2022-06 Expanding Growing Area

We had visitors this month but we also worked to get as much done as possible before next winter. We were trying things out with planting to gain experience about what worked and didn’t locally.

Planting Underway

I like plants to be productive and produce something. But my girlfriend wanted some prettier plants to welcome people coming to the property entrance. These helped give the lawn a visual border. I need to remember not everything is about production and numbers.

We added wire to the raised bed frames, to keep birds off the smaller plants. This worked but the covers had become really heavy. It took two of us to lift these on and off each time without hurting the plants. A modification might be to make the sides hinged so we can get to the plants without lifting the frame off.

The potatoes were planted out. we used buckets that I’d originally got for concrete mixing.

Generally, we found the sun and wind to be a bit brutal on the plants, and watering was a challenge. We had ideas on how to improve things but there were multiple projects going on and we were short on time and budget.

Being a Tourist

My parents came to visit and so we took them around the village and the local area. A lot of it was also new to me as we’d kept a low profile during covid, and had only got the car last month.

Bridge Repair

The footbridge that gives us access to the nearby village had been getting increasingly bouncy. I put in adjustable support to reduce the effective span of the bridge. It wasn’t fun working next to all the mosquitos in the stream but I was really happy with the stability of the bridge afterwards.

Extending the Raised Beds

We extended the first perimeter of raised bed around the garage. This is intended to do two things. First, it is a growing area, but second, it is a barrier to groundwater runoff. The field nearby has a high flow of surface runoff water when the snow melts and this sometimes flows around the garage. I’m not keen on visible flows of water around a foundation. With the raised beds forming a barrier this should be reduced.

Dedicated Serial Crop Bed

My girlfriend asked for a raised bed that might be used for Sweetcorn or similar. The idea is to play it in larger squares. I made a 3×4 metre bed and filled it with sieved earth. I would have liked to have put down wood chips between the raised beds. Then as they rot down over the years they could be added to the raised beds and replaced with more. We’d had a coarse bark delivery for a path but we were hunting for something similar to the supermarket bags but on a large scale. I wasn’t able to find a source this year, however.

Two simple wooden walkways are fitted and can be slid from side to side, or picked up and removed. The idea was to let the area be accessed for planting and harvesting without compacting the soil as much as walking on the surface. I think I remember my granddad doing something similar in his garden.

Redoing the Greenhouse Foundation

The original greenhouse had just used direct-earth anchoring. After one winter it looked wonky due to the frost movement of the earth. It also wasn’t clear how we would weed around the edges of the greenhouse. So we took it apart into four parts and moved it to make a better foundation.

I started digging it by hand but realised it would take too long, and I didn’t want to damage my back again. I approached a local excavator operator who came to help. They dug it all out and made it flat, but there was a lot more work that would be done over the next few months in order to get it rebuilt before winter