Waste No Space

I've mentioned in a couple of posts that the back of the garden is a steep slope, it's about 4 meters square and for quite a while was true 'set aside' land left to the weeds to slug it out for dominance, on the odd occasion madness would grip me and I'd attack it with the strimmer before wearily conceding defeat whilst wondering how much strimmer line I needed to buy before attacking it next time.

Now I'm lucky enough to have a south facing garden and this area gets full sun for the majority of the day, it seemed a real shame to leave it to the weeds especially when I wanted to grow more veg - so I hatched a patient plan, one that wouldn't require miles of strimmer line! Early last year I gathered up all the empty compost bags I could find and covered the areas I wanted to put the raised beds (and my miniature wild flower meadow), weighting them down with a collection of bricks, rocks and surprisingly useful old metal washing line posts I'd taken an angle-grinder to when I built the decking , I left things well alone for a good nine months.

When I eventually lifted the sacks I had pristine earth, weed free and good to go with the minimum of effort, utilising wood left over form the old fence we'd replaced I built raised beds and then managed to fill two of them with compost from what I'd thought was a very small compost heap - still surprised how much it yielded.

View from the top

The result is a little rough and ready but it's allowed me to get a crop of veg in and a couple of tasty meals worth already, the next step is to make the area more productive and less purely functional, I have a glut of plants needing a home and figure flowers around the veg will probably be a good thing and help with the aesthetic!

View from the bottom

Peas won't be long...

This year I've expanded my selection of veg and touch wood it seems to be doing well, last year I had potatoes (about one bags worth!) a few Radish, some very woody Beetroot and about two very stunted and misshapen Carrots; this year I've added in two additional raised beds on the back slope of the garden and planted Potatoes, Broccoli, Beetroot, Carrots, Beans (2 varieties) Rocket, Lettuce, Radish's (first crop eaten & enjoyed) and Peas.

The Pea's are coming on a storm and the pods are fattening up rapidly - it won't be long until we can harvest the first crop.

I lost the first few plants to slugs & snails within a couple of days of planting, always really annoying & frustrating when you watched a seed poke it's shoots above the soil, full of potential, only to see it mown down by a voracious appetite. I try to avoid using chemicals due to my daughter who loves to help me out in the garden still having a tendency for tasting anything that looks tempting and secondly because I like to think there's always an alternative way. Randomly browsing the web a few days later I came across a tip to use toilet roll tube around the base of Peas, I didn't think it would work, surely the slugs & snails would happily climb up & into the tube to munch the fresh shoot I thought - but clutching at straws I gave it a go anyway and to my surprise have found it works a treat.

I'm now using toilet roll tubes on lots of different plants (should have lots of Sun Flowers this year!) while they get established and as long as the base of the tube is below soil level it works, you can even half the tube so only half an inch is above ground and it still works - no idea why the slugs & snails don't like it and one of these days, maybe when Winter rolls in and the Garden is not so habitable I'll try and find out.