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?

First dig of spring

After uming and arring about re-starting the gardening I came home from work and started to dig.  (Al and I did start but quickly gave up because it was too cold/wet/hard work, but today it was too glorious not to).   One of the benefits of having a back garden as you mini-allotment is that I can work on it any time I wish to.

The garden itself has spent several years being ignored or used as a alternative for the local dump, this has meant that any work Al and I have done has taken almost twice as long; a bag is needed for the weeds, another for the excess soil and another for the rubble.    Given the time of year it feels as if we're up against the clock to sort the patch out before it gets too warm.   Last year was a bit of a rush but we did managed a small plot with successful  early potatoes, beetroot, courgette and parsnip we also unsuccessfully grew carrots and peas.   This year we're being adventurous and have decided to really go to town and grow as much as we can fit in!  Yes, we're the type of gardeners who throw the seeds in a hope that something happens because of this I count myself as a highly methodical gardener.

So to start the gardening off I've spent my time digging space for our home made cold frame, which will hopefully be used for growing melons, although I have to confess I have no idea how big or small melon vines grow so it might not be used to grow melons in.  By digging the space I also managed to create two huge bags of spare soil that needs to be dumped.   As an ironic birthday present, in January, I bought Al a gooseberry bush,  I say ironic because I hate gooseberries and his birthday is in August.  It has been living on our door stop ever since  and today it finally ended up in the garden.