Free Compost Update

If you were following along with me last year, you may be wondering how I got on with my homemade compost that I made for my upcycled bed bed. To recap, I was really pleased with how the raised bed turned out, but worried about how we would afford to fill it with compost. It's a huge bed. In the end I decided to try and make compost myself, in the bed - a cross between trenching, composting and making a lasagne bed.  You can read all about how I did it in the link above.

I went out today to assess the state of the home made compost, and I wasn't expecting greatness, for several reasons.
1. I had pretty much neglected the entire thing since before Christmas.  Hadn't dug it, hadn't turned it, hadn't really added anything to it. What can I say, I'm lazy.
2. I hadn't covered it over with any black plastic like I advised you to, because I didn't have any. It's not essential but it does speed the composting process up.
And
3. We hadn't had any very harsh weather this year. Hard frosts and snow areports both good for the land, they break down organic matter and clods of earth quickly. A mild winter here was great for my half hardy perennials,  but not fantastic for the soil.

Once again my garden gave me a pleasant surprise. The soil looked messy at first but once I gave it all a good turning over it wasn't too bad at all.

As you can see some of the larger dead plants have yet to break down very well (I probably should've chopped them up smaller), and there is some persistent grass and a creeping cleaver or two in there, but overall the soil quality seemed quite good. 

The level is a little lower than I'd have liked though, and I probably could've made it higher if I had continued to add layers of organic matter and newspaper through January and early February instead of just neglecting it. But again, lazy. So I decided to top it up today so the soil could warm up before my seedlings go in in a few weeks.

I put another layer of  newspaper down on top of my new soil. It won't do much in terms of suppressing weeds (although it may help, who knows?) but it will break down and release more carbon into the soil.

I watered it over with rainwater, because as I said in my original post about this bed, you want the soil to be a living organism and nothing can live without water, but also to stop it blowing away long enough for me to add a very fine layer of shop bought compost as a top dressing.

And then gave the whole thing another good water. 

I'm pleased with how it turned out. As the bits that haven't yet broken down rot down over the season, they'll release more nutrients into the soil to feed my plants. I plan on having some squashes, amongst other things, in that bed and they're heavy feeders too, so they'll like that, and I'll save money on expensive shop bought fertilisers.

I'm hoping to get that bed fully planted up over the next few weeks, with my squashes, some edible flowers, and maybe some beans and carrots. 

I've just been gifted two wooden obelisks for the veg garden too, and I have to decide where they're going to go, and whether I'm going to grow beans or squashes up them. I wasn't planning anything quite as fancy as that, so it's thrown me into a bit of a tizzy! 

Happy growing!

October Gardening

Hi fellow clueless gardeners!

I didn't post anything last week because it hasn't been a very visually interesting few weeks in the garden, but just in case you're following along with me, I thought I'd give you an update on what I've been doing in the garden this October.

Most exciting news first - the peas that I planted to overwinter at the end of September have sprouted!

I didn't expect them to - it feels like entirely the wrong time of year for seeds to be growing - but I have read on a few sites that you can grow peas over winter to be ready in March/April, during the hungry gap. I'd like to be able to extend my growing season as muh as possible so, skeptical as I am, I decided to give it a go. The variety I see associated with overwintering most often is one called 'Meteor' - I bought a pack of those and sewed about 20 of them straight into the ground in my pea bed. We'll see how they get on once the frosts start.

I've also planted some garlic, and some spring flowering bulbs (daffodils and snowdrops). I planted them in different areas - the garlic going into the border where the courgettes had been, and the flowering bulbs going into the area where my dog keeps digging and nothing seems to grow well. I've had a lot of luck with bulbs in the past and they've always seemed to grow well even in poorer soil so I'm hoping they will do well here, and the dog will stop digging quite so much. That area is currently really swampy due to all the rain we've had and the dog's churning,  but some grass is starting to take there so I'm hopeful it'll recover a little over winter.

I plant both my bulbs and my garlic in much the same way (although with garlic I'm mindful of spacing and tend to plant in rows, whereas with the flowers I chuck them on the ground and plant them where they fall for a more natural effect). I stab a butter knife into the ground (I keep one specifically for this, it's my take on an athame/boline), wiggle it about a bit, then drop the bulb in the resulting hole  and cover it up again. I have very loose, sandy soil though, so it's very easy for me. If yours is more clay or chalk based, or is very compacted, you may need to dig with a hand fork or similar to create a loose pocket of earth about twice the size of your bulb or clove so it can divide and spread its roots out easily.

This month has also been all about cleaning up the garden for winter. By that, as you know, I don't mean picking up every bit of leaf litter and clearing out every stalk. Mother Nature needs some of that to shelter beneficial insects, feed the birds, and nourish the soil. But it does mean inspecting the fruit trees for damaged branches once they've been harvested, and giving them a prune if needed to stop frost damage or disease setting in over winter. I also removed the diseased leaves of my courgette plants and disposed of them to keep them from infecting my compost, and over the next few days I'll be giving all of my tools a really thorough clean, first with soap and water, then with vinegar/alcohol so that they're ready to go in spring when I'll be working with delicate younger plants.

One of the fun things to do in the garden at the moment is save some seeds. The birds have already started this off for me with my marigolds

I'm not sure the picture shows it very clearly, but the dead seed heads have been pulled open and there are heaps of marigold seeds on the ground.

I'm not actually sure how the flowers from these seeds will turn out because I think they were F1 hybrids. The seeds are unlikely to produce the same flowers as their parent plant, but I've saved some seeds anyway out of curiosity. 

It was super easy to do, I just waited until the dead heads were dry, peeled back the outer layers of the plant heads and found all the seeds inside. There were so many just from a few heads that I'm also going to try experimenting with hanging the dead heads upside down from my tree branches over winter to see if the birds eating at them and wind battering them will help spread the seeds in a low effort, natural way.

I let the seeds dry out on a sheet of paper on a sunny windowsill, then popped them into an envelope ready for spring. If even a quarter of them germinate and flower we will have some very happy bees next summer.

I've still got to plant my shallots (and fast because we are getting very late in the season, but I've been lazy), which I'll do in a similar way to the garlic, but other than that I think the garden is mostly quietening down for winter now. All of our first year crops have been harvested  (and mostly eaten, although we are still working our way through the windowsill-ripened tomatoes), and beds have been cleared if annuals and mulched to nourish the soil ready for planting next year. I'll be "harvesting" some yew, ivy, and holly from my garden edges for our yuletide wreath in December,  but most of the garden work now is taking place in my head and on the page as I plan next year's growing season.

One ongoing piece of maintenence though is the new raised bed. Because I'm attempting to fill it with home made compost, in a sort of lassiez-faire lasagna bed, I will need to keep topping it up throughout the winter. I'm adding (well covered) kitchen scraps, shredded newspapers, cut grass, twigs, dead annual plants (that aren't diseased), toilet rolls tubes that have been cut into fine strips,

And the dead heads of the marigolds that I had removed seed from, as well as sweet chestnuts shells from my latest foraging session in the woods.

I was also lucky enough to be able to swap a bag of windfall apples for a bag of well rotted horse manure. Hopefully that'll be arriving in the next few days so I can add it to my beds and mulch the fruit trees with it.

When it arrives I will tell you how it came about. I never thought I'd be happy to receive a bag of shit, but that's what gardening does to a person.

From Bed to Bed

I've finally gotten around to writing up a quick how to about raised beds. It didn't take long at all (or rather it wouldn't have, but I'm married to an engineer, so it got complicated!), and is a fairly simple weekend project to get you started. I'll be showing you how I went from this:

To this:

And what still needs to be done to make it ready for planting.

What do I need?

You can make a raised bed out of just about anything. If it has sides and holes for drainage, you can make it into a bed. I made these out of some old drawers that the children had overstuffed with clothes and broken, and they worked brilliantly for my carrots for one year. I didn't construct them very well though, or treat them at all, so when I tried to move them this year they fell apart. 

I may still attempt to save the bigger one with a lot of duct tape and hope. When making these I literally removed the bottoms, stapled the drawers together and filled them up with compost. If I were doing the same now I would secure them with 4 stakes at the corners, and screw the sides to the stakes. I'm sure that would work a lot better than my quick bodge up from last spring.

You can make raised beds out of anything you have laying around, it's essentially the same as having a great big planter.  I had an old broken double bed and the slats were the perfect length for what I had in mind, so I used those, but you can use railway sleepers, corrugated iron or plastic, bricks, old drawers, shelves, anything you like. If you decide to use wooden palettes, first check to see if they've been heat treated. The ones that haven't may have been chemically treated, so might leech toxins into your soil. You can check by looking for a HT on the stamp somewhere on the pallette. It'll look something like this:

Once you start looking into toxins and raised bed building you can find a lot of information, some of it conflicting and all quite intimidating. I've generally grown food in recycled old furniture though, and I'm ok. Your mileage may vary so if in doubt, leave it out of your garden and ask a more knowledgeable gardner than me - they'll almost definitely be happy to give you advice.

You'll also need a screwdriver, screws, and if you're making a large bed, a friend to help you move it around.

Why Raised Beds?

A couple of people have asked me why I use raised beds in my garden when I already have great, easy to work soil. It's a fair question.

I actually do a mixture of raised beds and straight into the ground. You don't have to use them and if you put the work in your garden will reward you whether you grow in the ground, in raised beds, in planters or from hanging baskets. But there are advantages to using raised beds.

• Soil Health and Quality.

Raised beds actually are a really easy way of improving soil health in a specific area. If you have chalk or clay soil that can be difficult to work and compacts easily, you can add nutrients in the form of mulches and composts to make it easier to dig over. If you, like me, have sandy soil that dries out easily, you can added organic matter to help it retain moisture.

• Weeding

Weeding is soooooo much easier in a raised bed. Because the soil isn't as compacted, it makes pulling young weeds that have self seeded super easy to do by hand. And if you start your bed with a decent weed suppressing layer before adding in your growing medium, it's much harder for them to come up from under ground.

• Defining the area

This may not be as important to you if you are the only person using your garden, but I share mine with 4 children (and their friends), a dog with a fondness for digging and scratching at the ground, and a husband who likes to mow the grass but doesn't know a buttercup from a butternut and might well mow over my veg patch without careful supervision. Having your veg in raised beds stops people from walking over the soil and compacting it down, making it much easier for you to work with hand tools and for your seeds to easily push through to sprout and form their root systems.

• Extended growing season

Raised beds warm up much quicker than the ground, so you can plant stuff out earlier.

How to make your raised beds

As I said, this can be as simple or as complicated as you want it to be. The basic principal is to have 4 sides, anchored with stakes into the ground. Size doesnt matter, just make sure you can comfortably reach the middle of it so you won't have to walk on it to weed the middle of the bed, and don't let it be so long that you're tempted to walk across it instead of around it. We used an old bed frame that has been sat in the outbuildings for years because 1) it's too big to fit into my car to take to the tip and 2) I knew I wanted to upcycle it in some way but didn't know what I wanted to do with it.

I did intend to go and buy some stakes - they're not very expensive - but when I told my husband I was trying to build raised beds as cheap as possible he took it as a challenge and decided to make stakes from the part of the bedframe I wasn't using. I'll show you the different stages of his and try to explain how you can adapt it if you aren't using a broken bedframe.

One of the hardest parts of the project was trying to get the slats out of the bed without breaking them. There's no easy way to do that, especially if the bed frame has been sitting somewhere damp and the screws are rusting out. Taking it slowly, using a normal screwdriver (the electric one was making the screws disintegrate) and swearing at it loudly and often, seems to be the best method.

If I were doing this by myself I'd have screwed each plank to a stake in a rectangle and called it done. But, as I said, my enthusiastic engineer husband took over. So he used the existing posts that make up the sides of the bedframe to make the stakes. 

It's tricky to see in my pictures but the bed frame was shaped in such a way that making the corners was fairly simple, but a little different to how you'd do it with separate stakes.  It was easier for us to cut the bedframe around the last two, which will make up the head and foot of the bed, than to try and remove them. We didn't cut flush to the bed slats, because we will need that overhang to secure it into the ground.

Usually if you're making a bed with planks and stakes, you'll want your stakes on the inside of the bed, not the outside as we have done. That was purely us adapting the design to suit the materials we had. If you pop yours on the inside, only have them overhanging one edge (to go into the ground), and have the other edge of your stake be just a couple of inches below your topmost plank,  so you can cover it in soil and don't need to worry about sanding it down.

Once the corners were done, we attached the side planks to the existing "stakes"

And we had the frame of the bed.

This whole process would've been a lot easier if we had bought new screws. My husband decided to take the "frugal" part of my blog really seriously though, and decided to use a mishmash of screws he found lying around the place. They weren't great, but they did the job. An electric screwdriver and a drill made it a lot easier, but new screws would've made it easier still.

I made mine this length and height because that's how much wood I had, but you can make yours higher if you like, just attach your next plank up to the stakes too. Just bear in mind that the higher it is, the more it'll need to be filled up.

Placing your bed

Top tips for placing your bed mainly involve finding a flat place for it. You want your bed fairly level because otherwise one side will get very dry and the lower side may become waterlogged.

Once you've found a flattish spot for your bed, preferably in the sunniest spot of your garden, lay your frame out and mark the ground around the edge. We used lolly sticks, but you could mark it with a spade or a hoe, or even spray paint or string. Then move your frame out of the way and dig up the grass that's there already.

This bit is horrible, there's no getting round that. The only saving grace is that you don't have to dig too deep, just enough to get as many grass roots out as you can. Grass is hardy, and very invasive (that's why it's everywhere) and taking time to do that now will save you so much hassle further down the road when the growing season starts.

Once you've cleared the ground lay your bed frame onto the ground and slowly (so as not to rattle out all your screws), hammer your stakes into the ground. If you have very compacted or clay type soil, you may find it easier to dig a hole out for the stake with a crowbar.

We then sanded down the stumps that were still above ground, using an orbital sander  and grinder my husband uses for work.  If your stakes don't stick out above your planks, you won't need to do that because they'll be covered in soil. If they are a little big you can smooth them with sandpaper but it will take longer.

You can fancy it up by painting it, or make it last longer by lining the sides (not the bottom!) With old compost bags, if you like, but it isn't essential.

Now you've made your bed, well done! But you can't quite plant in it yet, it'll need filling up with compost first.

How to fill your beds for free (ish)

So you've built your bed from scratch and you've put your feet up for a well deserved brew and a browse at compost online. And then you realise, to fill this bed with shop bought compost is going to cost you an absolute fortune. Don't panic, even if you haven't started your compost bin yet or don't have space for one, you can still fill your beds for virtually nothing, so long as you've started in autumn or winter. 

I definitely can't afford the 8-10 sacks of compost it would take to fill this beast of a bed, so I'm going to be using this method as well.

Remember when I told you to save all your prunings to start your own bug hotel?  Well now we get to transform them with garden magic into compost.

I started by lining my bed with newspaper (ignore the diagonally placed plank in the middle, that's just an offcut I used to brace the bed until I fill it because the screws I used weren't great and it's a little rickety)

I lined the bottom of mine with a few layers of newspaper. You could use cardboard, or whatever you have around the place.  You could even use some fancy-pants weed suppressant membrane if you happen to have some. I wouldn't recommend using plastic for the bottom of your bed, because it can make everything soggy and cause your plants to rot from the roots. If you have a large sheet of black plastic though, don't throw it away just yet. When your bed is full you can throw it over the top of your bed to stop weeds getting in and warm the soil before planting.

Once you've got your first layer down, give it a good water. Nothing can grow without water and that includes your soil. You want it to be a living organism, full of worms and bugs, and life, not a sterile thing. Healthy plants start with healthy soil.

Now you can start chucking in whatever organic matter you have. All the garden trimmings can go in there (but maybe avoid invasive perrennial weeds like bindweed that seem to be indestructible, or poisonous plants like Yew that retain their toxicity after they've died down), leaves in various states of decay (provided they arent diseased), cut grass, veg or fruit peelings (go easy on the citrus), even brambles and nettles can go in there (I tend to avoid putting brambles in mine, despite having an abundance of them, because I garden bare handed and the thorns don't break down brilliantly). You can  split open spent teabags and chuck the tea leaves in, add coffee grounds, ground eggshells, anything that would go in your normal compost bin. 

Avoid things like meat, fish, or manure from cats or dogs. You can add in rabbit manure/used sawdust from your hamster, etc, but generally speaking don't add in poop from animals who eat meat. It can attract rats and can harbour diseases like Roundworm or Toxoplasmosis that can survive in your soil and pass onto you.

 You want a good mix of "greens" (veg peelings, etc) and "browns" (cardboard, newspaper, twiggy bits). Don't put huge great big bits in, if you have larger branches and things chop them up first. Add in spent compost from your old planters (for example I'm using the tired out compost I grew potatoes in this year), sawdust from making the bed, wood ash, last year's wood chip mulch, anything you have hanging around. Give everything another good water.

Only use this lasagne method of planting this side of the fallow season. You want to give your veg peelings and things plenty of time to break down  before adding plants, at least 4 weeks in the winter, preferably longer. Exceptions to this are if you intend to plant a cover crop/green manure for winter. I'll talk you through that in a sec.

It shouldn't smell as it breaks down, if it gets pongy give it a stir about with a big stick and throw another layer of shredded newspaper, paper (not shiny printed paper with lots of colours) or grass on top.

A few weeks after you've filled it with this lot,  you should notice it start to sink down and look like it needs filling again.

Thats great, it means the worms are working on breaking it all down into lovely rich compost for you. At that point you can start the process over.

When it is very nearly spring, and I'm sure it's all broken down nicely, I'll top it with a little shop bought compost, just because that contains perlite (to help retain moisture) and added slow release fertilisers.  You don't have to do that though, as long as you keep adding stuff and watering it over winter if it gets very dry, you should have a decent planting medium by spring for pennies.

Once I've got my bed filled I like to cover it to stop weeds getting in. I usually do that with some cardboard, which you can either remove before planting or water thoroughly and plant directly into. You can use a sheet of black polythene (which has the advantage that it'll help warm your soil even quicker) to cover your bed or you can plant a cover crop. 

Cover crops, such as clover, aren't intended for consumption and are just there to hold the soil structure, and add nutrients like nitrogen into the soil. They also help suppress weeds by taking up all the space. When spring comes along you can just dig them until the soil for added nutrients and start with a blank slate.

Composting  is a huge subject,  and probably one for a different post, but there's loads of info out there about what you can put in, and not all of it is conflicting! You may want to add more of a particular item depending on what you're growing (for example if I wanted to grow very nitrogen hungry crops like peas or leafy greens, I'd add lots of nettles). You can really geek out over compost ingredients but I try not to overthink it. Just throw stuff in, try to keep it balanced, and see what works. My gardening style is very much trial and error, and I'm very much a novice, but it has worked for me so far.

What are your favourite composting methods? Have you ever tried lasagne planting in a raised bed? What worked for you? Let me know, and if you have a go at building your own raised bed, I'd love to see it.

Happy growing!