No waste material when you have a compost heap
One of the first tasks for a new plotholder is to build some compost heaps. Almost all waste green material from the allotment should find its way onto the heap. Weeds, thinnings and crops which have finished can all be tossed in. Some bigger, tougher items need a bash with the spade or chopping up with secateurs.
Looking after the soil by adding compost is fundamental to successful growing. Ignore your soil or abuse it and you suffer the consequences, not necessarily immediately, but as yields decline and soil diseases take hold.
Visitors to the north of Scotland cannot fail to notice abandoned crofthouses and evidence of former cultivation round them. A new project has just been given the go-ahead. Researchers from Stirling University, together with residents of the North West Highlands Geopark, are studying how the depth of soil there has increased through cultivation over time. Until just over a century ago the traditional method of improving soil was by incorporating household waste and ash, seaweed, turf and animal manures. Not all of these are so easily available today but they indicate what we should be trying to do.
I recently visited St Andrews Allotments as part of the Hidden Gardens Open Day. This small, tranquil site is tucked away beyond some tennis courts, surrounded by a stone wall and above the abandoned railway station. I was shown around by Henry Paul, and among other things, admired their compost. Just as in times past when growers used
Ignore your soil or abuse it and you suffer the consequences
whatever was available, they are making good use of local resources. St Andrews Brewery are providing them with spent hops. These are brown and crumbly with a faint aroma of fine beer. Plotholders are layering the hops with chicken manure, all the allotment leftovers, and some comfrey. Comfrey is well worth growing in an odd corner of the allotment. It’s a perennial plant with pretty purple flowers beloved of bees and can either be chopped down and added to the compost heap or left in a covered bucket to turn into “compost tea” and diluted for use as a liquid manure. Comfrey can spread like wildfire. I recommend buying a plant or two of a cultivated form, variety Bocking 14, that doesn’t seed itself.
Some allotments have grass paths and the mowings can be layered on the heap. I know of one plotholder who begs the fine clippings from a neighbouring bowling green, having ascertained that they don’t contain any weedkiller. n