Stumped for time

Earlier this week I took delivery of a dumpy bag of washed concreting sand for my stump carrot bed and after several days of looking at it I realised it wasn't going to move itself. My garden is over 300' long and the stump bed is near the bottom so it was quite an effort to get this lot shifted......about 20 barrow loads.

Oscar had to come and have a look at what I was up to. One day I'll have to stop him playing in this.

I had just enough to make sure the bed was full. Ideally I would have liked to get this done a few weeks ago so that the sand could settle and then the bed be topped up but as ever time has beaten me.



And so today, as an experiment, I cored half of the bed with a 2.5" dia pipe. I tried this last year with little success as the roots all forked but I'm giving it another go. It's a quick way of rattling through the bed, 'spitting' the collected sand into a bucket from the pipe and filling with your borehole mix. I'm using the same mix as I used for my long carrots. Because coring allows you to get the stations closer together I managed to get 35 in this half, although they were only about 20" deep. In the other half I bored the stations, 24 only, which meant I was able to a wider hole at the top and a deeper one at about 26". All stations had a 2" section of drain pipe over them which should help concentrate water as my problems last season were caused by too little water. When I pulled the carrots I found the bore hole mix was bone dry. After the seed is sown in the middle of each station in a small indentation in the compost, the whole bed is watered well. A pane of glass over each 'cup' creates a mini-greenhouse effect but these will be removed once the seeds have germinated and are growing away well.