My vegetable beds…

Thursday, March 31st, 2005 at 9:55 pm

Today I would like to reveal about my garden project. My husband and I planned to grow some vegetables this year. This project was started since last autumn. We dug up some grass in the back garden. We could not have done this without the help from my lovely parents-in-law. Dad helped us in the garden while mum knitted Tatty’s jersey and pants.

After we dug up the grass, the garden looked like this. We let the soil to break up over winter. The frost, rain, snow, wind and a little bit of sun helped a lot. At that time I still had no idea what I would do to it. All I knew was I would like to grow vegetables and flowers together and vegetables would not make my garden looked so untidy. I would like to keep them a bit tidy which I knew it would be difficult but that was what I had to think about.

In March, my husband started double digging and mixed with some farmyard manure. We planned to do crop rotation which “they” said this method prevents building diseases up in the soil and preserves micro-nutrients. I read from some books and internet. They talked about raised-bed which I thought it was a good idea but our garden seemed to be too small to have proper raised-beds. At first I thought I would just plant it like it was but deep down inside me kept telling me that I should make raised-bed. So my husband and I decided to give it a go by going to B&Q to see what we could use to make the raised-bed. Actually at first I just wanted to have borders and paths for each crops. Our first bed was so difficult because we did not know how to do it. We both ended up in a bad mood and had to take the wood out to bits and started again. But it was success at last. We only did one bed that day and we both were tired.

The next day, I tried to build the bed myself and I could but I did not have strength to nail them. My husband nailed them and he said I did a good job and I should do the 3rd one as well. Then we ended up with 4 beds. The bit for the 4th bed was shady and wet which we planned to put potatoes. At first we did not plan to build the raised-bed for potatoes but we did not want potatoes to feel unfair and we had enough wood to make another bed but we ran out of nail. So we had to go back to B&Q to buy more nails.

While we built the beds we thought about putting gravel between the beds so we could use it as a path but I had to think again how I could prevent the gravel from going down to my flower bed. Then I had an idea of using stones since when we double dug we got lots of stones. Some of them were quite big. So I tried to collect them and lined them up at the edge of the flower bed and finally it looked like this.

I would not have to tell you how proud we are after we had all these done within 3 weeks. It was hard work but it turned out to be a lot better than what we thought it would be.