We unfortunately missed the start of the growing season as we were too busy with other home improvement projects. So none of the normal potato, onion or garlic crops for us this year, but we can still expect a bumper supply of salad leaves, herb, tomatoes, chilli, runner beans, courgettes, etc. to compensate.

The first job was to remove the polythene sheets that had been covering most of the raised beds for the last year or so. The sheets had done a good job of keeping out most of the weeds, except around the edges. The worms and ants had also done a good job of turning over the soil under the covers. We really didn’t have too much work to get them ready for planting.

Within a few hours all beds were cleared of weeds. The two beds to the right in the above photo, which were visibly still full of weeds, have now been cleared and will eventually be our fruit beds. They will be planted with raspberries, strawberries, rhubarb, etc. at the appropriate time.

We erected two tepees for French beans, using Laurel branches from the garden. One was planted with French Bean seedlings from the greenhouse and we directly planted Dwarf French “Purple Queen” Bean seeds around the other, for a later crop. We also planted two varieties of outdoor cucumbers in large pots near the greenhouse and plenty of courgette seedlings and seeds in the same beds as the bean tepees.

We’ll plant out the herb and salad seeds as soon as possible. We’ll probably use DIY seed tape for quite a few of the smaller seeds as we have documented previously.

Unfortunately another of our hens, Henrietta, recently died. She was one the first five hens we bought at Point of Lay, in April last year. That means we have now lost 3 hens this year, although we are sure there is no underlying connection between their causes of death. Poor Henrietta suffered a prolapse. We booked an emergency vet appointment as soon as we noticed, but unfortunately it was too late.

We haven’t really done any vegetable growing this year which means that currently our posts are infrequent, and every one we have made recently seems to have been (mostly sad) news about the chickens. We decided very early on this year that keeping an eye on our very active 18+ month old son at the same time as tending vegetables was not going to be easy (ie. possible !). Hopefully this will be a bit better next year, but we suspect we still won’t be back in the full swing of growing things for at least another year.

The wet weather we’ve had in the last month or so has brought surprisingly swift end to our work in the garden for this year. Weeks of rain have taken their toll and there are many jobs that we haven’t been able to finish. The last proper outdoor task that we did complete, was to prune our fruit trees at the end of October. Since then, however, we have not been really been able to do anything. We totally failed to plant out garlic or broad beans, or dig in manure and cover up the unused beds for winter. More work for next year, I guess !

The natural soil in our garden is clay so all the rain meant large puddles of standing water all over the lawn making any real garden work impossible. There was also quite a lot of standing water in the chickens run which they quickly turned into a mud bath. We had to rearrange their run to avoid the muddy pools and so far their new area is relatively clean.

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 took opportunity of the sunny weather on Saturday to dig up all our potatoes so we could get them dried in the sun before storage. We had one bed of Charlotte potatoes and half a bed of Edzell Blue, and managed to dig up enough to fill four large hessian sacks. This didn’t seem bad considering how many we had already dug up to eat as delicious new potatoes.

Today we harvested our first two potato plants. They were Charlotte salad potatoes and we got a little over a kilogram of new potatoes (about two and a half lbs) from the two plants. They tasted absolutely wonderful, boiled with a little mint and eaten with salmon and salad. They were also approved of, as finger food, by our six and a half month old son. He definitely seemed to be purring as he crammed them in his mouth.

We actually planted an area of approximately 6m x 1.2m with potatoes, about (two thirds are Charlotte and the rest are Edzell Blue), so it looks like we will have a very good crop this year.

Our first ever blog post is a roundup of activity in the garden for the last two months, as we tried to recover from a late start.

The first job was to clean and tidy the greenhouse. We then removed the polythene sheets from the raised beds. Due to the arrival of the latest member of our family, towards the end of last year, our 2008 growing season was seriously curtailed. Rather than just leave the beds to the mercy of the weeds, we dug in plenty of manure and compost in early autumn and then covered them all with black polythene sheets. The result, when we finally removed the sheets, was some lovely soil, kindly worked over by the worms. Admittedly there were still a few weeds where there was a gap in the around the edge of the beds, but certainly no back breaking digging was required. We will definitely do the same again this year with any unused beds.

We then planted onion sets, garlic, potatoes, broad beans, peas, sweetcorn, French beans, runner beans, carrots, salad (rocket, lettuce, radishes) and herbs (coriander, dill, parsley) directly into the beds. We also sowed chilli, cucumber, tomatoes, courgette and squash seeds into pots in the greenhouse.