Now, that is irrelevant to what I am going to tell you about the vegetable garden, but it's a nice enough picture to get us going. Just to the left of it, behind a low wall is the food-growing area. Yesterday I showed you its layout as I took it over, and to begin with the main task was simply to dig it through and clear it of weeds. We also had to construct a decent fruit cage to replace the small makeshift wooden structure that existed before. Here is a photo of one of my new colleagues engaged in just some of the digging, with the part-completed cage behind him. As you can see, I had opted to take up one of the three rectangles for fruit, leaving the remaining two for vegetables, as we no longer needed to supply the same quantity for year-round use as we would in a lived-in house -
All that we still had to do on the fruit cage was to attach the bird-proof netting and it would be ready to plant.
As for the vegetables, in the remaining two rectangles I had a new layout in mind. Up to now it had looked very amateurish, with long rows leading towards the distant hills, which usually were trampled with scruffy footprints resulting from harvesting or weeding. Add in to that the general neglected look with vegetable debris discarded on the surface, and it looked like a poorly-maintained allotment belonging to a lazy gardener with no standards. My solution was to divide each rectangle into six sections, separated by five paths pointing in the same direction as the original rows of vegetables, i.e. towards the hills in the photo above. Then, working from these paths we could sow, plant, weed and harvest without stepping on the growing areas. How did we achieve this? By laying out the plants at right angles to the paths, or across the picture you see above rather than down its length. It was a bit of a stretch for the smaller guys, because the new beds were possibly as much as ten feet long, but as they could be accessed from paths at either end, that meant a five-foot reach was required, which was easily manageable with a hoe. It worked for me, and in the event, I was more involved with this area of the garden than my colleagues. Oh, while we are on the subject, if you want to be efficient, weeding should only ever be done standing up. Crawling about on your hands and knees is slow, dirty and less effective. My aim is always to work quickly, standing, come out backwards, and use your hoe or fork to remove all evidence that you have been there on your way out. I think I've discussed before how flexible a hoe can be if used imaginatively. Try and get all the roots out with it, knock them about a bit to shake the soil off , let the small annual ones die off in the sun, pick up the larger and perennial ones and remove them. The only two tools I ever used for weeding were a Paxton hoe, with blades on all sides and a so-called Rose fork, basically a hand fork on a five-foot handle. And I never ever sat or knelt in the garden.
So, let's step back a bit and have a look at October in that first year. Working alongside the seasonal member of staff, I had begun to make improvements to the presentation, no doubt seen as interfering, I imagine. I had started cutting the hedges and had cleared up some of the detritus lying about. It all looked ok, but there were still those long rows of veggies and a sort of shanty-town of miscellaneous structures laid out in a seemingly random way. Probably to most people this looked all right, but don't be misled, the following picture looks good mostly on account of its historic setting rather than the quality of the gardening -
My aim with the new fruit cage was to make redundant all those wooden supports and to bring everything under one roof.
By April the following year, just prior to sowing and planting, we had cleared and levelled the ground and marked the paths for the new arrangement with strings. Initially these paths would be created just by packing down the soil as we walked on it. Later we would formalise them with a proper surface, but we didn't have the budget to do everything at once. At least, that was my intention -
I was using a six-crop rotation of my own design, and in the photo above the first rows of onion sets can be seen, running from left to right in short rows across the centre bed.
The border under the wall to the left of the picture had by now gained some plants obtained by dividing specimens from the dried-flower garden up the road, so we now had the beginnings of a proper harvestable dried flower border in the productive part of this garden -
Note how I have cannibalised some of the wood from the redundant structures and put up a frame over the path to the gate which was not used. This was quite tall at around ten feet, and I intended to use it as a support to grow ornamental squashes and gourds. The border was backed with some wall-trained old fruit trees which we tried our best with, which were well past their best, but the space we had created was going to make a huge difference in kick-starting the dried flower business -
By this stage we had also lifted some raspberries and gooseberries from the previous fruit area and planted them in position in the new cage ready for the season -
Tomorrow we shall see how all this preparatory work progressed towards a finished garden.
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