18/1/26 - Setting Up and an Experiment

Good weekend to you all.  This weekend was going to be one of those very rare weekends where virtually nothing was on the cards to do with growing or the allotment other than a very quick wander onto the plot to make sure all was well after not visiting all week.

Friday afternoon I had the chance to finish work a little earlier than usual, so we had a quick wander up while the weather was good and while it was still light.  I took some WD40 and a mini spanner to finish off a couple of things that I had left last week.  The locks on the sheds needed a bit of an oil, and the wires that I put in place for the raspberries last weekend needed a final tighten up.  But that little visit started the brain going, and it soon turned into another productive weekend.

With a predominantly wet forecast, if I were to do anything, it was going to be indoors mostly.  So far, I have only sown onions, but it won't be long before I will soon need my lights and grow tent set up.  As you may have seen, I have started a series of pages on this blog that I have called the 'How I.....' pages where I describe how I perform fairly routine tasks.  They are tried and tested and I rarely change how I do them.  So, as a point of reference and to save blogging about the same processes every year, I create one page per activity that will stay in place.  The latest page is here and describes how I got about setting up my grow tent for the start of the sowing season.

So with that all set up, I was happy to leave the allotment related activities for another week.  And that plan was going well until the allotment WhatsApp group chimed into life around 14.30 Sunday afternoon.  It was our Chairman informing the group that he had been to the site to deliver two trailer loads of a new compost/manure material and invited members to help themselves.  If it was any good, he said that they may be a possibility of getting more in the future.

Never one to let a freebie go to waste, I decided to get the waterproofs on and hot foot it up to the site to pick up a few wheelbarrow loads and have a look what it's like.  It's been sourced locally and has been described as a mix of coir, chicken and cattle manure and gypsum which should make it a good mulch or soil conditioner.  In my allotment growing, I tend to use 4 different sources of soil additive.  Normal shop bought multi-purpose compost, digestate provided by the Chairman, rotted horse manure that I source from nearby stables and occasionally my own mix of all of the above plus whatever I add to my compost bin.  When it comes to the manure and the digestate, I have experimented to one degree or another on how good it actually is.  For example, the digestate I found initially is quite bad.  You should never plant straight into it or use it neat.  It also seems to initially push the worms deeper into the soil profile, though after a period of a few weeks, it becomes less potent and the worms start working it into the soil more.  But, if left for the Winter, by the time planting comes in the Spring, it breaks down into this wonderful light texture continues to break down releasing more nutrients through the Spring months.  The worms seem to love it when it gets to this stage too.
When it comes to the manure, I did an experiment with growing broad beans to find out if it contained anything nasty like aminopyralids.  That experiment went something along the lines of sowing a broad bean in raw manure straight off the pile, sowing one in a 50/50 mix of shop compost and manure and then a control sowing in compost.  In all cases, the beans grew without signs of being affected by any contamination, although the one in raw manure did take a while, but I wasn't expecting it to even germinate, so I was quite happy with that.

In previous years in another part of my life, I've spent a lot of time around manure piles from various animals, slurry piles and other fertilisers.  You get to know the difference just by the smell, and often if it's old or fresh.  The new mix that has been delivered doesn't smell bad at all.  It's still got a bit of a nose to it which was the manure mix, but not particularly strong, suggesting that it's had some time to rot down a bit and mixed well.  It's not fully rotted, but still very good.  Plus on the whole, it's very dry and crumbly, although there are some larger clumps in there too, but they are easily broken down, or added to the current compost pile.  It's certainly not anyway near as potent as the digestate.  

I'd consider adding this to a bed, giving it a light mix in and possibly planting straight into it.  But before I'd recommend to anyone that they can do that, I think it's time for another broad bean experiment.  As it happens, I need to sow about 6 plants to replace a couple that have been damaged from the sowing at the end of last year, so this could be a good time to conduct the trials.  I picked up a couple of containers of the new mix in some old potato buckets, and have stashed them in the polytunnel so they don't get full of water.

Next weekend will be the start of the experiment.  It will go something along the lines of this...

6 small pots with one bean seed in each one.

2 pots will contact fresh shop bought compost sieved (does contain peat - I know, I don't need the lecture... 😉)

2 pots will contain a 50/50 mix of sieved shop compost, and sieved new media.

2 pots will contain 100% sieved new media.

They'll all be kept in the same environment, either in the polytunnel, or at home on the window sill or under lights and will all receive the same amount of water.  Then, it's just a case of seeing what happens.  The trial will end when either the plants are ready to be transplanted out, or there is clear evidence of failure in one or more of the pots.  What this space for news on progress!