This is why you use wood chips...

Haven't been to the plot for a week. Most of the week has been cold and rainy. So when I turn up I find loads of these guys...

Fun guys!

The woods chips become food for Mycorrhiza, which in turn becomes excellent food for your plants. Compost is a bacterial breakdown, whilst wood is fungus based. This gives a better composition of nutrients. In fact, you need both, but plants that have a better selection of mycorrhizal fungi tend to produce better crops. This is also the basis for "Back to Eden" gardening. I don't agree with the naming of it, but there can be no doubt that using wood chips and leaf mulches does produce good results.

Now I don't use the wood chips on my actual beds. But all of my paths are chipped, and the stepping places between the beds are also chipped. There are a number of other benefits too. Any weeds that manage to get a toehold, are very easily pulled. And it helps keep the place looking tidy.


Meanwhile, I went for a full blown cooking session at the plot today.

I was using the Ghillie Kettle to try and cook some breakfast. Unfortunately there were issues. I was trying to boil potatoes (they're in the pot on top of the kettle). This did not work as expected. The wind, gentle as it was, was enough to pull the heat away from the pot. I had to feed endless amounts of sticks into the kettle just to heat it up. In all it took about 90 mins to cook the spuds. So I decided to abandon that as a cooking method, and went back to the ethanol cooker.

There I managed to fry off the spuds, and add in a couple of eggs. Then with a tin of freshly cooked tuna I produced this mess... a.k.a. Lunch.

But I wasn't just cooking all day. There was plenty of work to be done. The flower bed was in a sorry state after being neglected after the floods. So I started to clear it of the couch grass, brambles and bindweed. Left behind some of the small blue flowers - not sure what they are, but the bees love 'em.

And piled everything up to become next year's Courgette Mound.

Soon I'll be building a new raised flower bed for the wife. In the meantime... there is much clearing to be done.