Vegetable growing course at Carshalton Community Allotment - week 1

I attended my first session of a 6 week vegetable growing course (2 hours every Saturday) at Carshalton Community Allotment today. This week's topic was soil preparation. I thought I knew a fair amount about gardening, but I learnt so much I thought this was worthy of several blog posts. I'll be adding more posts as I go along. The picture below is of keyhole gardening. It's one of the ways they're growing plants at the allotment.

Keyhole gardening

They're growing pak choi (aka Chinese cabbage). What makes it keyhole gardening is the hole at the top between the planks of wood.

Watering a keyhole garden

That's where you add the water and compost and it feeds its way down into the rest of the soil and the plants. The cardboard is to help the plants stay in place, suppress weeds and help it retain water. The plastic bottles on the tops of the sticks are simply to stop anyone getting poked (in the eye or anywhere else) by one of the sticks. They encourage children to participate, so they're keen on safety measures.

The keyhole gardening wasn't even an official part of our course (or at least I don't think it was). The course leader just showed it to us on our way out.