How To Make A Vegetable Garden
Posted By Judith on 13th August 2019
This is a post that I actually started to write last Autumn, but it never got finished or published for obvious reasons, so I thought it was about time I finished it off.
The garden renovations had dragged on until October 2016. Worn out and with Winter looming we’d decided to leave any further physical work until the coming Spring, and so it was that in April 2017 work began on the long awaited vegetable garden.
As you can see at that stage it was just an oddly shaped piece of ground on a slight slope, though the amount of work it had taken to actually get it to that stage was truly vast because of the camber of the land and all the rubbish/rubble that had been piled on it since 2014.
By May the individual beds were taking shape as I laid the paths, but still a long way to go.
By August the sweetcorn was growing, but not much else. The paths weren’t finished, I’d pretty much run out of steam. I’m getting too old for laying slabs.
By the end of September everything was cleared out except the strawberries and having got my second wind I began to extend the paths.
And so we found ourselves in Spring 2018.
I laid 4 ‘stepping stones’ with the remaining slabs and by May it was actually beginning to look like a vegetable patch. I’d even sowed grass seed at the far side to extend the ‘lawn’. (I use the term loosely).
At the beginning of June the peas and Broad Beans were thriving, as were the strawberries. The sweetcorn needed work.
I was expecting subsequent pictures to show an ongoing, thriving plot, but as we all know it got hot.
In fact it got very, very hot and very dry too. Plants throughout the garden were flowering and setting seed at an unprecedented rate and the vegetables were no exception, not helped by a very windy spell which played havoc with my sweetcorn and Broad Beans, though I did manage to harvest some beans and cobs.
As a result my subsequent picture is a bit of a disappointment.
By the beginning of September the peas, Broad Beans and sweetcorn were all gone. All that remained were 2 strawberry beds and the nasturtiums which I always plant with the beans to control black fly. In the foreground you can just see the rhubarb and outdoor tomatoes with the Antirrhinum (snapdragon) that self seed there every year.
My wheelbarrow covers a pile of horse manure ready for digging in, but as we know I got overtaken by events last September and all work in the garden stopped.
The truth is I’ve never really got going again. A long illness after Xmas and a bad thumb in June, all put me out of action and the garden suffered too.
I will soon be writing about what happened next.
