Wednesday 20 June 2018

volunteers and vagrants

I took one green recycling bag of couch grass roots to the tip (these belong to previous run of garden waste recycling and are no longer collected from kerbside, but I kept the bags because they are great for weeding, trimming etc.) and it was so heavy I nearly herniated the helpful man who saw me struggling and came over to help. It's all one plant, technically speaking, a root-spread clone.

In among the couch grass mat are the fragments of the last occupant, like exotic vagrants in a flock of starlings. Here's a yellow chard:

Allotment progress

Most striking of all are the sprouts of last year's potatoes. So far I've found ten or twelve plants. Apparently they're called volunteers, and I can eat them, if they make anything worthwhile.

Other treats and delights include many, many paving stones, masses of bricks and a big old tarp:

Allotment progress Allotment progress

Currently supressing weeds and spreading ants nests. I have a lot of ants. But to return to the couch grass, taking it all to the tip feels inappropriate, plus I lost a quantity of topsoil doing it. Time to activate one of the weird composting solutions. After all, I did inherit a suitable trug:

Allotment progress

Click through to Flickr for context notes and more photos.

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