Digging is now well under way. The main veg plot is a roughly equilateral triangle with sides around 45m long, which gives about 900 sq metres for veg and soft fruit. That’s three times the size of my old allotment. This excludes the expanse of more steeply sloping land, which will house the orchard and coppice, and the building plot, which once the house is constructed will give perhaps another 500 square metres of growing space with room for a large polytunnel.
Considering the weather conditions of the last week, the soil is incredibly dry – a virtue of the buffer of Quaternary Fluvioglacial Sand and Gravel that lies over the unforgiving Moinian Metamorphic rocks or Boulder Clay which cover much of the inland area around here. I’d like to think it was judicious foresight, but frankly we’d have taken anything. It’s all a far cry from the Oxford Clay and the main problem is going to be drought, because as Al Lotment knows, Forres gets less rainfall than Oxford, although if he studied the stats properly he could probably show it rains more often here. A brisk southwesterly highlighted the other problem. High up the agenda is a shelterbelt of edible hedging along the north and west boundaries.
As the soil has been cattle-grazed, it has a fertile top over a stony compacted subsoil. Valerie thinks we should get someone in to plough it but that would be like paying someone to dig your manure in for you. Instead, I have invested in a few cutting-edge hand tools. I am pictured with my new best friend, my azada, cutting the first sods. I guess you lot are still struggling on with your quaint anachronistic forks and spades. Paul excepted of course. The azada pulls up Stonehenge style boulders from the subsoil, which inspired me to build a dry-stone wall feature to raise the soil up on the downslope side of the veg plot. It can’t compete with the 9”x 2” but one has to make use of the resources at hand. The pressure is now off with rhubarb in and asparagus ready to go once the soil warms up.
