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!

In The Beginning...

The Kitchen Witch's Garden

Most of the people reading this blog will have come over from twitter, where my kitchen garden journey began under the hashtag #VsBoringGardenTweets. Those folk will have to forgive me for going over old ground here while I catch you all up with the story so far.

I moved to my current home about 10 years ago. Before this place we lived in a tiny flat with a shared garden we weren't allowed to cultivate, so when we were given a small front yard and medium sized back garden we were really excited. Ha!

We planted three "dwarf" fruit trees (more on those later) out back, then focused on trying to make the front garden neater. I had visions of restoring what had obviously once been a beautiful cottage garden. My dreams were quickly swallowed by bindweed, brambles, and ground elder. In the end I rescued what I could (a few of the giant daisies and the fuchsia) and plonked them in the back garden, then ripped up what was left, covered it in weed suppressing material and topped it with gravel. I was gutted - I try hard to work with Mother Nature rather than against her, and a sea of stone chips isn't exactly environmentally friendly. It felt like a huge fail, and that my dream of wandering through my kitchen garden, deciding what was for tea based on what was ripe, was destined to stay just that-a dream.

Disgruntled, disenchanted, and more than a little daunted, I ignored the back garden completely. For about a decade.

You know what happens when you ignore a garden for 10 years? Mother Nature gets to work.

The pic above shows about a quarter of the garden before I started working on it, but the photo doesn't really do it justice. The brambles were taller than me (I'm 5'3") and as thick as my wrist. I had no money, no skills or expertise, and no tools to speak of.

The advantage to starting with an absolute mess though, is that whatever you do, you can't really make things worse. Armed with some kitchen scissors, a small hacksaw, and a lot of determination, I went in. A full-on smallholding wasn't going to create itself (and a fully self sufficient one is likely not possible on the little land I have) but I could make a start.

I didn't know I was going to be blogging our journey to a kitchen garden when I started, so unfortunately I didn't take many pictures of the clearing out process.

I chopped everything to the ground with my trusty kitchen scissors and an elderly hacksaw. It won't lie and say it was easy, it was horrendous. A few days in though, I was lent an electric hedge trimmer. That made the process much quicker and, despite having a budget of basically nothing, I decided that was an investment worth making, so I bought one of my own. That made the whole process much easier and quicker and, despite having cut myself to ribbons on brambles and not having a single speck of my body that wasn't covered in nettle rash, I managed to get most of the brambles, ivy, nettles, and bindweed cut to ground level. I felt like a superhero, and my garden felt huge.

I had no idea what to do next, so I appealed to twitter to give me no-budget garden tips. Turns out, the gardening community are absolutely adorable and love nothing more than helping a clueless novice like me get growing.

I was inundated with advice, and given some seeds, gloves and even some gardening tools. Definitely easier than trying to dig with a tablespoon and prune with kitchen scissors.

My shed is currently full of old junk that I couldn't take to the tip, so I decided to reuse what I could, both to save money, and as an attempt to make less of an impact on the natural world. I didn't take pics of the process (although I'll try to make you a step by step guide for a future post) but I turned a couple of broken drawers and old bookshelves into raised beds/planters, and turned my youngest's old cot into a pea trellis.

When I was done clearing and building some beds, it looked something like this:

Hard to believe it's the same section of garden, isn't it?

The path was already there (which was news to me), but the rest if it was built by me, over the course of a couple of weeks.  In the top left of the picture, you can see the base of the cot leaning against the house. I dug the bottom of it in to stabilise it and that will (hopefully!) be the trellis for my jasmine plants to climb up.

Below that in the pic, still on the left, you can see the old bookcases I made into raised beds.  The bed next to them is where the giant daisies and fuchsia from the front garden were dumped, and you can see a planter with some strawberries in, and a green bag that has seed potatoes in.

On the top right of the image is the pea trellis I made out of the cot sides (I'll do a detailed post about that in the near future) and below that is the raised beds made of old drawers. It wasn't too bad as a quick bodge, but I'll be doing my future raised beds differently.

The garden is a huge work in progress still. We've learned what works, what definitely doesn't, and why, pretty as it undoubtedly is, we hate bindweed. We've had some excellent crops and some epic fails, and learned a lot about the needs of our particular garden. I'll try and catch you up with the story so far in future posts.

Next year, I want to go all out, and turn about half the garden into a fully functioning allotment. I till have no idea what I'm doing (although I feel more confident in my ignorance now), I still have no money, and this very "helpful" beast

has decided that he really likes digging too. But the benefits, for my mental health, for my physical health, for my children's newly found tolerance of vegetables, and for the local wildlife, far outweighs the nettle rash, bad backs, and epic pintrest fails.

I've loved growing some food this year, and feeling closer to the earth. Hopefully now I have the skills under my belt to scale everything up -or learn a few hundred more ways that don't work.

Come along with me as I battle bindweed and brambles and try to turn my neglected garden into a functional kitchen garden on a shoestring, without upsetting Mother Nature too much.