Day 96 - Horseshit

The vegetable garden was set up with one long border about five metres deep running down the length of the perimeter wall, and three large rectangular beds in the open, surrounded by connecting paths. Although there was some semblance of order in terms of crop-rotation in the main beds, it was by no means defined as I would like to see it, and the border under the wall seemed to have collected all sorts of produce that nobody had a plan for. This included a scruffy home-made fruit cage with some worn-out specimens in it, various brassicas and runner beans, and opposite this bed there was a makeshift structure designed to support sweet peas. These were a hangover from when the house had been in private hands. The previous gardener had worked the place as a private garden, and current maintenance harked back to that, even though there was now no particular need for many of the provisions that were appropriate to private service. The picture below shows how it looked -

If you know anything about me by now, after almost 100 posts, you will probably have guessed correctly, that I was about to dig the whole thing up and start again. From the next picture you will see that almost all of one of the large beds was taken up with potatoes. There are various factors at play here, not least of which, I suspect, is that the gardener had found it advantageous to grow supplies which could be stored and used throughout the winter by his own family, and I also believe that there was some impetus provided by the competitive growing environment of local vegetable shows. For these one needs an obsession, and not necessarily an eye for overall presentation. My emphasis was going to be very different. I would not need the tatties for personal use or for exhibition, but I did want to sell them in the shop and I wanted the garden to look good while we were growing them, By the way, most gardeners know that if you want to clear the ground in an overgrown garden, then potatoes are the answer. Potatoes clear the ground, isn't that what everyone tells you? More horseshit, I'm afraid. Literally. The point is, spuds are not a magic formula for getting out of working your land. The reason they help you to get rid of long-standing weed problems is the kind of cultivation they require. You have to dig deep, incorporate copious quantities of manure, and you have to earth them up into ridges to exclude light from the tubers so they don't turn green, and then you have to dig deep again to harvest them. The potatoes have done nothing to contribute to the clearance. Your digging has done it all. If you have no use for acres of edible tubers, then all you have to do is dig your ground conscientiously and you will achieve the same result. Another myth exploded. Here's the picture of how it was -

Those long, long rows stretching from one side of the beds to the other, forcing you to trample through the mud to hoe or harvest were the traditional layout for so many veggie gardens throughout the world. But how stupid do you have to be to want to work like that? I certainly didn't envisage continuing without making some changes.

The border under the wall was split into two halves by a path which led to a gate opening directly onto the road which was no longer used on safety grounds. The runner beans marked one side of the path. On the other was an unaccountable planting of Dahlias, again a throwback to the old days, when these would have been grown as cut flower for the house. They weren't even particularly attractive Dahlias, and were being grown in a mulch of weeds which made them look even worse -

It was all going to have to go to make way for something revolutionary. An entirely new concept, founded on co-operation between the two gardens, bringing them into harmony, and in so doing, giving this garden's name a significance.

The other garden, with its unique concentration on dried flowers, had borders which were really quite limited in size for harvesting the material from. Because of this, they could look stripped when a crop had been taken for drying, which lessened the amenity value of the flower borders for visitors. My thought was to grow the flowers here, in the larger garden, in this long border under the wall, and treat them as a crop, denuding them completely if necessary when the flowers were ready, and allowing the other garden to retain its colour so that visitors could enjoy it, and also so they could see how the dried flowers looked before processing. This would then leave borders for our dried flower expert to talk about with the visiting public, while still providing him with ample material to dry and sell. The space we had available was at least five metres deep, and perhaps 40 or 50 metres long, so there was a lot of room available to realise my vision. The fruit and vegetables could then be grown in the remaining three rectangular beds for display and sale. And that's what I am going to show you tomorrow.