved lovage/loveage. Are the new raised beds a scene of horticultural creation or destruction?
My defence (my reasoning) is that making the raised beds (a form of hill side terracing) is a way of managing the water-logging and improving and maintaining the top soil - or the 'organic' and 'assimilation' horizons - if, that is, I understand those terms I've encountered in, 'Edible Perennial Gardening - Growing Successful Polycultures in Small Spaces' by Anni Kelsey. My intervention may have been brutal (Brutalist?) and unnecessarily controlling and you might see, as a consequence of my forced raising, a scene of 'soil food web' devastation in the photographs below.
But, but, but - a hot flush of guilt and a last ditch attempt to redeem myself - I call on the robins who I think sang my praises as I lifted and shifted worm-filled spadefuls of soil into the brutally rectilinear beds. I repeat, it isn't the whole stretch, from the north end of 4a to the south end of 4c, I've dug; just the pathways between those beds. The new raised beds are areas of soil which have not been disturbed (much) in nearly two years, since the former compost bays were established there. Looking at the gradient of the slope they are on; the top sides of the beds stand at one scaffold board (width) deep while the bottom sides are two high/deep. There is gravity to counteract by which I mean the tendency of the top soil to shift downhill.
Our established practice for the initial use of former composting bay areas is the cultivation of main crop potatoes. It seems to have worked very well in terms of the quantity and quality of the potatoes although the use of the new beds in 'Plot B top' for a potato mono-crop, albeit relatively small in scale, is hardly a way of venturing into the less utilitarian bounty of poly-cuturalism.
Of course I want to believe that our raised bed gardening intervention is beneficial and that something potentially beneficial has been created and that any distress to, and disruption of, the culture of the soil is only temporary and will be redressed by our more gentle, loving and respectful nurture to come. Er, yes I think I probably will dig most of the potatoes up. I do however envisage a time of post potato healing.
You can judge whether or not the photographs below are documentary evidence of abuse of the soil. I hold my hand up and declare I dug it with love for a and for b and for c.
Plot B 4a / 4b / 4c - 23/1/16
Up the slope from the new raised beds our loveage lovage is re-emerging. It's a herb I enjoy a lot both to eat and admire as plant - especially when it has gone to seed. Our Levisticum officinale has re-emerged with an extra 'e' that prompted some checking up on the spelling and etymology of the name. This plant appears to have a rich multi-cultural heritage and gives us a new sense of gardening and place in that area of the allotment site. The planting of another 'lovage' may be part of the post potato healing.
Levisticum officinale. 24/1/16.
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