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.
5
