Warned Off

The weather broke this morning and I dashed hot foot to the allotments, hoping to plant some green things.

There I received more words of wisdom. Do not plant anything yet, rather wait another week at least and preferably two weeks.

Hmph!

Well, these chaps run successful allotments and frankly I haven't a clue so I'm following their advice.

Of course I was on site by then, so I had to do something.

I bought a couple of big bags of manure which I dug into the potato bed and the pea bed. Then I removed the black plastic sheeting that had been covering the last bed and dug that over.

The wise old bird in residence seems to be reasonably impressed with my enthusiasm for the job, little does he know how utterly clueless I actually am about the whole process. Take digging for example, I've read that there are various approaches, from trenching to no-dig. So what did I do? Just cleared the old plants and weeds then dug the soil over. The effect looks good, but I've no idea if it will yield up a plentiful bounty of fruit and veg.

Anyway, my enthusiasm was rewarded today when he spied me digging a bramble out by the roots. He gave me a brand new pair of secateurs that he had going spare. So now it's official, I actually own gardening tools. Well, a single gardening tool at least.

The funny thing is, I'm still going dig any brambles out by the roots to prevent them from growing back, but the secateurs will come in very handy for pruning the raspberry canes growing in the fruit bush bed.

After digging on the allotment I had to pop into work, where wonder of wonders I found myself listening to Gardener's Question Time on Radio 4. So it's official, I am now an old fart!

In one part of the show one of the guests said something about this being the time of year to prune raspberry canes, but that against conventional wisdom you shouldn't prune them right the way back to the ground. He was just getting into the swing of what you should actually do with them when a pesky piece of work distracted me and I totally missed what he said. If anyone reading this knows what's to do in this case (e.g. if you too listened to GQT but paid more attention than I did) would you please let me know? Thanks.