I’m gardening again, properly. I don’t know what properly means but I’m doing it. Maybe I’m saying that the no-dig method was not a fully successful approach, maybe not. I think it’s time to take every sort of hammer to crack this nut, from a toy plastic inflatable version to a sledge hammer. I will do what it takes, and I will protect the soil and soil organisms at the same time. But when the couch-grass sends its hungry shoots tunnelling through my potatoes, it is time for other sorts of action. I am waging gentle war on couch-grass. It is possible to get it out of the ground where there are no other crops, but it does require digging.

I am not planning to abandon all my principles, but I have decided to stop writing about them. I will write instead about what I do, and what I produce.

The work this week includes laying a patchwork of flagstones to approach the greenhouse. I forked over the area, a rough rectangle bounded on three sides by the shed, the water tank and the greenhouse, and on the fourth side by some slices of tree that form a low raised platform. Around these are some herbs, and I plan to add more herbs to the central area, which I have now levelled, around the flagstones. It will be a good place for some of the different mints I have, where outward invasion will not be troublesome. Also the aromatic plants are useful deterrents to bugs which may want to eat my greenhouse crops.

Another operation this week that has required digging, and has involved the removal of couch-grass is to prepare a piece of ground to plant redcurrant cuttings. I used plant material provided by my immediate southerly neighbours, Daryl and Dave. I also put in some blackcurrant cuttings from my own plants. The idea is to make pencil sized pieces of shoot, and plant them, and then wait until they root next year and transplant them in the autumn. I decided I could put them in where they will remain, and I made about a dozen of each. My cuttings were somewhat haphazard, but with a dozen of each a success rate of 25% (a disaster for a commercial grower) will be fine for me.

Little by little. There is a large area where the potatoes were that looks like I need to dig it – the couch-grass – but there are other areas which will not need any digging. I have selected broad bean seed and garlic cloves from last year, and the time for planting these is fast approaching, and the places for them will need a little raking over, and very little more. The beauty of these two crops is that they grow when other things do not.

See you next week, and good gardening!