One-ish year on

Looking few my photos I came to realise how much of the garden we've already managed to transform.  As I've posted about before, the biggest problem the great veggie adventure has faced is the fact that the garden has been so abandoned.  The last date anyone really did anything (before us) is about 2001 and we only started last year.  There is a huge amount of work that still needs to be done in order to achieve a finished garden.  In order to actually get some garden we started on digging out the veg patch last spring and managed this:

To the side is a row of what we guess was once a flower bed because this spring we had the most impressive weeds in the form of some very tradtional English bluebells.

                          

There were a few signs of its former life still left when we started the veggie adventure.  There was also an overgrown rose bush which had started to trail across the rickety wooden fence.  It was so bad we started to wonder if it should be like that or not.  Early on the rose had a brutal chop and has flourished ever since; seems it was focused on growing and not flowering.  This year we have taken the same approach to the hawthorn that was left to grow wild in the hope that it will too bush out and not grow out.  In place of weeds we slowly started to plant, first the herb garden went in and then the courgettes followed.

With all that work to do we left the garden as it was for the summer focusing on growing and harvesting our own veg with varying levels of success.  Never keep peas in grow bags for a start!  In the late summer we had the helping hand of some farm/industrial weed killer killing off a lot of the weeds that had taken hold of the top area of the garden.   Leaving us to manually manage the bottom nearest to us, where the coldstore and shed presently live.  The weed killer worked, even killing off the dandelion roots (!) and with hard work in the autumn we have managed to get to the workable plot we have today.  Twice the size of the orginal plot with double the veg growing.  Who knows what I will be posting next year?