Science Fiction and Fantasy Author
I am pretty pleased with this.
Before (June 2011, a month before we moved in):
Eight months later (late Feb 2012, the week before I had Leon!):
One year on (July 2012):
Nearly three years on (May 2014):
Not bad going, really. More photos in the Flickr album.
(Currently it looks quite wintery but I might add a photo in a bit anyway.)
One of the problems I mentioned in my 2013 analysis concerned how much time we spend outside and how much we use the grassy area; as well as the herbs not being used enough in cooking. A couple of months ago I moved things around, but hadn’t blogged about it before today. So, some photos! (Sadly, some rainy photos, but there we go.)
I’ve move the mini greenhouse again, back up against the fence. This freed up the space next to the door for some of the most-used herb pots, and made it easier to get at the water butt. The herbs are now being used more often!
This little red paddling pool fits the space next to the door nicely. I’ve also hung a couple of the chairs on the fence to make more space.
I moved the blueberry in the Butler sink to be in front of one of the raised beds, rather than next to it. This makes it easier to walk onto the grass from the back door. I’d still like to replace the concrete part of the patio with something more pleasant underfoot, and at the same level as the brick part, to increase the amount of usable space and reduce the perceived barrier between the parts of the garden, but that’s a long-term project. The strawberry planter is also not very useful (only the top section works well), so I may replant the strawberries elsewhere at the end of the season and get rid of it, with the same aim.
In unrelated news, so far the plastic bottle cloches plus copper tape are protecting the baby courgette plants from slug attack successfully:
This year I am planning my annual veggies based on four criteria: ease of growing, how much better they taste home-grown than bought, whether we will actually eat them, and whether they’re expensive in the shops. Here’s how the analysis looks (green plus, orange maybe, red negative):
The ones with green stars to their left are the ones that make the cut: anything with one or more red minuses or no green pluses was out. After a little more debate I have ditched podded peas in favour of just growing mangetout (mostly eaten straight from the plant in the garden, mmm). Which gives me:
| Vegetable | Plant | Harvest | Bed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Potatoes | Mid-March – May (earlies) | 9-10 wks after planting (early June – August) | South-west (once broad beans are up) |
| Chard | Spring/self-sown | Throughout year | South/north-east perennial beds |
| Rocket | Throughout year (not July) | Throughout year | Wherever there’s space |
| Misc lettuce | Throughout year (not July) | Throughout year | North-west bed |
| Courgette | Indoors mid-April, plant out mid-May | From July/August | North-west bed |
| Pepper | Mid-Feb onwards indoors, plant ‘out’ mid-May | From July/August (harvest green to increase yield) | Greenhouse |
| Garlic | Nov (already in) | June | In edges of various beds |
| Mangetout | March | June | Next to fig up fence; in tomato pots until tomatoes ready |
| Broad beans | Nov (already in) | April-May | South-west bed |
| Podded beans | May | July | Square bean bed |
| Tomatoes | March in greenhouse | August/September | In pots along fence |
So my tasks so far look like this:
Next I need to work out what other tasks I need to do: fertilising, tying in fruit, peas, and tomatoes, etc. Then I can transfer it all into my calendar — thus minimising decisions to make and enabling me just to do things when I have a moment.
It’s about the time of year that I need to prune my fruit trees and bushes. I have done this before, but I am far from convinced that I did it the best way (and also I can’t remember what that was anyway). Hence this resource collection on pruning, and a summary for what I need to do.
Apple tree
Blackcurrant
Blueberry
Any comments from experienced pruners (especially of dwarf apple trees!) welcome.
Following up from my analysis of where my garden needs some redesigning, one part of the solution was to plant up half of the raised beds as a forest-type garden; or given the size of the space, in a forest-garden-influenced style. The beds are the ones along the left-hand (western) fence in the photo below. I’ll be keeping the other two beds for annuals.
So this is what I’ve come up with:
South-west bed (the long one along the fence in the above photo):
North-west bed (the one just by the herbs):
There should be room for next year’s tomatoes in pots between the two beds against the fence, and then south of the south-west bed, where they’ve been this year.
I’ve read that you can grow asparagus through ground cover as a herbaceous perennial, which if it’s true I may try the year after next. (I like asparagus, but the last time I grew it my feeling was that it took up quite a lot of space, which you couldn’t use for anything else the rest of the year, for a very small crop.) I’d also like to investigate other perennial salad leaves, but for now that is enough to get started.
I’ve ordered my various bare-root trees/shrubs from Martin Crawford’s Agroforestry Research Trust, so am looking forward to their arrival in December!
As part of the ongoing maintenance of the permaculture design for my back garden, I made a list of the issues highlighted in my successes and problems posts:
After thinking about it for a few days, I concluded that the maintenance and harvesting problems actually break down into three factors:
I took a look at the permaculture principles while thinking about designing a solution. (The whole design maintenance process is about principle 4, “Accept self-regulation and feedback”.) (Italics are conclusions or things I need to add to my to-do list.)
My very first conclusion was that however many solutions there are to snail and slug problems, my preferred solution was to learn to live together with the snails. (Principle 1, “Observe and interact; beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”) As a vegan, I can’t really justify killing the snails, who are after all only trying to feed themselves, the same way I am. Observing the plants that struggled, the ones most at risk are small annual seedlings (carrots and turnips, courgette, basil), and that grape vine. This suggests a multi-layer approach (principle 10: “Use and value diversity”):
My next problem was the lack of time, combined with the lack of time spent in the garden. The obvious solution to a lack of time is to grow plants that need less attention, which broadly speaking again points to perennials. (Snail-resistant and easier to grow! Principle 5: “Use and value renewable resources and services”.) A second solution is to plan what maintenance I do need (eg checking the soil pH of the blueberries, fertilising fruit trees) a bit better over the winter, ready for summer. (Principle 2: “Catch and store energy”; that is, use my winter energy to better direct my summer energy.) Making comfrey and nettle tea is also on my agenda.
The lack of time in the garden is strongly related to our excessively warm south-facing patio. We have a patio umbrella, but it doesn’t provide much shade, and it doesn’t shade the wall of the house which then radiates heat back out. It’s actually a difficult space to shade, because it is so very south-facing! One solution might be an awning with a ‘curtain’ falling a couple of feet around it. However, my preferred solution is another grape vine, trained over the patio. This will produce a grape crop, provide all-day shading for the house wall, and the transpiration of the green leaves will cool the space under them. I thought we would need a pergola for this (difficult to install on our concrete patio), but in fact installing strong wires should do the trick at least initially. (Principle 9: “Use small and slow solutions”, principle 3: “Obtain a yield” (of both shade and grapes!), principle 2: “Catch and store energy” (grapes store sun energy), and principle 8: “Integrate rather than segregate” (two functions, one solution).
There were other awkwardnesses in the patio space which I’ve already fixed and which are already meaning I spend more time out there and water a bit more, as the weather cools:
I’m currently working on watering and wicking solutions to make watering required less often, and easier when it is required. I’d like something in all the annual beds and anywhere else (eg the blueberry and cherry pots) it’s needed. I also need to add a longer hose to the tap for when I need to use that, to make the watering can easier to fill.
The planned perennial beds, with full ground cover, will also help retain moisture in the earth, as will adding more compost as it becomes available. I’m going to abandon the strawberry tower which doesn’t work at all well, and use the strawberries as perennial ground cover.
Harvesting: we don’t use as much rocket as we have; but as a self-seeded low-maintenance plant which gets eaten sometimes and is nice to nibble on while gardening, I’m happy to just let it keep on keeping on. I’m going to stop planting annual lettuce, but might plant a salad-type perennial leaf (low-maintenance, available if wanted).
I am going to put sticky notes on the herb jars which are for things we have outside, to remind cooks that the fresh herbs are there!
Finally, in terms of under-utilised space (principle 6: “Produce no waste”), a handful of different solutions:
Generally, my aim is to set things up so that, as much as possible, they manage themselves. It’s going to require a certain amount of work over the winter to set things up, and over the first year or two to help them get going, but in the long run this should significantly improve the way the garden works, heading towards the “harvesting as maintenance” goal.
The big part of the plan is forest-garden style planting in the two western raised beds. I’ve worked out my plan for that and will write about it in my next post.
Following up on this year’s successes, here are the problems that I’d like to fix for next year.
The observant reader will have noticed that snails are my single biggest problem. My main aim for the winter is to find a solution to this problem. Ducks (or chickens? do they eat snails too?) would be ideal but sadly impractical!
I also need to think about what plants we’ve actually eaten and so what’s worth growing. I’m considering potatoes for next year as a low-maintenance crop that we really enjoy eating.
A quick round-up of this year’s garden successes, as the summer growing season comes to a close and I start thinking about autumn planting.
The thing I note from this is that it’s the low-maintenance and self-seeded plants that seem to be doing the best. Something to bear in mind when planning for next year.
Maintenance notes for next year:
This week I dug out the “composting” half of the compost pile, and lo! there was a big load of beautiful rich black compost:
I covered half of one bed with it to a depth of an inch or so, and added a couple of spadefuls to the beans and the blackcurrant beds. Very pleasing; I just hope the new “composting” half (I’ve switched them over) does its thing just as well by winter when I want to spread some more of it.
In other fertiliser news, I think comfrey has appeared in the west flowerbed, where there are a bunch of other miscellaneous things busily self-seeding. Thumbs crossed! I also harvested nettles from under the apple tree (by pulling them up; nettles are fabulous plants in many ways but not suitable for a very small garden with a toddler) and am making nettle tea at the bottom of the garden.
I find it difficult to remember to regularly water all of my various growing spaces. Two of them (balcony and porch) don’t have any water source which means watering is harder work and thus likely to happen; the back garden has water but I still struggle to remember and find the time to get out there with the watering can (time consuming in itself). So I’ve been looking into watering systems.
I already have most of my tomatoes in self-built self-watering containers, which work wonderfully. Mine are very basic, based around two florists buckets stacked on one another (full instructions in Permaculture in Pots!). For the third year in a row, the tomatoes in those buckets are thriving, and I want to make a couple more for next year.
I’m likely to construct more SWCs for the porch and balcony, but in the meantime I’ve been looking at other alternatives to use in the existing containers, as well as in the ground in the raised beds in the back garden. In the light of the permaculture approach of “make small changes and observe”, here are the current experiments, all using things we already had lying around the house:
I suspect that the best solution will be different in my different growing spaces, as the parameters, requirements, and limitations are different in all three areas. However, I would like to get some kind of watering solution in place across all of them before next summer. Watch this space for more experimental results!
Meanwhile, the rocket is doing just fine anyway.