Digging

Spring must be upon us - I've spent the afternoon on the allotment for the first time since the Autumn. OK so it was 2 degrees and there was still ice in the chickens water, but it felt like the seasons are slowly moving forward. This is one of the main reasons I garden - the close proximity with the outside world reveals the minutiae of the changing seasons, which seems to help slow down time as every day feels a little different. The speeding up of time as you grow older was brought in to sharp focus for me recently when a girl in the playground recognised me when I was picking Alec up from school last week. She looked at me for a moment or two as if trying to recollect something and then finally remarked "I remember you, from when I used to go to that after school gardening club", clearly something from her dim and distant past. It was actually last October! Seemed like yesterday to me...

Anyway, back to the allotment. Having last week moved the chicken coup and run off of the vegetable bed that they had been weeding and manuring for me, it was time for a spot of my favourite garden activity - double digging! I hate this, it's really hard, unrewarding, cold work, but needs must. There is a serious compacted pan under the topsoil and the topsoil is in need of a bit of improvement, so I'm tackling it year by year, bed by bed. Last year I did two of the beds (8 metres long by 1.2 metres wide each) and believe me that was enough. However, as I have created long narrow beds that I don't ever have to walk on I have absolutely no intention of re-digging the beds once they are done, for at least ten years, as there should be no significant compaction. A big dressing of manure each autumn lightly forked into the surface should be all that is required to keep the soil in good condition.

Double digging involves digging down to two spades depth. To be honest I can't see the point of any other kind of digging. If you've gone to the trouble of exposing the subsoil by single digging, you may as well at least fork up the subsoil to remove any compaction and get some air into it, and preferably add a bit of organic matter at the same time. To my mind garden compost from your heap or bin is as good as any manure, and therefore an essential thing to have in your plot. Horse and chicken manure are excellent as well, I'm not so keen on bullock muck but others swear by it. Today I used a combination of compost and chicken manure - should be good!

So four hours, a broken back and a broken spirit later, another bed is finally done. Only seven more to go (sigh), I'll do one more this year and that's it for 2011. Still, it's a great feeling knowing I shouldn't have to do it again for a long, long time. Everyone should double dig their plot once at the beginning, and then through careful planning to avoid compaction never do it again.

Having finished digging I even had time to sow a broad beans in the multiple gaps where the ones I sowed in the autumn had been killed by the ice and snow. A few have survived, but most succumbed to the elements in the end. A bit of horticultural fleece laid over them during the worst of the weather would probably have saved them, but having not tried over-wintering broad beans before this is something I have learnt for next year. It will be interesting to see if the newly sown beans catch up with the surviving over-wintered crop. It's still pretty early to be sowing broad beans, these were Aquadulce - the only ones really hardy enough to be sown this early. I'll probably put some more in in another month's time for successional cropping - I love broad beans, they're one of the first early crops and hopefully I'll have enough to freeze a few as well. They also, of course, taste much better picked fresh, young and tender from your garden instead of old, stale and mealy from the shops. If you aren't a big broad bean fan try a few grown fresh from your garden - you may be surprised by the difference. The Sutton is a very good dwarf variety that won't take up much space but will give a decent yield. See my coming post on favourite varieties.

So having spent the day digging, here are a few do's and don'ts:

Do double-dig, once, and never again.
Do incorporate plenty of good organic matter
Don't mix sub-soil in with your top-soil. The sub-soil is usually lighter and of a very different consistency - it was very obvious when I had got down to the sub-soil in my beds. Fork it up or dig it over to break it up, but dont mix it in with the top-soil as it will be detremental.
Don't try to do too much in one go - take small spadefuls and do as much as you feel comfortable with, especially in cold weather as you can easily do yourself an injury.
Don't feel you have to do the whole plot at once, as I have already mentioned I am doing two beds per year, therefore it will be five years before they are all done.
Do avoid using rotovators if you can - they help to create a compacted pan that will just lead to more digging. They also chop up and spread the roots of perennial weeds, leading to more perennial weeds. If you have already double-dug there should be no need to rotovate as long as you dont walk on your beds.