2024-06 – Summer Rush

June has been hot, and the start of June needed lots of garden upkeep, such as strimming, mowing, and hand-weeding. It’s hard budgeting available spare time between maintenance, planting and progressing the garden plan. The current plan is to reduce windspeed a little, increase shade, remove remains from previous projects and then think about infrastructure for the future. We’re being a lot more relaxed with the greenhouse this year, using less plants so that they’re easier to look after.

Local Climate

At this time of year the sun can be relentless. Sunrise is roughly 03:00 and sunset roughly 23:00. Between those hours the sky is still bright and looks like a UK evening.

Towards the end of June it got too hot to plant anything. I had to manually water some blueberry bushes midday due to wilting leaves. The newer bushes planted a year ago likely dont yet have roots deep enough to survive as well as the older bushes.

The hayfield next to us got ploughed and then tilled into a fine soil. The farmer planted some type of cover crop and by the end of the month it’s growing fast.

Adventure Path Area

Around the back of the garage we’ve previously built a ring of raised beds and planted fruit bushes and trees. We have a stepping-stone path and call it the adventure path as there are plants on either side. It was looking a little sparse at the start of June but we gave it a lot of attention this month.

We built two wooden arches for the adventure path around the garage which should give the plants good support for them to climb up. They look pretty but importantly should provide some amount of wind break for the blueberry bushes and apple trees nearby. There are more arches to make but it is midsommer holidays so the local hardware store is on a skeleton crew. We’ve ordered the materials and can finish the building in July.

We planted chives around the base of each apple tree. The idea is that perhaps the smell from the chives might help mask the smells that parasites use to find the fruit trees. Thoughout the month we placed and replaced compost around the chives to help them grow. The chives have also done brilliantly in other parts of the garden so they seem fine with the local conditions.

We haven’t yet picked a cover plant to grow around the new fence and crowd-out any weeds. I planted three types of thyme to see how they would do. I think perhaps thyme wont be aggressive enough. We weeded the surrounding area but tried to leave the wild strawberries intact.

Back Garden Border

The bottom of the garden borders a stream, and we dont own the stream bank so managing a blended wild border has been tricky. Our aim is to encourage the most useful native plants along that border and see if we can get them to crowd out the more nuisance plants.

I tried two types of clover as nitrogen fixing cover/green manure for bare earth areas but the seeds didn’t germinate well. I tried out 10 survivors on various areas of the border. Sadly by the end of the month only about 3/10 had survived the onslaught of slugs and sun.

Slugs (sniglar) have been a massive problem this year. Slug traps filled with beer seem to catch about 5-7 a night per trap which is ok. But drinking the beer and walking around with a bucket catches about 150. To reduce hiding place for slugs I put sand around the base of each raised bed. This filled in any holes around the base where I’d dug the raised beds. Dumping them in the stream for tadpoles and fish to eat seemed like a good idea. That was until on a second trip I saw an army of slugs coming out of the water like a military beach invasion. I think I need a neighbour with a hungry chicken.

The water level in the nearby stream is at its lowest this time of year and the flies aren’t as bad as they will be in later months. That means its the best time to maintain the bridge over the stream. I took a level, sledgehammer and spanners to readjust all the bridge supports. This keeps the bridge stable and will help it last longer.

I used a small chainsaw to fight back aggressive spreading brush at the back of the property and fed it though a wood chipper to put back on the ground. We’re hoping the comfrey (vallört) overtakes the area cleared because it looks pretty, will shade out other weeds, and can be harvested as a green manure.

Compost Heaps

I did make time to rotate the compost heaps and tidy them up. The compost heaps are made of pallets and essentially have been just a pile left for a few years. They were looking a bit unkempt. Also almost everyone British that visits the garden helpfully instructs me that the compost heaps need rotating.

The electric drum sieve was great for outputting a usable soil. It took a couple of days to process most of the compartments but I had to stop when there was only one left to do. I need to build a fifth bay for the generated additional volume which I will do in July. The kitchen waste compost bins also needed to be empty before winter which is now done. This is because the compost wont reduce down when it gets below zero so it’s possible to run out of space.

I know keeping a compost heap is important for sustainability, but for time economics the £4/40-50L bags of compost from the supermarket look really tempting compared to the effort and space needed for the compost heaps. I think if we had a larger area like an acre or more it would be easy to simply have a compost pile and turn it each month with a small tractor. With half an acre we cant really keep and use a tractor without setting aside a lot of space for movement and storage.