Kitchen garden plot on Skye

I'm going to record here my progress on my new kitchen garden/zone one plot. Following discussion on the design here I've now got a fair idea of the layout i'm aiming for, but at the moment I just want to get some more seeds in the ground!
So this is the area I started with, having finished the construction of my new polytunnel:

new growing area looking South

It is fairly open and sunny, athought the polytunnel does shade it in the evening. I think the soil here is fairly good. It doesn't seem to have been ploughed to oblivion like the field further down the hill, and has a fair amount of organic matter in it. It is compacted however, from having the digger going across it, so I'm going to at least fork it all over to enable some drainage. There are also docken, creeping buttercups, silverweed and creeping thistle, as well as an expected weed seed load.

digging the docken

The area is roughly semicircular, and much of it has been covered with mounds of soil for a year, which has killed off most of the turf, leaving just the more pernicious weeds. The outer part of the circle was not covered so much, so I have decided to plant that part mainly with potatoes, as they can complete fairly well with weeds, and harvesting them will also give me another opportunity to fork some more of the weeds out.

planting my potatoes

I did put a little sheep manure on some of the potato bed. My neighbour has a couple of barns with a thick layer of manure in from several years over wintering and lambing, which I have permission to help myself to. I did do a 'pea test' for poisons, which came up clear, as i expected. They started off a bit smaller than the ones grow with added compost, but soon caught up after this picture was taken.

poison peas

It is a fair trek with a wheelbarrow (no vehicle access to barn perhaps hence lack of clean out) so as my soil is not bad I don't expect I'll generally add manure, but I felt it would be interesting to see whether it does help the potato yeild at the end of the year.

more digging.....

After a couple of fairly hard afternoons' work I have now got half of the main digging done and have started to mark out the secondary paths and sow some short rows of the vegetables I have less seed for: bulbing fennel, spinach, root chiccory, mooli radish. The nasty weed roots have been removed to a pile on the edge of the escarpment where they will do no harm.

first seed sown

I'm thinking of using the area towards the polytunnel as a nursery bed for more perennial vegetables and flowers that tend to get lost in my garden areas. It will also probably tend towards a herb garden, although I did sow a row of fennel alongside my vegetables today.
There is still half the area to clear and level, and some of the soil needs moving to the future perennial bed before that can be sown.

Looking forward to seeing your pics and following the progress.

Nice view!

That polytunnel position looks good. Skye weather being what it is, having it close to the kitchen garden makes sense for quick access when the rain comes in sideways. Looking forward to seeing how it develops.

It's looking great, Nancy! Fingers crossed for a bountiful season!

A longer spell between posting than anticipated - so much happening in spring in the garden, it's a rush to try and get sowing before it is too late in the season. The weather didn't help much, however having the kitchen garden right next to the polytunnel turned out to be a genius idea! During the showers I could pootle round in there out of the rain.

So I've started making the dog resistant fence. It's marked out with sticks at the moment and I've made gateways out of old pallets fixed to surplus posts. Having used the garden a little bit I'm thinking I'm going to use one of the pallets at the North end as part of a little shed to put tools in: more pallets and a slightly sloped 'green roof' is my plan at the moment. The tools will then be handy for both polytunnel and garden, with no excuse for not tidying them out of the weather, which ought to improve tool handle durability.

gateways to nowhere...

The area next to the polytunnel is going to be a perennial border, so I have sowed some seeds (the mallow are already germinating!) planted out my leeks from last year to hopefully go to seed, some skirret plants that I dug up ages ago, a tiny wasabi, which I hope will like it next to the tunnel, some new strawberry plants, and my dahlia seedlings. It's looking a bit sparse at the moment, but hopefully once the seeds start germinating and I get more herbs transplanted in it will fill in before the weeds take over. I've got buttercups, docken, sorrel and all sorts germinating everywhere of course!

perennial border next to tunnel

Quite a bit of clearing despite the piled up soil - moving and loosening the under soil, coping with silverweed that was buried and regrowing.... Finally I got my runner beans transplanted out and my peas sown and the last bed cleared and ready to go. There is still more silverweed coming up in the pathway between the last bed and the potatoes, but that can wait....

runner beans and pea sticks

I used some of my coppiced hazel for pea and bean sticks and put the beans either side of one of the little paths making a sort of tunnel - I may regret it as it is a bit small!

I love this stage of a garden, where it is all tidy and ready to grow, before the weeds take over and it all looks chaotic!

view down central path

As a side note the manure seems to have affected one variety of potatoes quite dramatically, although of course I can't remember which this is! The other variety has less of a difference between those with manure and those without. I have since put a little more manure on all the potatoes, so hopefully it will even out. It may not affect the final yield however, but the plants do look happier for it!

potatoes with manure on left

First things - progress on the dog resistant fence:
It's basically done except for the gates. I used nice straight poles stuck in at about a foot spacing, and then wove thinner bits of willow, hazel and whatever I had handy to make a bit of a barrier. It doesn't need to keep wildlife out, and probably won't stop a determined dog, but ought to be good enough for my purpose.

completed dog fence

I'm intending to plant a hedge outside this in early spring to replace it in time, act as a pollinator refuge and wildlife resource, and maybe additional harvest of food and mulch. To clear the ground a bit in preparation I'm going to move scrappy twiggy bits from my coppicing to a windrow just outside the new fence. I've already tidied up some hedge prunings that were where my future hobbit forge is going, although I used those to reinforce the fence a bit.

The last bit of bed I ended up planting rye grain. I had grown this for the first time last year in my simple farming growing area and it did really well! This year it is late going in, and the plan is to stop it seeding this year (it is probably too late in the year anyhow) see how it overwinters and let it go to seed next year. Theoretically it should get a bigger harvest that way and I'll see how well it protects the soil over the winter too. So far it is growing pretty well.

I've now mulched all the potatoes with hay cut from my trackways down the hill. I haven't earthed them up, so we'll see whether I get many green ones.

mulched potatoes

However things aren't growing so well The broad beans started well, but are very short and the leaves are yellowing with dead blotches. The mooli radish went straight to seed (I suspect it would have been better after misummer) the other root crops are tiny still. It's a little early to tell how well the peas and runner beans will do.....
I think the potato/manure experience should have been a warning to me that the soil wasn't as good as I'd thought. The dark colouration, that I took to be a sign of organic matter from the animals overwintering quarters, is probably just residual peat in the soil. It has just not been ploughed quite so much as the larger gently sloped area down below the escarpment, so more of the peat is left in the soil. 200 yards above me on the hill it is basically peat heath and bog, so I ought to have known really!

all planted and growing

I want assess how acidic the soil is, as I feel that could be probably a significant part of the soil problem; more acid soils 'lock up' the nutrients and make them less accessable to the plants. Then I need to come up with a plan of remediation. I feel it will involve boichar, seaweed and bracken in fairly large amounts. I'm reluctant to buy in lime, my soil down the hill has improved drastically without it, but I may try some crushed cooked bones as well. One thing I have noticed in my polytunnel (just next to this area) as well as in parts of this garden are little flakes of rust, like an archaeological find rusted away (I'll see if I can take a photo). I've worked out that they must be a soil horizon of some kind due to the constant inundations and rather suggest a lack of drainage. As it has been broken up and mixed in as a result of the earthworks for the tunnel, I'm assuming that this will not still occur. We've not had a super dry summer, but not as wet as it can get, and I haven't noticed standing water as yet. I'll keep an eye on it over the winter and see if I think additional drainage will help. Increasing the heights of the beds is a simple option, as they are just a little higher than the paths at the moment.

So I promised to try and find a picture of the iron lumps and I actually found a picture I'd taken of the layer in the bank above where we dug the soil and rock out for the polytunnel:

iron layer in soil section

Hopefully you can see the roughly horizontal layer of iron about half way down the picture. There seems to be a vertical layer too....

These are some bits I picked out. They have been broken up as the soil was dug and moved around, but they do look like little iron artifacts at first.



The fragments are very fragile. I've been collecting them up to play with experiment when I get my rocket forge going. They're pretty obviously very rich in iron, like bog iron, so may be a better source than the black sand I am also planning to use.

My understanding is that the layers are formed due to inundation causing anaerobic conditions which reduce the Fe3+ to Fe2+, forming a layer which then contributes further to the waterlogging as it reduces further the permeability of the soil.

Nancy Reading wrote:

I want assess how acidic the soil is, as I feel that could be probably a significant part of the soil problem; more acid soils 'lock up' the nutrients and make them less accessable to the plants. Then I need to come up with a plan of remediation. I feel it will involve boichar, seaweed and bracken in fairly large amounts. I'm reluctant to buy in lime, my soil down the hill has improved drastically without it, but I may try some crushed cooked bones as well. One thing I have noticed in my polytunnel (just next to this area) as well as in parts of this garden are little flakes of rust, like an archaeological find rusted away (I'll see if I can take a photo). I've worked out that they must be a soil horizon of some kind due to the constant inundations and rather suggest a lack of drainage. As it has been broken up and mixed in as a result of the earthworks for the tunnel, I'm assuming that this will not still occur. We've not had a super dry summer, but not as wet as it can get, and I haven't noticed standing water as yet. I'll keep an eye on it over the winter and see if I think additional drainage will help. Increasing the heights of the beds is a simple option, as they are just a little higher than the paths at the moment.

Wood ash helps manage acidity. Bone char would help too, and provide a nice phosphorous drip.

Thanks Chance - great idea! I have used bones before, but I think putting them in the firebox will make them easier to crush and make the dogs less likely to dig them up again....wood ash and bone char - check!

Your potatoes look great! Can you haul more sheep manure for your entire garden including the poly tunnel? If I remember right, you said your neighbor's sheep grazed on your land for years. Then they have been removing fertility and you deserve that back. Besides, animals are provided additional minerals and vitamins for best health so by using the manure, you are recycling some important trace elements, say selenium, copper and cobalt in organic forms that your soil might be lacking.

Do pallets come blue in your part of the world or did you make them blue? It's kind of charming in appearance.

May Lotito wrote:Your potatoes look great! Can you haul more sheep manure for your entire garden including the poly tunnel? If I remember right, you said your neighbor's sheep grazed on your land for years. Then they have been removing fertility and you deserve that back. Besides, animals are provided additional minerals and vitamins for best health so by using the manure, you are recycling some important trace elements, say selenium, copper and cobalt in organic forms that your soil might be lacking.

A different neighbour, but the principle stands! This is the neighbouring property that is up for sale, so if it gets a new neighbour (anyone fancy living next door?) then I'll have to renegotiate. It's fairly hard work to move - access isn't great, but I think I'll move some to my spare compost bin and try and layer it with some more plant materials when I get some time. The manure is so dry and old I think it could be used as fuel! It takes some work to rehydrate it.

Christopher Weeks wrote:Do pallets come blue in your part of the world or did you make them blue? It's kind of charming in appearance.

There is a particular company that I understand leases out these blue pallets. Theoretically they want them back, but I get deliveries from my suppliers at the shop on them and the courier doesn't take them away again. I'm planning a new shed at one end of the garden to store my tools handy and more blue pallets are in the plan!
I deliberately chose the blue to be consistent, and have enough now for the shed build.