So our garden looks like we’ve kinda let nature go wild on a mixture of slightly selected plants. I actually kind of adore it and am endlessly frustrated by it. Back in Slough we did one thing really right; we planned it out and then dug the whole lot over, pretty much. So when it was laid out we weren’t faced with bits that weren’t path but still have grass on because they’ve not yet been dug into the beds.
So I’m creeping around and doing a bit here and a bit there to clear the grass off what will be the beds. And given that I couldn’t do anything much else, this afternoon was spent clearing a bit more. So the patch under the apple tree at the bottom, between the apple tree and this year’s potato bed, that’s looking pretty much sorted. There’s some scrubby patches off near the edges that need a little more, but when we dig it over with some compost or manure, or some mix of the two, that should improve that.
That scrubby patch of grass off to the right is where the path will run. I need to lop a bit of wood off and then plonk the gravel around for that bit…. The other issue down there is that the hedge is seriously overgrown, but that’s a problem for a whole other day, that’s my opinion!
This big patch of scrubby grass is where we’re moving all the turf to. I don’t seem to have a photo of it but it’s been the scabby bit of land between our garage and our lowest terrace; the intention is that next year we’ll have a hammock over it, because it’s the one bit of our garden that gets shade in the early evening and afternoon. It’s horribly uneven because I literally dump whatever chunks of grass I dig up from other sections onto it and then leave it to see if it takes. I did water it in the heat of the summer, but that’s been the total extent of my love and kindness to it.
It’s quite nicely meadowy when it takes though, and we’ll probably try and find some meadow seeds to throw into it, to make ourselves a little mini wildflower meadow to hide in.
Looking up from the same place you can see that things have got a little exuberant; there’s quite a bit of weeding to do (which I did a little of today). You can also see the plum tree…
Which provided this delicious morsel!
We bought that tree as one of three from a farm shop (by which we mean a shop in which farmers buy 10s of trees to build up orchards) in Cornwall: a plum and apple and a cherry. The apple is fantastic (James Grieves, I think, is the variety and it’s delicious) and has been really productive this year. The cherry we never get anything off, because the birds eat every damn thing, and this year is the first year the plum’s produced anything. This is the first one I’ve eaten…and it was worth the wait. Lord it was yummy.
And then, finally we come to this. It may not look like much, but it’s a mixture of lots of carrots, celeriac and some poppies. I think there might be some fennel hiding in there too! It’s a raised bed that I threw together to try and keep the slug problem down a bit. It seems to have worked, by throwing lots of nematode stuff in there, and lots of slug-killing pellets, it now seems to have reached a more controlled stage where we don’t seem to need to do too much with it. The carrots and other veg seem to be growing pretty enthusiastically…
Next year we shall have to top up the soil a fair bit, because we didn’t have enough to fill it this year. Not that we want it complete full, but fuller’n it is.
So it is coming along, in a kind of slightly half-arsed way.
