Veggies, or a lack of...

Do you know what the most successful thing to come out of our veg plot was last year? Raspberries... yes, not even a vegetable! We had courgette plants eaten by slugs, sweetcorn that got to about half height then turned black, and leeks that looked more like spring onions. We also had a very poor germination rate for peas and beans both attempting to start them inside and then planted straight out. Generally not our finest year.

All of that caused us to take a step back and think about what we're working with. When we converted this area of the garden the soil was in a very poor state. We dug in a lot of compost initially and have done so a little more each year, but the reality is that the ground is probably in need of some T.L.C. 

So this year we're planting no vegetables at all. We're leaving the area fallow, though instead of leaving a nice empty space to fill with weeds we've planted green manure. A couple of cycles of that followed by a healthy dose of compost or manure and fingers crossed we'll have a better success rate with whatever we decide to grow next.

While that ticks over we'll be enjoying a regular box of fresh, seasonal vegetables from a local farmer instead, and looking forward to a good harvest of fruit from our various trees. 

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Sewing the Seeds

Do you remember back in January how we wrote a post about getting on top of the garden? We'd ticked off lots of little jobs and were looking forward to what came next. Well what came next was - you guessed it - the bathroom, and we've not really been in the garden since. Our fairly sorted patio now has a toilet and sink sitting on it, and the old bath is still in the middle of the lawn!

Seed sewing time is upon us though, and regardless of the state of outside we're being hopeful and getting ourselves set up for another year of vegetable growing. We're using our conservatory as a greenhouse once more as this has worked well in the past. This year we've set up a simple set of shelves to rack up all our seedlings on, and over Easter we set about planting some veg.

So far we've sown these:

Broad Beans
Courgettes
Leeks
Peas
Pumpkins
Runner Beans
Salad Leaves
Squashes
Sweetcorn
Swiss Chard

It all sounds quite exciting when its laid out like that. We always try and grow those things that are nicest fresh, and that we eat lots of over the summer months, but this year we've expanded the list by trying to utilise every bit of space we've got, and also to pop in a few autumn and winter veggies too. Sounds like a plan to me....

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Round and round the garden....

It's been such a pleasant weekend hasn't it? So nice to see the sun shining. While we were out in the garden yesterday we realised it's been a while since we've shown you what's going on, so here's a round the garden trip of what we've been up to and what's looking good at the moment...

We've been planting out lots of our seedlings. Taking inspiration from the kitchen garden at Chatsworth house where they plant their veggies all mixed together in a radial format we've mixed up our purple sprouting, salad leaves and some flower seeds in a grid. We're hoping that it's all going to look very pretty in a few weeks time.

Our broad beans are doing very well. Unfortunately the peas we planted at the same time have been well and truely munched by the juvenile sparrows we've had around. Just not to be this year.

Being indecisive about where to plant out our sunflowers we eventually went for placing them all in a block in the middle of our veg patch. 

We've recently hung out a new bird feeder to cope with the influx of the aforementioned sparrows. They certainly come in flocks and still choose to squabble over one or two holes despite there being plenty of open ones. The chickens of course continue to feast from the rejects!

Well trained sparrows throw the bits they don't like to the chickens...

As part of all the clearing we did earlier in the year we revealed an acer that had previously been well hidden. It's thriving for the extra space.

Our alliums are looking as good as last year (sorry, not sure on the variety). I do love these flowers. 

We've been donated quite a few broken fence panels for our wood burner recently. While we're very grateful for the free fuel our patio does currently look like this:

The small bed in the front of the house is looking relatively tidy at the moment, with the climbing rose (Claire Austen) covered in flowers and the penstamen just coming into bloom too. 

We're very hopefully for a first cherry harvest this year. We planted this tree 18 months ago and it didn't try and fruit last summer. This time it's looking great.

The black peppermint is thriving this year. Joe has high hopes of a plentiful supply for peppermint tea.

And finally a few more plants in flower at the moment...

Last summers lavender plugs trying to flower already!

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Making a Plan - January Gardening

It's planning time. We have three beds that make up our veg patch and we're starting to come to some decisions about what we want to do with them this year. Each bed is about 1.5m x 3m so we have plenty of space to grow a range of things - but not enough to be completely self sufficient in veg over the summer. Our plan has always been to both rotate crops through the beds and try a few different things each year.

Last year we grew onions and garlic in bed one, potatoes in bed two and salad leaves, beetroot, cabbages, runner beans, courgettes and purple sprouting broccoli in bed three. We also had tomatoes in pots.

Photo from May 2013

Our plans for 2014 are being guided by a certain bit of news though. We've decided to take a few months unpaid leave from our jobs and do some travelling. We'll be out of the country for all of September, October and November and we're going to spend most of our time in New Zealand, though we're also stopping in Canada, Australia and Thailand. As you can imagine we're rather excited about this and I'm sure you'll hear more about it all as time goes on.

This has made us think more carefully about what we're planting. Not being here during the autumn is a little limiting, but means we can focus on those crops that will keep us going all summer.

Bed One was an easy decision. We really enjoyed having a fresh spuds in the garden all summer, and it saved us quite a bit on buying little polythene bags of baby potatoes from the supermarket. We'd mostly finished our potato crop by September and so we'll just plant a couple less plants this year, focusing on early varieties.

We've gone for Pink Fir Apple and Pentland Javelin which we had great success with last year, and have added Red Duke of York as a variety we've not tried before. These all came from the garden centre where they have a range of loose potatoes on a "fill a bag" basis. We found last year that this worked really well for us as one bag is plenty for our space and we could fill it with a mixture of varieties.  Joe set these out to chit at the weekend.

Bed Two is going to be given over to fresh salad leaves this year.  We can plant these as we go along and again should keep us going for all those summer months before our trip. We'll let you know what we plant when we make such decisions.

We then had a bit of a debate about Bed Three. We had wondered about leaving it fallow, then considered planting a green manure, before stumbling on the answer; peas! We're going to fill the bed with peas and broad beans which hopefully we'll enjoy for several months (read: be fed up of by the time we leave), and should hopefully do the soil some good too.

We've chosen "Hurst Green Shaft" pea variety and "Red Epicure" bean variety this year. Yes - a red broad bean, we were intrigued and decided that this definitely needed investigation (particularly with a description such as "'beany' flavour" - who could resist).

And thats it. We're keeping it simple and hopefully this should leave us with some time to get on with the rest of the garden as well.

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Photo Friday

Our cabbages may be weedy this year but they can still make a reasonable photo.

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October in the Chicken Coop

This month in the chicken coop....

... Frog learns a new trick:

A quick hop up onto the windowsill and she neatly avoids the fence we've built. We don't think she gets into the veg patch this way - we've seen her squeezing through holes in the fence again - but invariably this is how she chooses to get out when she sees us coming (or is bribed!). Typical. The fence still does the trick with the other three which prevents complete destruction, and fortunately there's very little left to harm now anyway, but we'll have to come up with a better solution before next spring. *sighs*

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A Garden Update

Linking up with Garden Bloggers' Blooms Day for the first time, though I'm afraid this post is rather lacking in flowers! 

A steady trickle of things have been going on in the garden. None of them seem big enough to write about in their own right but I thought it was high time to bring everyone up to speed on what has been happening. The biggest changes have been happening on opposite sides of the garden as one big project.

As we built our chicken run we discovered a large area of hardcore. This isn't great for the chickens - there isn't much to scratch around in it for! We decided it needed to come out. Excellent, thought I, free hardcore to use as a basis for paths. Over in the vegetable plot the grassy paths between the beds have been awaiting the moment of their demise. Being a bit shy on good topsoil I decided not to waste it by burying it so have saved it for later use - I left the chickens guarding it (nicely tilling it and fishing out any weeds)! I intend to dig it out later for use where it matters and refill the space with a lot of wood chippings.

Chicken run with hardcore in bottom half of the picture.

Vegetable plot (much earlier in the year) with grassy paths.

Soil comes out, hardcore goes in.

The chickens working over the spoil heap in their improved run.

Nice solid paths in the vegetable garden.

In order to try and give our vegetables the best start we've chicken proofed that area of the garden. Unfortunately our two bantams are too nifty for us. This time it was Frog who'd found a gap in the fence and we caught her several times strolling around our potatoes and onions. Time for reinforcements!

Re-enforced chicken fence. 

Here are a few of the smaller things that have been going on in our garden (mostly unaided):

Our tower of sweet peas - still going strong!

Courgettes doing what courgettes do - sneakily growing under a mass of leaves.

Cabbages looking more like Swiss cheese. There have been a lot of cabbage white butterflies around the garden...

Our new rhubarb plant seems to be taking.

Our apples are growing big and juicy.

Our holiday gift to ourselves - one bay tree. There are already double the number of leaves on it!

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Our Garden - An Introduction

We've lived in our current house for about a year, and so the garden is a complete mix of plants and structure from previous owners and things we've added and changed. 

Here's a quick tour of how our garden currently looks:

Vegetable plots
This is completely our work, and has been the focus of our efforts since we moved in. When we arrived this area was overgrown with knee high grass and weeds. We've set it up with four basic beds for flowering bulbs and vegetables. 

Lawn with low wall edge
A large part of the garden is taken up by an almost ovular lawn, defined by a brick wall that has seen better days.

Pond
Beyond the lawn, in the far corner of the garden, is a small pond. We haven't decided what we want to do with this area yet - but in the mean time it turns out the local frogs are very keen on it and we currently have a lot of tadpoles!

Chickens
Next to the pond we've created an enclosed area for our four hens.

Patio
The patio has become a bit of a dumping ground while we work on other areas. Hopefully it won't always look like this!

Fruit Trees
When we moved in there were three fruit trees in the garden: a plum, an apple and a pear. We've since added three more apples and a cherry - but it'll be a few years before we get any fruit off these new trees.

...and that's about it. 

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