Tidying up

Had a day off on Tuesday so went to the allotment in the morning for various bits of tidying up. The first job was to dig over the area at the front of the old plot, where the potatoes had been. I removed a few weeds and a few potatoes that I'd missed, and then covered it over with black plastic for the winter (see above). This will stop the weeds growing there until I'm ready to plant in it next year. I'll probably also be using this area to have a tractor load of manure dumped on it later in the year.

I also bagged up a load of weeds that I had been piling up and took them to the dump. There were also a couple of bags of junk to get rid of from the new plot that the previous owners had left behind. I then pruned out the raspberry canes that had fruited this year, and they went to the dump as well.


The second cropping potatoes that I planted a month ago have been growing very well and I decided to earth them up, which is supposed to encourage growth, protect the potatoes from daylight (which makes them go green) and keep the frost off them (not that there is a danger of that in August!). They'd grown a bit too high to properly cover them in earth, but I raked up the soil around them as best I could (see before and after above).