Grumpy

I was very miffed last week to discover that the plot adjoining my allotment at the end had been ploughed. Not an issue in itself, but the person doing the ploughing had seen fit to turn his tractor repeatedly on the grassy area I keep at the end of my plot for family picnics. Had they had the decency to seek my permission before driving on my plot, or even bothered to have a close look, they would have become aware of the line of globe artichoke plants that mark the end of my plot that have now been pulverized by the tractor wheels. It has taken me two years to nurture these plants to the stage where they may well have yielded their first crop this year; now I will have to start over, and erect another fence to prevent it happening again.

For the record I have had my own plot ploughed a couple of times in the early years, and have always ended up regretting it. It is very tempting when faced with a new weedy plot to just bury the problems with the plough. The reality is that you end up shifting all the soil over by one furrow towards one side of your plot, leaving an unwelcome trench down one side and a hump on the other. No amount of raking will ever level it out properly again, and you are left with an uneven plot that soon exhibits all the same weedy problems as before. Regular ploughing will create a compacted pan under the top soil just as much as rotovating will, and it won't do any good for your soil structure either as no organic matter is incorporated. As I have previously commented, fixed beds and paths and double digging are the best way for an allotment or garden - hard work at first but far easier to maintain in the long run. Ploughing may seem like the easy option, but it will give poorer results and more problems in the long run. I suggest you leave it for the farmers, for whom there is little option given the scale of their plot, and use more appropriate techniques for allotments, which don't involve driving agricultural machinery over other peoples artichokes.