Garden plans and strawberry beds

When we dug over the lawn in the garden we had no real plan apart from having a space where we could grow things. It seems the end of the world has come and gone (for now) and before the winter and the endless wet and darkness, I thought we should ‘do the garden’ properly. The plan is to have the bed slightly raised with “railway sleepers” around the edge and planks going through the middle to allow for easier working.

I marked out the bed roughly with some bits of wood, keeping in mind the measurements of 240cm and 120cm which are the lengths that sleepers come in. The less cutting the better. Which is why the bed is not quite the same shape as it is now.

The problem now is waiting for the bed to empty out so I can get going laying the edges, starting with the two straight edges.

The plants in the garden going well include:

tomatoes, picking lots of them
runner beans
cucumbers (top right-hand corner)

Just sown and growing well:

turnips
spinach

We are also emptying the beds by using:

beetroot
carrots (first lot this week)
potatoes (dug up some quite large ones today)

The kale is under cover to stop butterflies from laying eggs and they will stay under there. It has meant being a bit creative to make the netting higher.

On the plot, a good lot of hoeing to get rid of the many weeds, plus sorting out netting over the brasicas. One of the broccoli had a bit of a head on it which I was tempted to cut today but decided to leave it for another week.

The fennel seems to have gone to seed, lots of very hot and then lots of rain maybe. The plants still look interesting but we won’t get the bulbs at the bottom, instead we will get flowers.

Most things are just growing and looking after themselves, but the strawberries have suffered all year. I tidied them up and started to put some extra compost around them to top the bed up. I feel the soil is pretty shallow and so the whole bed could do with topping up, it will take some visits to sort that out (the picture below you can spot just the top right-hand corner has been topped up). Hopefully when done, next year will be better, especially as now we have cut down the over hanging branches off the trees.