We had our first garden party this weekend. Not the sort with tea and cakes but the sort where your friends come over to help you in the garden in return for food and beer.The big job this weekend was to clear all the branches from the trees we cut down last year. The foliage piled in our garden virtually covered the entire space. Our guests tackled this with a wood chipper hired from Diggers.ie reducing the pile into a somewhat smaller mountain of wood chips. Looking at the back of my garden from the front for the first time in ages, I had forgotten how vast the space was. It still looks unkempt but with the trees out of the way you can see the potential of the space.
On Sunday we started the digging, marking out an area of land that was to be our veggie patch. My final plan is to have half of the garden devoted to vegetables but to start with we dug one large bed. It's a great feeling to bury your hands in the soil for the first time. It's so full of life; worms, roots and organic matter just crumbling in your hands readying itself to release it's goodness into the food we grow. It didn't take too long to dig the patch, three of us with shovels and spades lifting the sods, leveling out the ground and turning the soil. Within 30 minutes we were all leaning on our spades looking at the brown square of land now ready to accept plants.
On Monday we planted our first seeds, filling improvised seed trays with a variety of vegetables and flowers: carrots, lettuce, beetroot, onions, squash courgettes and sunflowers. We also planted marigolds which, according to our guest gardening expert Laura keep the pests away.
I was dying to put something into the new bed straight away, so I took my wilting herbs from the kitchen windowsill and planted them out in the new patch. Apparently I don't have long to wait until I will see the first few shoots in my seed trays. Three to four days... at the moment I feel like checking them every few minutes like an impatient child I can't wait to see them grow.
A big thank-you to everyone who came and helped us out this weekend.
To Barry who loved the machinery and sawing.
To Graham for his energy.
To Laura for being an expert and giving me knowledge.
Thanks. I'm looking forward to seeing you again for our first feast from the homegrown veggies.
Get planting spuds as they will help to clear the ground and give you great satisfaction when you harvest them. Sharps Express or British Queens are good first croppers and are in the hardware shops now. Plus you can just make lazy beds and chuck em in if you don't want to defile your nice brown bed.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the advice Polly. What's a lazybed? I was thinking of planting some of the sprouting potatoes from my kitchen.
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