October 2008 - Starting work on the new kitchen garden (Part 1)
A few days later we arrived for our first day’s work in bringing this garden back to life, bearing scythes, forks, spades and a mattock. As we’d done before, we decided that we would stick to hand tools as much as possible. Breaking new ground under your own steam certainly makes it personal!
It was hard to know where to begin, the amount to be done was mesmerising, so while we thought about that, we got the scythes out and set to cutting the grass around the apple trees and on the meadow side of the garden. It looked slightly emptier and more manageable afterwards - it wasn’t really, of course; all the grass and weeds were still there, just shorter, but it looked neater and we enjoyed the exercise.
Scything the grass
The farm owner, Mrs Mawle, appeared to say hello and talk about what we might do, telling us what we could dig up, what she’d like left and where the best growing spots were. To begin with there was a huge self-seeded Buddleja in the middle of the grassy area – that could go. Karl set about it, first sawing off the branches and then taking a mattock to the roots. He had it out in a surprisingly short time and we added it to a pile of branches and seedy grass cuttings ready for burning.
I had some perennial plants and shrubs in pots that I wanted to add to the garden, both colour and to attract insects, so we created two beds so that they could go in right away. We dug one along the edge of the grassy area and the other across the middle of it, skimming off the now short grass with spades and piling it up, grass side down, by the main length of hedge.
Digging over the soil, we found the roots of nettle, thistle, dock and bindweed and this gave us pause for thought. Should we spray it with weed killer and leave the plants in their pots for longer? No, we were too impatient for that and anyway, we’d never used weed killer before and didn’t really want to start now. Instead we decided to dig out what we could and get the plants straight in.
So, first to dig the weeds out - the ground beneath the skimmed off grass was compacted, heavy and hard work to dig, much claggier than we’d been used to, and required some concentrated battering to break it down. First Karl broke up the solidity with the mattock, after which I tried breaking it up some more with the fork, but it needed another mattocking from Karl before it was reading to be forked again. I could have done the mattocking myself but Karl can work stronger and faster and he was willing to do it.
After another going over, it was slightly easier going and I went through with the fork and dug out the weeds and roots. Some bindweed inevitably remained, but we’ll just have to deal with that as we go along. Once the soil had been turned a few times, it started to look like it might turn into something usable.
I set the plants out in a roughly thought-out pattern with regards to size, shape, preferred situation, colour and flowering time – shrub, a few perennials, another shrub, more perennials and so on – dug holes, mixed in compost and in they went, followed by much water and a mulch of compost.
Ornamental plant border
By the end of two days we had a couple of attractive ornamental beds, already being put to use by the local honey bees. Indeed, as soon as a Caryopteris x clandonensis ‘Heavenly Blue’ was brought out of the car, a mass of little honey bees came straight to it. Where were they coming from? I looked around and saw that in the end wall of the cottage overlooking the garden, there was a hole, high up, next to a wooden beam and in the air around this hole was a cloud of bees. Plenty of bees, good sign.
© Copyright Miranda Hodgson 2008