Soilman's Allotment Blog

Let's get cooking

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Heap good bin

Compost. No subject closer to my heart, especially in autumn when I'm piling material on the heap.

I'm a fan of this compost bin. It's modular, so you can make a new section by sliding planks into the existing uprights. It's also dead easy to assemble. Must be: I'm generally unable to locate my arse with both hands, but this was a doddle.

Not cheap, of course, but then good things aren't. Were this eternal truth recognised by the world's finance directors, I might have spent less of my working life trying to disguise a Mini as a Rolls Royce.

Preparing for battle

Here are the Walcheren Winter cauliflowers I'm relying on for my spring brassica hit. Calling them cauliflowers is a bit of a con. Really they're heading broccoli, but no less tasty for that.

Note the heavy duty, ultra-tall, anti-pigeon netting. Over-wintering brassicas are a prime target for enemy attack. Defences must be unbreachable. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

This morning felt like the first day of autumn. The air has that heavy, damp, smoky feel. Let's hope it's not a wet one; poor old Blighty will become part of the North Sea.

Back of the net

Tragically, I'm rather proud of this. It's just 20mm plastic water pipe, but it has the perfect tensility for bending into rigid hoops. 3m lengths make unimprovable brassica nets.

I'd love to claim credit for this idea, but I can't. A fellow allotmenteer started it. Now we're all at it – witness my neighbour's plot in the background. The local plumber's merchant closes early these days.

These are the little things I wish I'd known when I started the allotment. This took 10 mins to erect, and will stand there, rock solid, until I remove it. Building nets from bamboo canes takes an hour. And then they collapse.

I'd love to hear about other people's tried-and-tested engineering tricks. Better yet, email me a picture (the address is in my 'About' section) and I'll post a collage of allotment 'netting solutions'.