Hot, hot, hot

The 'hot' is in reference to the hot bed, rather than the weather, as a balmy July it most certainly is not. A hot bed is made out of fresh manure (many thanks to Lynn for letting us take a load of her spare prime dung!), straw and soil and, despite washing my hands several times already, I still seem to have a certain 'eau de dung' about me, which is most attractive. The rabbit certainly seems to like being near me, even if nobody else does...

There are many ways to make a hot bed and I'm sure I've probably not done it as well as most, but this year's is a bit of a test for next when we're going to be more organised and get the local school to help plant the seeds from scratch. I don't know who was more relieved about the plants getting out of their tiny pots in the greenhouse and into the soil - them or me. They've been in a desperate state for weeks now.

The basics of a hot bed is to create a container of really hot stuff that is perfect for heavy feeders such as squashes and beans. In this bed, I'm applying the Three Sisters principle, which is from a Native American tradition of planting corn, beans and squash together in one bed. Used by various tribes throughout North America, the system is a simple but effective example of companion planting.

The three plants are companions; they help each other by maximizing growing conditions for one another. The corn grows in the centre of the bed and serves as a support for climbing pole beans. The beans fix nitrogen in the soil, important for nitrogen loving, heavy feeding corn. The squash surrounds the corn and beans and covers the ground, serving to hold moisture in the soil, and – as Native American lore explains – the prickles on squash stems act as repellant to pests such as hungry raccoons. I don't think we'll have to worry about raccoons much in High Spen, but it might deter other predators.

Two pests that will love this bed are slugs and snails, which are relentless in their quest to eat everything I plant. I've tried everything from hair around the plants to egg shells and copper wire, but they always win. One thing that does work, even if it makes me feel a little guilty, is traps filled with my husband's home brew. Well at least they die happy :) So, around this bed you'll see in the picture is some copper tape, which I'm trialling. Fingers crossed it works.

I've lined the edges of the pile with recycled bubblewrap and decided that I'd make a framework of willow to hold it in place, which took longer than I envisaged, but it think it was worth the effort. I'm going to fill the rest of the base with straw to act as further insulation and help to keep it all together.

This afternoon I took a wander around the allotment and took some photos to show how things are coming along:



The hops are beginning to work their way up the wires



The jerusalem artichokes have been tied in - they're getting much taller and doing their job of bullying out the weeds pretty well (the insect home in the background is currently home to a family of earwigs - not quite the ladybird/bee/butterfly/lacewing I was expecting, and not really good news, so I'll have to try and encourage them to set up somewhere else)



Raspberries are finally appearing on the canes and I didn't want to lose the whole crop to the birds, so I've put a net up today over our home-made fruit cage (constructed out of old greenhouse staging we found under the weeds in the winter)



The willow dome is almost dense enough to shelter under (although definitely not in a real downpour, which I discovered recently) and I've been weaving it in on a regular basis to avoid the 'top heavy' look you can often get on willow creations that are planted and then left alone for years!