The new veggie garden

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I’ve been promising you all for the last few weeks I would post this blog – finally got the pix out of Mr MB and promptly fell sick with a 24 hour bug… So here we go.

Two months ago, in early August, we came to an agreement with a neighbour to take over part of his garden we now have an area of approx 150 sq. metres to grow veg. in.

When we took the area over it had not been cultivated in more than 4 years and was completely overgrow with ragwort up to our waists, bramble thickets, nettles, huge dockens and other assorted ‘junk’. Oh and a hedge at top and bottom that was at least 4 metres high and had not been pruned in god knows how long. This is what we faced back in August.

Standing near the top of the garden looking down, you can just see the entrance to the veggie area. Puss is a shy one and wont play. We’ve got the use of the greenhouse for growing on seedlings etc.

This was the view in through the entrance to the veggie garden

Once inside this is what we found…

No this isn’t a fruit cage but a run they used to keep their dogs in… however, it is about to become a fruit cage Note the heap of grass clippings – there were piles of them around.

Not for the fainthearted!

The first step was to get the hedges under control, this involved pruning them back extremely hard which added two metres to the length of the garden! Then with the aid of ladders, long handled loppers and the hedge trimmer we were able to reduce the height to something more manageable. In between times we hacked the bramble thicket down getting well scratched for our efforts.

The bottom hedge after the first hard pruning back… we discovered there was a fence!

And the top hedge… Whilst I was working away on the hedges Mr MB was busy uprooting all the large weeds and starting to dig. We decided to have two beds with a path slightly offset from the gate. They are approximately the same size and one will be the moon bed and the other the control bed. Notice he has discovered two important pieces of furniture… plastic chairs for the MBs to sit and have a mug of tea on.

So the digging commenced…

We knew this was not something we would be able to do in a couple of days so we just worked away steadily with Mr MB doing the bulk of the work. Whilst I continued to tame the hedge and sort out another bramble thicket by the greenhouse which was attempting to destroy the poor wee thing.

The soil, having not been worked for four years was rather impoverished looking and full of small rootlets.

One worry was that we were seeing very few worms… a look over the fence told us why a neighbour had a flock of approx 50 hens which ate anything that moved or breathed. We began to wonder if we’d made a mistake. Then we went off to Austria for two weeks walking in the mountains and forgot all about the garden.

Once back David got into the digging again and started to mulch the ground he’d dug with the old rotted grass clipping and phacelia. Note there is now a gate at the top of the veggie garden to keep our neighbours two dogs out.

All the prunings from the hedge were laid down where the paths were going to be helping to suppress weeds and define the actual paths.

In all we discovered 3 compost bins with varying degrees of rotted down grass and compost in them.

Notice Mr MB has also lifted a lot of the slabs from the ‘fruit cage’ in preparation for the raspberry canes been planted in November. We will have both summer and autumn fruiting canes and possibly something like a Tay berry. We are in no hurry to fill up the cage as there is always another year.

The area below the fruit cage is slabbed and the slabs cemented in… so we will use this for the compost bins and to rot down grass clippings, of which there will be plenty as the rest of the garden is all down to grass

The view down the garden now that the hedge has been properly pruned and reduced in height

Meet Felix, our neighbour’s other cat… Felix is just like his namesake and goes where he pleases – we frequently find him wandering through our kitchen looking for food. Our siamese girls don’t seem to mind but we do politely show him the door.

As of last week both the beds were completely dug over mulched and will now be left until early spring unless we can source some rotted horse manure in which case that will go on the beds too.

There is yet another area below the veggie garden which is where Mr MB is standing to take these photos. This area drops down to a burn (stream) and we’ll be working on that too but more slowly. Right now it has the usual bramble thickets, elderberry trees, nettles and material we did not feel happy composting or using as mulch.

Green manure, in this case phycelia is great for adding nutriment to the soil.

Given that we sowed this just about as late as you can and get away with it I’m pleased to see it growing strongly.

The ‘almost’ tidy working area of the garden with the compost bins and tumbler. Note the rather odd wheelbarrow which we unearth from – yup another bramble thicket

We’ve never used a tumbler composter before but, in theory this should allow us to make compost more quickly… I am withholding judgement on that until we remove the first pile of compost.

So that is the new veggie garden at it looks now. I’m sorry there are no photos of Mr MB or myself working. But often David was there on his own or we forgot to take he camera over.

We’ll keep you informed as to what is going on… next month we will collect the raspberry canes from Perthshire and get them planted. Then there will be little activity until early spring.

Not shown in any of the photos is a useful little tool shed which used to be the dogs house when the fruit cage was a dog run. Not large but it means we can store tools over there rather than walking them back and fore across the road. We are now on the look out for some second hand tools to supplement what we already have. With Christmas coming up perhaps we can persuade our son to give us tools as a present. I’m sure there must be on-line store you can buy from and have delivered direct to the person.

27 Oct, 2009
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Crazydi

Well done Mr & Mrs MB! You have both worked incredibly hard to transform that area. Here's hoping you reap the benefits next year....keep us posted on progress :)

27 Oct, 2009

The new veggie garden

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