Diary of a permaculture -ish garden, March and April 2020.

Lilac blossom time is my favourite time.  It smells so good.  My neighbour says she can smell it in her garden too, and she wants a cutting of it when the time's right.

In the back garden, my raised beds have been topped up with a mix of driveway soil (yep we're still going with that!), hotbin compost and some compost from a big deep planter I'm getting rid of.  I've planted potatoes, peas and broad beans in one, and interplanted with spinach and bok choi.  My other back garden raised bed is empty for now, but I have some minipops sweetcorn in the greenhouse ready to go in next week.  There's swiss chard in both raised beds that's just started to bolt.  And you can see in the front one that my walking onions have popped back up and have started to flower.

One of my projects has been rationalising the amount of pots I have round the garden.  I've been planting things into the ground and rearranging, I'm pleased with this little arrangement with the owl planter and the big terracotta bowl with ginger and spring onions in it. 

My front garden raised beds are doing so good.  A couple have been cleared out and are waiting for new plants, and a couple are full, of onions and garlic, and garlic and carrot seedlings and lettuce seedlings.  My onions are covered because we get onion moth (they lay their eggs in the leaves and the caterpillar buries itself in the onion and eats it from the inside out!), my cover is a mosquito net for a cot, held up with sticks, and so far it seems to be working ok. 

We had a really big job done on the back hedge.  It's needed trimming for ages and we finally bit the bullet and had a tree surgeon come and do it.  It cost £500!!!!!!!!!  And while I'm sad about the loss of birdy habitat and privacy from the houses behind, I am definitely glad of the extra light that it's letting into the garden, and to be rid of the creeping dread that 'something' would have to be done about the hedge - at least it's done now!  The winter-y photo below is the before, and the next the after.  Just so you know, the tree to the left was a sycamore and was taller than our house.  The huge tree on the right is also a sycamore and was what I was dreading our tree turning into.

The hedge looks a bit sparse at the moment, but I've been assured it will grow back pretty quickly in the next few months, and there is new growth on it.  I asked for the chipped wood from the hedge-cutting, and there was enough to cover our whole garden, 14 rubble sacks have gone to mums for her garden and we still have this much left, under the blue tarp, in an old tonne gravel bag! 

I'm dealing with this corner next.  I've already started clearing it out, I need to finish that, put gravel down and then move my shed and greenhouse so they're flat against the brick wall at the back. 

Speaking of greenhouses, I've painted mine, black and white because that's the only paint we have at the moment, and I think it looks ok.

I don't feed the birds.  We've had rats and mice in the garden and I don't want to encourage them.  But the garden is always full of birds, sparrows, robins, blue tits, coal tits, great tits, blackbirds, starlings, pigeons and these goldfinches, who visit to eat dandelion seeds for their lunch. 

How's your garden doing? 

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Dairy of a permaculture (ish) garden, June 2019.

I love it when the foxgloves flower, they're soo beautiful!

Our biggest garden-y excitement this month has been that the driveway is almost finished!  Seven 850kg bags of gravel have been spread (we may have bought one too many, but we've come up with  a plan for it!).  Joe's about to put up a new fence, there's a bin store to build and we want a couple of big pots with something pretty in by the front door (any suggestions - we want something hardy and evergreen and it's mostly shady apart from a few hours of sun in the morning).  I have a new waterbutt too, it's 250 litres and filled in one night - it's been really rainy here!  We've also had new guttering and facias so please note how nice and shiny they are because they cost £1700 (our old ones were asbestos...).

I think the gravel will be slightly less white and a bit more more pale grey once the rain's washed the dust off.  Look at this side path too - I think it's sooo nice!

The front garden raised beds are doing really good!  I've already had my first potatoes and there are beans and peas growing in with the potatoes too.  I've got carrots and beets on the way, and I've trimmed all my onions back because they were hitting the top of their protective mesh (the internet said I could trim them back to 4 inches high a couple of times during the growing season, and it would send more energy into making a bigger bulb, so we shall see).  I've had loads of kale, the sweetcorn is up and my tomatoes and peppers have flowers on them!

I've got little apples on my little apple tree! 

I've got broad beans, peas and borlotto beans in my back garden raised beds.  There are some courgettes in the other raised bed and a lot of weeds too (not pictured!).

Here's the garden in full for posterity. 

How's your garden doing?  Every time I plant a new plant a slug eats it and I'm getting fed up of that, and I had to pull up nearly all of my outside tomatoes because of blight, but otherwise I'm enjoying my garden! 

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Diary of a permaculture (ish) garden, February and March 2019.

Hello!  The garden is waking up (and so am I, I always want to hibernate through the winter!).  There's some blossom already, beautiful pink almond blossom and white on the new cherry plum trees.

The crocus have been and gone.

In the front garden I've planted a couple of patches of zingy yellow daffodils.  Some by the new cherry tree just as you come onto the drive, a pretty little springy area with some snowdrops, muscari, daffs and a hellebore my mum bought me.  The other in the corner by the fence, there's a new rose (a David Austen rose called 'generous gardener' that was my lovely valentines present) and some daffodils at the front of the bed.  It's always surprising how a few cheap little bulbs can make a garden look pretty and well cared for in the spring.

The new raised beds have gone up in the front garden!!!  I'm soooo pleased with them!

Joe's filling them up with the soil he dug out of the drive when he was levelling it, and I'm adding layers of garden clippings and cardboard to try to create a lasagne bed effect.  The driveway soil is slightly clay-ish, so I'm wanting to break it up with some organic matter, and hoping it'll all rot down together into something nice.  When I get nearer the top of the beds I'll add some bagged compost (I went to get some from Homebase the other day and there was some on offer for £2 a bag - so I bought 8 bags!) and some biochar (which is my new experiment this year).

We've had to have all our gutters replaced this month and I had to move my hotbin composter out of the way.  So it seemed a good opportunity to empty it.  About a million worms were living in there!  My back garden raised beds have had a nice top dressing of compost ready for the new growing season.

I've started planting some seeds in the heated propagator (tomatoes and peppers), chitting some potatoes (Jazzy, Nicola, Kestrel and Swift, I have no idea what I'm doing with potatoes so I just bought a small packet of several varieties to try.  The tray I'm chitting them in is the innards of Joe's Lego advent calendar and it's perfect for the job!) and I have my onions and some supermarket organic garlic ready and waiting to get going. 

Here's the garden in full, for posterity! 

How's your garden?  Have you survived the winter?  Are you ready for spring?

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Diary of a permaculture (ish) garden, September and October 2018.

Like every good husband should, mine bought me a big-arse gardening knife for my birthday!  

Ooo yes, it's very effective at getting up big weedy roots - I'm most happy with it.

The front garden is coming on, we hired a skip for Joe to put his diggings into, and completely filled it (we also emptied the loft - don't you love it when the person you bought the house from leaves the loft full of 10 dismantled flatpack cupboards and a bed, thanks for that!).  The next step is to put some hardcore down and compress it down by hiring a whacker plate, then it'll be time to put gravel down.  I'll be relieved when it's done! 

I've been topping up the garden beds with some of the soil dug up from the drive.  This little raised bed is in the corner of the front garden, I used the lasagne method of layering drive-soil, leaves and branches, more drive-soil then a top layer of more leaves.  The top layer of leaves is to stop cats pooping on the soil!  The drive-soil is pretty clay-y, so I hope it'll get better over winter, especially with the garden waste mixed in to help break it up.  

I did the same for the last weedy corner down the side garden.  I hoed and weeded the worst of it, covered in a layer of garden waste (mostly buddleia and raspberry prunings), then a thick layer of driveway soil, I planted some narcissus and tulip bulbs in the soil, and some strawberry plants transferred from around the garden, then covered the whole of the side garden in a layer of hedge trimmings (again - cat poop deterrent).  It looks so much better without all the weeds.

I did the nice autumn activity of collecting up seed heads and acorns and planting them up - we'll see what comes up in spring!

I've been growing some ginger in a pot outside all summer.  I lifted it gently to see how it had grown, which wasn't very much.  I reburied it to let it grow more, but it got frosted and looks super unhappy now!  I'll try again next year though, if we keep having hot summers, and I get an early start with it in the conservatory I should be able to get a better harvest. 

That's kind of it for the garden for the last few months.  The weather has been so rainy, and I've needed some time to look after my family the last couple of months, both of which have meant less time for gardening.  I'll still pop out for a while if we get any dry days, but I've said goodbye to proper gardening for the year, and started dreaming and saving for next year's projects!

I did have a final gardening flourish this afternoon though, in the almost drizzle, grey skies and extreme wind, I planted a tree.  It's a crab apple called 'Red Sentinel', it'll have little red fruits that stay on through the autumn and winter.  I had to trim the roots to fit it into the pot (aka stainless steel bin), I hope it will survive!

How's your garden this month?

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Diary of a permaculture (ish) garden, August 2018.

There's been some lovely sunshine for gardening in this month.

It's all going on this month!  Joe's digging up the driveway, to level it and then lay hardcore and gravel.  He's digging up lots of soil, which he's making into a pile at the bottom of the garden.  I've been sieving the soil and topping up my raised beds with it, and when the driveway is finished I'll sieve some more of the soil and put it in my front garden raised beds.  

Here is drive progress...

I've also been making progress with the side garden.  I think I've said before that I basically don't weed unless I have another plant to replace the weed with - to cut down on the work of constantly weeding an area and trying to keep the soil clear, when mother nature clearly has different ideas.  I focused on this area under my Discovery apple tree this year, and I think it's been pretty successful.  

If you look at the far left of the photo above you can see all those green weeds, they're next on my to weed list, but maybe next year! 

I've planted strawberries, wild strawberries, chives, garlic chives, Siberian perennial onions, red and white clover, curry plant, rosemary, sedum and yellow creeping Jenny, as well as daffodil and tulip bulbs for the spring.  

I'm pretty happy with my raised beds, I'm eagerly awaiting my first courgette of the year - I was soo late planting this year!  I've had loads of kale and some chard, but I'm still waiting to see if my other late plantings of cauliflower, sweetcorn and shallots are going to do anything.  

I'm also waiting for all these tomatoes to go red.  Putting this planter on the corner here, which is the sunniest part of the garden was the best decision - these are the healthiest tomatoes I've ever grown.  The beans and peppers I've tried to grow round the sides of the basket haven't worked so well though, I'll have to rethink it ready for next year.

All of my blueberry plants have been repotted, and I've been rewarded with lots of blueberries and loads of new growth too. 

That's about it for the garden this month.  It must be autumn, because my 'autumn joy' sedum has started flowering 

How's your garden this month?

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