walesinwellies

New Year, New Blog, New Vegaspirations!

The last two growing seasons have been a steep learning curve and no doubt will continue to be for years to come!

 

When we arrived at the house, the back of the garden was a paddock and with no pony of our own to keep the grass down I was keen to convert the expanse of grass into something more productive and less tedious! We originally planned to keep half of the paddock for the kids to play in and use the other half to grow vegetables and fruit in 5 or 6 beds.

Christmas 2011 saw me showered with gardening books (embarrassingly I am terrible at learning from books so I have read them but for the most part forgotten the wisdom they imparted). That Xmas was also the one where I really proved my skill at treasure hunts when I failed miserably to track down my greenhouse off PreLoved that my hubby got me at great effort all the way from Bath with the help of his Dad (who has asked us to NEVER include him in another such venture because it turns out that dismantling an aluminium-framed glass greenhouse is actually really hard work!). The Post-Christmas period saw us predominantly trying to put up the greenhouse after painfully flattening the right-sized area for it.

Spring 2012 we tried to hand-dig some beds but discovered that the soil here is very heavy and full beyond belief of bricks, cement and large stones. So we hired the biggest, hand-pushed rotovator we could and discovered that even that beast was not a match for our clay. So then my final weapon was my broad-shouldered hubby. I felt bad living the stereotype of feeble female especially with my history of British powerlifting champion, but my efforts to dig the beds resulted in a painstaking 4-hour session progressing about half a bed-length compared to his one bed per hour.

I went a bit overboard buying seeds that spring wanting to grow everything under the sun and I religiously followed all the instructions on the packaging but in all honesty with no great attention to detail. I put parsnips under a cloche quite early on and then forgot about them. I dumped leeks left right and centre wherever I could find space. I planted seed potatoes at random in one bed and pretty much ignored them and certainly did not earth them up. I started cauliflowers, broccoli, kale and brussel sprouts in the greenhouse and transplanted them into a brassicas bed but then decided I didn't care about kale, didn't stake the brussels, the broccoli flowered, and the cauliflower just didn't do anything at all. Only 4 runner bean plants of the 15 I planted ever produced seedlings, even less of the peas were successful. I didn't get a single carrot whether I started them in the greenhouse or not. All my tomato and pepper plants in the greenhouse were devoured by slugs.

By August I was dying of morning sickness with our youngest on the way and considered simply watering my plants as a major achievement. I don't think I lifted a single weed all season so by then it was hard to distinguish wanted and unwanted plants. We had read somewhere about birds liking carrot and brassica seedlings so we had put netting over some of the beds but that made me even less inclined to do anything as even mowing the grass between the beds was difficult. On the upside I did get a fairly good crop of purple new potatoes that a customer had given me when I was delivering a course at their premises in May.

In September I accidentally came across some runner beans which was a pleasant surprise. In October with first trimester a thing of the past, it finally occurred to me to harvest. I don't suppose I really deserved a huge success given my efforts but nonetheless I was somewhat tearful when I discovered that my parsnips, one of the only things that had appeared to flourish, had actually split into alien-like, multi-tentacled scrawny roots in our rocky soil. My leeks had reached gigantic proportions so there was quite a glut of leek and potato soup at our house for a while. The only other crop was brussel sprouts which I observed was infested with some nasty looking slug-like parasites.

 

Our extra-terrestrial parsnips

So my husband got me to do a little reading and helped me put together some month by month action plans and we hatched a new plan. Over my current vegetable plot we decided to build a giant mesh cage that I could walk around inside which would protect crops from carrot fly, birds, and others. We decided to make raised beds for the root crops. We agreed to look around for some more secondhand greenhouses so we could have a fruit one, a seedling one and a tomato one. Once again PreLoved proved its worth and £20 later we had two new greenhouses only this time we had to try and figure out which bits belonged to which and then try to get loads of new glass cut which we managed to do quite cheaply in the end after some serious shopping around.

February 2013 - one of our busier months for our business, a month of preparation in the garden... and the last 4 weeks before my due date. We hired a digger and a tractor-pulled rotovator to lay siege to the area we later dubbed "La Somme". The rotovator failed miserably, indeed the tractor got stuck in the mud so in the end we diggered the whole area. And then my superhero hubby put up the framework for this mesh cage. And then it started snowing.

 

 

La Somme

I was watching the chickens in their new garden area out of the kitchen window under the snow and observed that the snow was bowing the netting as it accumulated in it like a hammock. With a shock I realised that this would happen on the far finer mesh of my veg-cage. It took quite a while to come up with a solution to this problem but eventually we decided to staple the mesh to the sides of the cage, and using wire and market-stall clips, we would fix the roof on during the summer months but remove it and store it by winter in one of the greenhouses.

I decided to rein in my ambitions this year and concentrate on staple, easy-to-grow veg. I put seed potatoes in the same bed this year but made a note to myself about earthing them up. I did two grow-bags of new potatoes too. I planted carrots and parsnips in the raised beds and was giddy with pleasure when I saw those carrot seedlings appear. My parsnips however were not as happy this year. I decided the only brassica I wanted was brussel sprouts for Christmas and went a little overboard with these but was pleased to see them growing well and even got hubby to stake them eventually. A neighbour gave me some broccoli seedlings but once again it all flowered despite mulching them and regularly watering them to try and keep them cool. We planted runner beans in raised beds and half-barrels around the garden this year and every plant flourished. I had mediocre success with my pea plants but decided that the seeds got too wet and simply rotted rather than germinate. As an afterthought I chucked some garlic, onions and leeks around as well. And this year I even managed to fit in some very sporadic weeding!

 

 

Runner bean

Meanwhile outside the cage, in March we built a raspberry planter out of recycled half-rounds from the old paddock fencing, a strawberry planter in one of the new greenhouses, we put blackcurrant bushes and blueberry bushes in half-barrels and the other half of the ex-paddock became our new orchard with 2 apple, 1 Bramley, 2 cherry and 2 conference pear trees going in. No fruit this year but we have great hopes for years to come.

Strawberry planter

End of August was soon upon us and this year joy of joys we harvested 2 wheelbarrow loads of potatoes, around 400 straight beautiful carrots, about 10kilos of runner beans, 30 onions, 20 garlic heads, with a good crop of parasite-free brussel sprouts on the way, about 40 parsnips still growing, and the leeks once again thriving (it is Wales' national vegetable for a reason I guess). In the end we were giving away runner beans as our freezers were filled and we were absolutely sick of blanching them. We had a few meals on our own peas, a constant trickle of soft fruit that my two-year old loved coming out to pick with me every day and a glut of mainly green tomatoes from the greenhouse. The carrots and potatoes we have stored in big plastic boxes in the dark and the cool in peat and so far, touch wood, they have stored quite well despite our rookie mistakes of not letting them harden off in the ground. The season has been so mild also that some of the carrots have started growing again but so far they have still been great eating.

Carrots galore!

Christmas was great with all the vegetables at the table, being from our own garden. King Edward roast poatoes, roast parsnips, brussels sprouts with chestnuts, steamed carrots and runner beans always taste better when grown by one's own fair hands!

And so now with another growing season screaming towards us it is time to start planning another year and once again build on lessons learnt last year!