Clearing up

We have cleared all the beds except for the carrots in readiness for the manure delivery.

Allotment & Garden Guide - October 1945 (2)

CLEAR THAT RUBBISH

Clearing up the garden or allotment is a job that should not be put off. If decaying vegetable material, old sticks, cabbage stumps and other rubbish is left to rot in the garden, all kinds of pests and vermin will be encouraged. Keep up with the work of clearing the ground as soon as the crops are finished. Put all suitable material on the compost heap, while not forgetting the needs of any domestic livestock.

Bean sticks can often be made to serve two seasons, if they are carefully stored and kept dry during the winter. Pea sticks of the brushwood type are seldom much use after one season and should be burned.

THOSE BONFIRES

Keep them to the smallest limits and burn only woody or diseased material, the underground parts of thistles, docks, couch grass and the like. Bonfire ash should not be left out for the rain and dew to dissolve and wash away the very soluble form of potash it contains. It can be incorporated in the garden soil immediately it is cold, or it may be bagged, stored in a dry place and used as a fertilizer when needed.

Allotment & Garden Guide - October 1945

"Hail, old October, bright and chill,
First freed man from the summer sun!
Spice high the bowl and drink your fill!
Thank Heaven, at last the summer's done!"

An American divine wrote that October is nature's funeral month and that the month of departure is more beautiful than the month of coming: that October is more beautiful than May. Gardeners may well argue about that, but they will agree that the sun of their gardening year is setting in October. It is a time for reflection, for a judicial summing up of our successes and failures.

Are our failures due to any lack in ourselves? Did we fail to tackle those pests in good time or did those poor, worthless crops result from a lack of fertility in our soil? The farmer, we are told, looks at winter with spring in his eyes. So does the good gardener. For both the practical couplet is this: "In October dung your field, And your land its wealth shall yield."

But the reader may say, "It's all very well for the farmer, but where can I get dung?" Well, the answer to that has been given many many times; it is simply this—if you can't get dung, make compost. And how few gardeners do, yet compost will help them to keep their land fertile.

THAT COMPOST

October is the picture month — the month for painted leaves, as Thoreau, the American nature writer called it. That's a nice poetic thought, but to the sensible gardener those painted leaves, when they drop, become compost. Leaves of oak, beech and birch are very valuable for the compost heap, but pine and spruce needles, together with lime and plane tree leaves, are best burnt and the ashes used instead as a fertiliser.

So Marc, let's get that manure!!!!!!