One of the perennial weeds found on allotment plots and in gardens is dock, it's a problem plant, but it can be controlled by removing as much of it as possible, this includes the roots, which can be very long as you can see in the video below.
You can just hoe the tops off, but I prefer to dig them up using a fork which helps loosen the soil so you can get as much root out as possible.
This is how we deal with them on the allotment, and some of the other weeds.Work continues, and as the weather warms up we need to put in more hours on the plot, this time it's planting potatoes, horseradish and the tidying continues as well, and there are some bonus velvet mites, we often see them on the plot, I've seen them in garden as well.
We get a lot of other critters on the plot, some welcome, some not so much but it's all part of gardening in general.
Anyway here's what I got up to on this visit -
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A quick guide on how to make a dibber, perfect for planting bulbs of all variety's, cheap and quick to make, this one is made from an old pallet, or at least part of an old pallet.
Obviously you'd need a lathe to make this, it's what I used, but your could make one like this with hand tools easily enough, it'd just take a bit longer.
This one would be good for planting bulbs as it's quite thick and with the added lines down it, it will be easy to make sure things are planted at the right depth, the marks are made at 1cm intervals with a total of 12cm in all.
Here's the video of me making it -
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Another day and another set of jobs, this time some actual planting, we've put in some shallots, onions and some broad beans and carried on tidying things up.
Probably not the best day for digging, it was very wet and muddy, but time waits for no one, all in all I'm happy with what we got done.
The days work -
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So the first actual working trip to the allotment occurred recently, it doesn't look like much was done, but the main job was sorting out the grape vines, so that's out of the way now.
We use more of a no dig method now than we did when we first started out, which is why there's weed control fabric all over the place, we started using it last year (mainly due to time constraints) but noticed a difference in the crops we got.
As an example we grew squashes in two beds on the plot, one that was dug over and prepared the usual way and the other we used weed control fabric and we got a better crop of squashes from the bed where we'd used weed control, so we've expanded the use of it for this year, and as I said it saves time.
Below is the video I took -
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A quick guide on how to make a garden sieve, perfect for covering seeds in seed trays, cheap and quick to make, I had the bit of wood and an off cut of steel mesh already, but you could use a piece of pallet wood, and then all you'd need is some mesh, which you can pick up for around six pounds from various diy type shops.
This one is a good size for covering seeds once you've sown them in seed trays, and as you can see from the video it's easy to make, you don't need any special tools or materials.
The how to -
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It's the time of year where my thoughts turn to all things gardening and so I start making plans and lists of jobs to be done.
Trouble is I broke the handle of the only fork I have for use at home, I have a couple down the allotment, probably should get another for home use (how many forks is too many?) I broke the handle whilst trying to dig up some very old rose bushes that someone in our local area had put on a freecycle type website, in the end I got eight very large (rooted) rose bushes, which are now in the garden in various places, which is good, but it did leave me with a broken garden fork.
So off to the workshop to make a new handle, below is the video.
Thanks for visiting.
