Double digging


Some farmers still lift potatoes by hand.  Their method was to work along each row lifting the potatoes out of the soil with a broad fork, depositing them neatly to one side of the row, leaving the haulms on the disturbed soil behind the digger.


This is the way many allotment gardeners harvest their spuds.  However, if you have a sticky clay loam soil that sticks to the potatoes it's not always that easy: there are always a few small ones that insist on remaining in the soil.  Have you noticed how self-sown potatoes always shoot up amongst delicate seedlings


A recently suggestion I saw (which has actually been in use many years) is to scoop the potato row to the left, then 'pick' the potatoes into a bucket and thence into a sack.  Then deposit the haulms behind you, after carefully removing even the tiniest of tubers that might grow again.


By the end of each row you'll be left with a hollow littered with haulms and a few uprooted weeds.  Then dig over the hollow, burying the rubbish, effectively double-digging the ground, leaving a layer of vegetation as a sanctuary for worms and quietly rotting away to increase the soil's fertility.


This sounds a good system, I'm going to try that next year.


Two Golden Rules for a weed-free allotment

1. Leave enough room between rows of plants so it's easy to get at the weeds with your hoe.  Cabbages are a good 'cleaning crop'; they're robust and spaced well apart.  As they mature they shade any weeds and inhibit their growth.
2. Hoe the soil before the weeds become noticeable.  Hoeing allows air into the soil, creating a mulching effect which reduced the evaporation of moisture in hot dry weather.  (I was taught 'if you hoe when you don't have to hoe, you'll never have to hoe'!)

Five Fallacies about weeds

1. Potatoes are a 'cleaning crop'.  This is only partly true; potatoes won't get rid of weeds without a lot of effort on your part.  What is true is that you can't grow a decent crop of potatoes on weedy ground.
2. You'll have to get rid of every scrap of weed root.  This is a counsel of perfection that deters many people from gardening.  The fact is that good cultivation - digging and hoeing - kills off the most persistent weeds like couch grass and nettles.  If they do grow again, they're easy to pull up when the soil's been well cultivated.
3. You shouldn't put weeds on a compost heap.  Yes, you should.  The heat generated by a properly made compost heap destroys all weed seeds, rhizomes and bulbils.
4. The only way to deal with weeds is to remove them with their top layer of soil.  This gets rid of any seeds that may have fallen from them.  What an appalling fallacy!  Your allotment's fertility lies in the top few inches of soil and weeds are better adapted than your vegetables to grown in an impoverished soil.  Actually weed seeds best survive deep down in the soil where there's less air; every time you dig your plot you bring next year's weeds to the surface.  Skimming off the surface won't appreciably reduce your weed population but it will reduce your chances of growing a good crop of vegetables.
5. Modern weedkillers make weed control easy.  Weedkillers like Glyphosate have their uses but generally speaking, not on allotments. Spraying involves as much effort as hoeing and weedkillers with their suitable sprayers are expensive to buy.  Furthermore drifting spray might kill the wrong plants, worse still they could kill plants on your neighbours' plots, which won't make for happy gardening.