1 May 2006

It’s bloody hard work this skiving business.

In spite of having work to do today (Public holday? Sorry? What’s that?), I’ve been bitten by the gardening bug, having sowed my squash seeds yesterday as well as further sweetcorn and french beans (that’s them on the bottom shelf).

Consequently, today I’ve been a bad, bad girl and instead of getting on with all the tasks I have to do that contribute to keeping a roof over our heads, I snuck off down to the allotment with my gardening assistant beside me in order to finish working the asparagus bed. Observant P’soup visitors will remember that this was one of the tasks on my list to do before we went on holiday. Well, erm, it was a big job.

The bed is 5.5m long and the soil is full of bindweed roots. Owen has spent all his time down the plot in recent visits forking it over and removing barrowloads of roots. Today, on Monty’s advice we spent hours preparing the bed as follows:

First we laid a roll of black plastic on one side of the bed onto which we dug out the topsoil, removing any bindweed roots we spotted as we went. Actually this proved to be a pretty horrible part of the entire process as we unearthed a dead fox cub. It can only have been buried there in the last week and it was so small and perfect-looking, right down to its soft fur. Owen carried it on his spade down to the edge of the allotments and re-buried it.

Next, having dried our eyes, we emptied five bags of gravel over the bed, some chicken manure pellets and three bags of homemade compost. This was raked level and then forked in to the soil, thereby exposing yet more bindweed roots for removal.

The soil / compost / gravel / chicken manure mixture was then raked into two ridges and the asparagus crowns draped over the top (looking spookily like they’d just landed from space).

Finally, we covered the crowns in the previously removed topsoil, removing yet more bindweed roots as we worked. It all got a good drink and we congratulated ourselves on our hard work.

Now? Well, we won’t get to taste our delicious Crimson Pacific asparagus spears for another two years. That’s going to test my patience to the limit. But hopefully, this is a bed that will not need anything like this amount of work doing on it again. Yes, we will need to weed it (steamed bindweed, anyone?) and mulch it, but those are much less strenuous tasks than we did today. And it will all be worth it in the end.

Filed under: Hard labour, Sowings, Today's Bible — Clare @ 5:58 pm