Tuesday 22 April 2014

The new patch

We moved to the Scottish countryside last October, after two years at sea and countless years in the city. Our traditional Galloway cottage came with 1.3 acres, including a sizeable vegetable garden (8 x 25 metres). Alas, the veg plot looked like this:

Veg garden habitat, October 2013
Veg garden habitat, October 2013

More of a habitat really, with metre-high nettles, brambles and bracken. Putting my 70-something parents to good use, we managed to roughly clear the area in a week and were pleased to discover ten raised beds and a nice garden bench hiding underneath. It felt a bit like an archaeological dig.

The first hard graft, November 2013
The first hard graft, November 2013
Then we had to wait nearly four weeks until Boxing Day for a non-windy day to cover everything with thick black plastic. Ideally, we would have liked to leave the plastic down for six months, but with us raring to go planting this spring we had to settle for three months. In the meantime we filled in two ornamental ponds with rubble, soil and compost to make a herb and a salad pond.

The salad pond had to be peacock- and cat-proofed immediately.
The salad pond had to be peacock- and cat-proofed immediately.

We lifted the plastic cover in late March and to our surprise found some very jaundiced daffodils growing in two of the beds. These got a week's worth of chlorophyll before we transplanted them all over our garden. They are now doing very well in their new sites, except those that have been dug up and trampled on by the chickens.

The Scottish daffs are tough. The veg bed after the plastic came off, March 2014
The Scottish daffs are tough. The veg bed after the plastic came off, March 2014

The past two weeks have been spent digging and pulling up enormous dock, nettle and bracken roots. There is nothing for it but hard graft. Jim is a stalwart digger, but even he needed a day off after a fortnight's solid effort. As each bed is readied we've been planting it up. So far we have populated seven of the ten beds: beetroot, pak choi and lettuce; calabrese and kale; red cabbage, white cabbage and Brussels sprouts; carrots and onions; parsnips and Swiss chard; peas and broad beans; cress, rocket, little gems and radish.



The partially planted veg beds, April 2014
The partially planted veg beds, April 2014
We are both pretty much novice gardeners. My only gardening experience before was harvesting fruit and veg in my gran's garden as a child and having a window box of kitchen herbs. As a city girl, I've never had a garden before. And while Jim grew up having a garden, his expertise was mainly limited to lawn-mowing. But, armed with the Garden Expert reference books and a plentiful supply of useful youtube videos we are going to give this our best shot. Any advice is welcome as we take our first steps to figure out what works and what doesn't. In the worst-case scenario, we can always become nettle farmers!

5 comments:

  1. I believe you can stew the nettles into a good fertilizer. Seb calls weeds naughty plants. (I was trying to explain why we were pulling up plants.) It looks like you had lots of naughty plants. Good luck. Glad you are blogging it. I would love to have more space down here. Now I can vicariously garden .

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  2. Thanks, Hannah. Yes, we have lots and lots of naughty plants. We also have a ground elder infestation elsewhere. I've already been making nettle tea, but there is only so much you can drink of that! Thanks for the fertiliser tip - we are going to make our own seaweed fertiliser since we have the stuff on our door step.

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  3. We had ground elder. Urgh. You can eat it like a salad leaf. Tastes a bit like parsely. Once you get sick of that Glyphosate does the trick.

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  4. You can eat the stuff? OK, we'll give that a try. Otherwise, some of it is going under black plastic until next February and the rest is going to get dug up and then we'll send the chickens in. Don't really want to use weed killer if we can help it.

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  5. Looking sharp. Best of luck to your renovated beds!

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