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.

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.

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.