The waters are rising...

About this time of year, things get distinctly soggy up at the allotment. This is typical: the last trench of the bed I'm double-digging at the moment, about a spade's depth and dry when I left it, but a day later the water table is high enough to fill it from underneath.

I've also got soup-plates attaching to my wellies every time I go in there, and I keep having to take days off because the soil is simply too wet to work. It does it no good in any case - as soon as you tread on soggy soil you squeeze out the air pockets, compacting it so that when it dries out it becomes a hard pan that nothing will grow in (and which is murder to cultivate).

Luckily though my allotment has a split personality: on one side (the lower side - particularly the end that's towards the middle of the site) it gets like this very very quickly in the year - that's where the double-dug bed in the picture is sited. At the other end, on the left-hand side, though, it stays more or less dry-ish until about February, so I've now transferred to that end and am double-digging another bed there. Nice to have a choice in the matter!

Blackcurrant boogie

I have a couple of blackcurrant bushes in my back garden which have been here since I got here (about 7 years now) but have always been in the wrong place - a bit too shady and too crowded, being in the corner between the fence and the greenhouse. Now at last I've got space (and time) to get them onto a far nicer spot on the allotment.

I'm putting them into 1mx1m raised beds - partly because I can't really be bothered to double-dig anything bigger than they actually need, partly because I got given a Link-a-bord raised bed to trial, so I thought this would be a good way to test it out (it's the green one in the front in the picture). So far the verdict is: really easy to install, but a bit on the flimsy side - I had a job to get it level as it doesn't have enough weight to sit steadily on the ground by itself so it moves around all over the place. and for the same reason I'm also a bit sceptical as to how efficiently it'll stay in place (the pegs used on each corner to anchor it keep rising up).

Anyway - so I've dug the space out to a spade's depth, loosened the bottom with a fork, and then filled in with 2 barrows of stable manure and 2 barrows of the compost from my allotment compost bins. Mixed it up thoroughly, put in the edging for the raised beds (the other one's more straightforwardly made of gravel boards) and then replaced the topsoil. It looks dead smart - next step is to hoick out the blackcurrants and shift them over.

Another raised bed completed

I spent this afternoon battling with the soup again - marginally more diggable since it hasn't rained for all of about 3 days, but it still left me with mud soup-plates attached to the bottom of my wellies.

Never mind: object achieved. I finished constructing the next raised bed: having double-dug the area over the last couple of weeks, I finally up-ended the last wheelbarrow load of compost and then put in the scaffold boards.

The worst of constructing raised beds, I find, is getting it all level. When you've got a site like mine - sloping not just from side to side, but also from front to back - it's the devil's own job to get four sides of a rectangle on a level. With this bed, as with others, I had one end almost proud of the ground level while the other end was sunk almost level with it. At the end of the day, it doesn't affect the result, which is a defined, contained area of really well-cultivated soil which produces seriously good crops. Well worth the work - and the frustration.

The strawberries are now in - four rows of Honeoye which I hope (mice permitting) will provide me with lots of really early strawberries this year. I'm planning to plant out the garlic soon, too, and the early crop of peas and broad beans which have been pre-germinating in my coldframe at home. It's amazing how much there is to do at this time of year!