Tag: Veg Beds

Raised Beds

raised beds

After 15 or 20 years the raised veg beds are beginning to come apart at the corners and rot through in places.

raised beds as they are now

I like the L-shaped beds as they are but wheeling a barrow down the garden is a bit of an obstacle courses, especially steering past the greenhouse.

plan for new layout of raised beds

So our plan is to widen the central path – and perhaps the side paths to give better access to the beds. It’s a big job but we’re getting Earnshaw’s the local timber and fencing centre in to give us a quote for the doing the work.

Planting veg and covering it with netting or cloches to keep the pigeons off should then be a whole lot easier.

And then I can turn my attention to the rampant chicory that has, as always, taken over my patch of what should be a wild flower meadow.

Summer Sowing

veg bed

There’s just time for one last sowing for late summer vegetables. Going through the packets of seeds that we’ve already got in, there are eight that I can try but there’s only a 4 by almost 8 foot section of raised bed that I can fit them into, so I’ve gone for 2 foot squares instead of rows to get more in.

CalendulaCarrotKohl RabiSpring Onion
Salad leavesFrench beanPerpetual SpinachPea
Summer sowing

Some of the crops, such as salad leaves, will stay where I’ve sown them but as we clear the potatoes and other crops over the next few weeks I’ll be able to plant some on, such as the French beans and perpetual spinach.

The Foxes’ Ball

anxious fox
cartoon fox

They brought us:

  • one pink-and-yellow cricket practice ball (which I must return to our neighbours’ spaniel, Rogue, two doors up the road)
  • three tennis ball in varying degrees of fluffiness and squishiness
  • two dead rats

In the veg beds they’ve flattened our seedling Musselburgh leeks, broken into the netting over our dwarf French beans and dug a series of small neat holes.

The fun and games didn’t stop with stolen tennis balls: they also dug up several of our ball-sized Sturton onions and stashed most of them at the bottom of the hedge but one was taken over to the middle of the path by the shed at the other side of the garden.

A single broad bean pod was neatly nipped off and left in the middle of the now flattened leek bed.

cartoon fox

Veg Beds

A sketch to remind me where we’re planting things this year. We always struggle to remember exactly what we planted where when the new season starts.

British summertime started today; the days are getting longer, the soil is warming and, over the past week, the hawthorn hedge has turned bright green as the leaf buds open. We’re getting ahead with the garden; I put the Vivaldi second early potatoes in yesterday and we put the Stuggarter Riesen onion sets in earlier in the week. The alkathene piping and netting are there to stop the blackbirds pulling them up. In a few weeks, once the onions have started to put down roots, we’ll be able to remove the netting.

As we planted the onions two pairs of buzzards circled above us, calling occasionally, in what looked like a minor skirmish over territory.

Broccoli

IT’S SURVIVED frost and snow, it’s been pecked to tatters by Pheasants but I’m afraid what finally did for one of our purple-flowering broccoli plants was the bonfire we lit yesterday afternoon near the the compost bins, just beyond the cabbage beds.  I hope that two or three of the plants will recover sufficiently to give us a small supply of broccoli florets in a month or two.

We’ve found that you can’t be in a hurry when it comes to purple-flowering broccoli. We had no florets in the autumn when you might have expected a first crop. Ours always does better in the spring, which is good time to have it as there’s a bit of a lull in the supply of garden veg at that time. We did harvest kale and cabbage – both red and winter varieties – from this little cabbage patch in the autumn.

Veg beds as they were in 2009, which, as that's 3 years ago, is the way they will be again this year.

This spring, because of the rotation system we’re using, the cabbages and the potatoes that we grow alongside them will move onto the next bed in a clockwise direction, ousting the beans which will in turn move on to the bed where we grew root crops (and had a rare success with carrots last year) which in turn will move on to the bed where we grew the beans.