New Allotment Advice Please

elektra-2007

Hi I have an new Allotment, its very over run with grass, weeds ect.

Ive brought some thick black plastic to lay over the ground, my plans are to leave it for a few weeks to kill everything underneath. But then im not sure what to do after that.
Can i just get a rotorvator and turn over the ground?
Or do I need to try get rid of the dead grass first?
Will i need to mix in compost or is the soil ok to start straight away, is there test i can do to check?
Thanks for any advice im a total novice, I have looked at a few books about growing and to be fair it either dosnt give me the advice i need, or gets too technical.
Thanks for any advice you can give

thifty

Hi elektra
Sounds like me last year! I have quite a lot of gardening experience but had never had an allotment until last year which is a different thing all together!
You have a few options to clear it
weed killer the lot
use a rotavator and chop up all the weeds into tiny pieces only for them to grow more(as you can tell i dont recommend this option)
do it the painful way (which i did with a lot of help from my retired dad), dig it all over slowly, getting rid of all weeds and burning them as you go.

i found a 2 rolls of curtain material in our school skip and covered the ground with that, which kept the weeds down a bit but it made it not seem as daunting as it split it up into sections. I now have it all clear but then i only have a half one and i even share that with a friend.

I then just had the first year playing at it, with lots of advice from my dad and the old man next door, ken who is lovely. He gave me some of his stuff which tasted lovely and spurred me on. I was so proud when i had actually grown some lovely stuff and could offer him something back.
I came to realise that there was not much goodness left in my plot and i used chicken muck pellets when planting but had mixed success. I have noiw had a load of muck delivered and my wonderful father has spread it all and dug it in (no you can't have him, he is all mine:rotfl:)
I cant wait to get started again and have been organising all my seeds into month order!
Good luck, having a plot is one of the best things I have done. I have purple sprouting broc ready in next week or so and I cant wait to try it along with some of my lovely leeks:)

Vixie_Pixie

Hi elektra

we dug ours over the painful way by manually digging! We done 1/4 of our plot at a time, then we fed the soil with chicken manure pellets and blood fish and bone. We then planted some veggies and pulled up any weeds that popped up on a daily basis. We've had our allotment a year and only half is dug over... the rest is covered with plastic sheeting

Ives

If you dont fancy digging you can put cardboard over the grass and put a 10cm layer of manure/compost etc on top. The cardboard will kill the grass denying it light, and both will rot down into organic matter, and in the meantime the worms will mix this and the manure into the soil improving its structure and nutritional content. I cleared my lawn for veg growing by doing this in Autumn and it was ready for the Spring. In the summer this technique takes 10 weeks to break down. Make sure the cardboard is overlapped by an inch - look up permaculture for more organic energy saving tips. It took me 3 hours to do, but digging would have taken 2 weeks! Dont use chemical fertliserers as this will destroy any long term nutrition in the soil as well as killing much of the soil life. Its like feeding your kids McDonalds breakfast, dinner and tea - they (and your plants) will put on a lot of growth but wont be healthy.

matt987106

when we took over ours, it had been sprayed by the council to kill the weeds and couch grass, then they paid some1 to prep the land ( which was just a 1/4 turn of the top soil , yes pretty useless, so we had to pick up each and every 1 of them 1 ft sq bits of earth and get rid of it, we piled it up down each side of our plot, many others barrowed it to the skip, we then had to move these 2 big mounds either side ( in our on time, i did this in oct last year ))

of course then the earth under was really hard and compact, so we have to dig it over and i then purchased a rotovator ( which is great, makes easy work of it ) we had a season of veg out of it

about to start again, which will entail me running the rotorvator over it all again a few times, i know people frown about them ( its not the same as double digging ) but its quick and it works for me

maxdp

I started on my allotment last year in about March. It was covered in Couch grass. I dug up small bits at a time and weeded as thoroughly as I could. As soon as I had done this I then planted as I went. The first bed I cleared i planted potatoes. Then Broad beans and onions. Weeds did still come up and I cleared as I could. It took a long time but at least I was able to grow as I went which made it seem worthwhile.

I did lay some carpet on parts to try to kill the weeds but one of the Old timers at the Allotment told me to be careful doing that because it attracts a certain type of worm, (which I cannot remember the name of) which was not good.

Good luck to you.

Megansmum

elektra-2007 wrote: »

Hi I have an new Allotment, its very over run with grass, weeds ect.

Ive brought some thick black plastic to lay over the ground, my plans are to leave it for a few weeks to kill everything underneath. But then im not sure what to do after that.
Can i just get a rotorvator and turn over the ground?
Or do I need to try get rid of the dead grass first?
Will i need to mix in compost or is the soil ok to start straight away, is there test i can do to check?
Thanks for any advice im a total novice, I have looked at a few books about growing and to be fair it either dosnt give me the advice i need, or gets too technical.
Thanks for any advice you can give

You can get this:
http://www.wilkinsonplus.com/Garden-Accessories/Wilko-Soil-Moisture-and-pH-Tester/invt/0261281?htxt=PsAGyAqy%2FDSGVBgOHPBfATKVETOKIWHcwqoICuDrG%2FxTcDPfxIrYzUvEu76RzzM6wutKTeo9AOCB%0AtDs76aYYKg%3D%3D

which as it says tests the ph level of your soil, then depending what you want to grow you'll know whether to add lime etc