Day 95 - Stooping

There were two aspects to the kitchen garden - firstly, the way the veggies were grown, the siting of the different areas required and their orientation, and secondly, the restoration of the box hedges that defined the areas. I probably worked on both aspects at the same time, but for the purposes of this blog, I shall start with the hedges.

This was an example of overall neglect which extended beyond the bounds of the food-growing area, as there were other low hedges in the ornamental garden, and these, too, were shapeless and ill-maintained. The hedges weren't tall, and yet, at a height of not much more than a foot from the ground, they still managed to look top-heavy and as if they were collapsing. I have no idea how anybody could achieve that. A fine example can be seen in one of the neglected borders behind the house, where the overall dereliction can be observed obscuring the rough hedges -

For some reason, because these borders were near the kitchen, I suspect, someone had decided to plant herbs in them, without much consideration for future maintenance, and they had become overrun with various varieties of mint, which contributed to the general drab jumble you can see.

Hedges elsewhere were less out of hand, but nevertheless very uneven, fluffy and rounded, undulating haphazardly along their length, and failing in their border-defining task -

It didn't actually take much to bring them back under control, although the process involved back-breaking stooping for hours at a time in the dead of winter, and the end result was quite a lot of bald sticks which needed a season to green up fully once more. I was happy with the results, which gave me something to work on for the future. That same border looked like this by the following March, complete with my new team of gardeners, who by then had not long started -

Obviously, it wasn't going to look perfect yet, as it was seriously wonky to start with. Note that by this time, I had acquired a shredder, and had also cut down the herbaceous plants and mulched thickly with chipped and shredded material. I made good use of the mountainous piles of dead branches that I had inherited from my predecessor, in the process tidying unsightly heaps of spoil ten feet high which no visitor could have failed to notice. In the kitchen garden the hedge improvements made a big contribution to the formal feel of the beds, although there were still years of work in them to make them properly straight and level -

That was still only March, though, and at a very early stage. This photo is worth keeping in mind, as it shows the very basic layout of rectangles in the kitchen garden, which were about to benefit from a serious rethink. Traditionally they had been divided up into four for crop rotation reasons, and then gardened in long rows from side to side in the traditional manner. This was about to change.