[ht]

Hi all,

I have two questions. My allotment has raised beds and on turning them the soil generally looks very good, except there's a lot of small stones among it. Is it worth me taking these stones out? I was going to make a frame to fit over the wheel barrow, shoveling soil over it and catching the stones, but am I overthinking this when there could be nothing the matter with a few stones?

Second question, I planted onion sets last week. I noticed today a few had been pulled out of the soil so I have since netted the onion bed. I've got other seeds in the ground in other beds, am I going to need to net these too for fear of birds ripping seedlings out?

Thanks for any help

[Christine]

You only need to net till things get a good root down then the birds won't be able to put things up. For some reason onions, garlic, peas and beans are favourites for pulling up and peas for nipping by sparrows. But as they get bigger the birds go do other things.

I think  few small stones can be hand picked off as they come to the top. A neighbour on one of my allotments riddled the complete soil of his plot (10 rods) when he first moved in and it sets to a solid pan in times of either heavy rain or drying winds. To remove all stones is something I wouldn't do as a result.

[JayG]

Root crops like parsnips and carrots can fork when the roots encounter a stone, so you could make a case for trying to remove them from the soil where you intend to grow such crops, but apart from that stones don't cause many problems and, as Christine has said, you could consider them to be part of the soil structure. In any event, you'd go nuts trying to permanently remove of all of them, as Nature has a clever way of slowly moving solid objects up through the soil in winter...