14th July 2021,
Another mountain of earth, what’s going on here then?
Well the idea behind this little excavation was to provide an elevated “off the ground” space to work on. Basic, I know, but at least not plodding about in the mud! And the end result? A pile of earth (not topsoil most of this) and a couple of buckets of stones…
Now, about stones… Many people would just throw these away, "a pain in the arse for a gardener!" However, they are very useful, stones. They can be used to fill up spots where you don’t want soil but need some flexibility (because of their different sizes) and want to stop weeds from growing; good for drainage too! I’m a big believer in (yes!) sifting out bigger stones but keeping them. You never know when they might come in handy.
How this corner by the compost heaps is going to turn out? And what we are going to do with it, to tell the truth, we don’t really know yet, but…
The next picture you can see the trellis is almost finished. Just the last bottom section to finish off and then the flower surround is done. Raised bed / terrace next. Chris put in some rustic old brick steps just to add a bit of character to the path area there. Now that the stinging nettles have been removed, I think we have "borrowed" a bit of next door's plot (poetic licence on the borders) but only a small amount.
In the next picture, a little bit further down the plot, everything is beginning to grow nicely. In our keenness to coax our tomatoes along, we’ve planted a lot of “spares” along with the butternuts. Now it is a race between tomatoes and butternuts who takes the ground first, the butternuts have got their skates on!
The courgettes are certainly growing well where we have put them/ They have already taken up the same amount of space they did in a grow bag when grown in a previous year so looking forward to plenty of courgette this year!
The beans have not reached the top of their stakes. We should really have got 2m canes but then again how would we harvest them? And in the polytunnel, tomatoes are growing nicely. It has been a bit of a hurry getting the polytunnel ready this year with all the winds in May and almost losing the entire thing, but it is operational now.
The last picture showing our aubergines which got all mixed up with peppers and we don’t know what the hell we planted in the end… there are a few peppers… but mostly looks like we’ve got aubergines. Check out the makeshift “suspension” shelves and see what I mean by "hurried polytunnel usage" - all around the edge of the polytunnel we have weeds growing, a pet hate btw!
