My garden

Cosmos with bee.
Tomatillo in a pot.
Raised bed with chives, loose leaf lettuce, sunflowers, sweet peas, french beans, fennel, beetroot, basil, parsley, thyme, cos lettuce, kale and cosmos.
Courgette in a pot and french bean.

Renewed: Pre-school nursery's beds

AFTER: With the help of the children we dug all the sand out of the pond. It became a treasure hunt as we unearthed lots of lost plastic animals and pieces of lego. I cleaned the container and rocks then filled it back up with fresh water. I weeded the beds and filled them up with some fresh multi-purpose compost. On one bed I put down some old pink jersey fabric I had as a membrane. "Are you making a bed?" one boy asked. Underneath it I had put some kitchen peelings for the worms and bran flakes for the slugs.; the slugs love to eat them and it kills them. I then cut slits and planted some chives I had brought in and divided from my own garden, some red and green loose leaf lettuce and cosmos I had raised from seed and some strawberries the manageress of the nursery had bought. She had also bought some pebbles so I put those around the base of the plants. The whole bed can be covered with them. In the other bed I put four canes around a metal pole. The canes came from prunings of my neighbour's bamboo. There were some sharp edges where the stems had been trimmed so I tied some fabric strips on to cover them. I planted some more chives and two tomato plants. I left the chopped off stems of the chives on top of the soil. I have some sweetcorn, cucumbers, snake gourd and courgette plants that I am raising at home and will bring in when they are a bit bigger. And I will bring in some bean seeds for the children to sow next to the canes.

The allotment: hard graft

I got my allotment in Jan 2009. Only a small part of it was dug over and planted last year. I made two raised beds by digging soil from the path and throwing it onto the bed. One had beans (not very successful), courgettes, salad, squash and perpetual spinach. The other had potatoes, salad and radishes. I attempted carrots but the badgers got them. We poured my husband's pee on the carrots but it didn't put them off. We were told it would. I mulched the beds with grass clippings, covered as much of the plot as I could with found carpet and cut down grass when it became too long. This made it manageable with the limited time I had.

The site is very steep and my plot is sloping. I'm trying to dig it without having to terrace it. The ground is perfect to dig just now. I have been digging an area I had covered with carpet for about 6 months. I use a fork, dig a chunk up, turn it over and whack it until it crumbles a bit. Then search through and remove bind weed and couch grass roots. (The bind weed is the curly white root in the photo). I dug over an area next to where some strawberries are planted. I planted the runners, which I got from a client, in September. A couple had died so I replaced those with spares I had put in the other bed. I then put a mulch of straw around the strawberries. I got the bale of straw last January and used it as a seat so it's started to rot down. Now I need to order some manure.

Harvest

My tomatoes all got blight. I didn't trash the lot and cry over empty pots of tomato sauce like my neighbour. I removed the brown bits and waited. The weather turned drier. I was careful to water the roots only. I removed more brown bits as they appeared. Soon my plants had no leaves left. Nearly all my tomatoes ripened. I only lost a few. As it became colder I removed the unripe ones and let them blush red in a bowl on the kitchen table. Next year I will plant my tomatoes in pots and fill the raised bed with peas.




























Tomatoes from the raised bed in my garden.
Salad and the raised bed.
Courgettes and the raised bed.
Cucumbers.