Chicken-n-Veg

Archive for the ‘Fruit’ Category

Bit of a gap posting updates because of our 2 week summer break in France (and then another couple of weeks catching up in the garden and at work).

We left the garden and chickens in the very capable hands of various friends and family and came back to a vegetable garden in full swing. Plentiful beans, tomatoes, cucumber, courgettes, kale, chillies. There was also a good supply of plums and blackberries. We got more than 4 kg of greengages as ground fall, round one tree, which was quickly turned into jam.

We spent quite a bit of time at the weekend building and placing two more raised beds. These are hopefully the last raised beds we will need. We intend to use them mainly for ‘permanent’ fruit plants such as raspberry, gooseberry and rhubarb, ie. plants that with a bit of care will last for years. We will perhaps also use the beds for some annual strawberries.

The beds were built from scaffolding boards and are 3.9m x 1.2m. The inside of the beds were lined with polythene (actually a roll of damp proof course), to stop them wicking moisture from the soil. They were also treated with several coats of a green horticultural wood preserver. This is stated to be non-toxic and suitable for any horticultural purpose, ie. safe for vegetables and won’t kill the worms in the soil. We can certainly confirm that worms love the previous beds we built. The polythene liner will stop any preservative treatment from leaching into the soil anyway.

We got a lot of ‘help’ from the hens as we were digging to get the new beds level. The ex-battery hens in particular were so keen to get to all of the worms that we were unearthing that it was very lucky that none were decapitated by our spades. We also needed to keep shooing them away from the vegetable beds, as they seemed to want to help us thin out our seedlings.