Plans are nothing, planning is everything

Diary

Posted: Wednesday 19 May, 2004

by Dan at 7:15pm in Growing Comments closed

So said some famous military man, I forget who, but it's a sound observation. On Sunday we had about 2 1/2 tonne of screened soil sitting on our drive and nowhere to put it. It was the leftovers of the 3 tonne I had ordered to fill in the pond to make the bog garden - okay, so I overestimated just a tad how much we'd need!

What to do? Well, we had a quick review of what was what and decided to restrict the pig rotation to the two westerly pens (more a back-and-forth than a rotation then), and keep the third, east-most pen for a permanent vegetable garden. Going a step further we decided it would be a good use of the available space to remove the fence separating the east-most pen and the existing vegetable garden, and to extend the raised veg beds to the full length of the new-to-be-united vegetable garden. This will have a number of benefits - the pig ark never needs to be moved again, since it sits on the fence line between the two pens and has a door into each pen; I'll need to do a lot less digging each year; and we'll have a lot more space to grow vegetables, all in permanent raised beds.

Extended raise bed So Monday I ordered the 91 metres of 2x8 inch board needed for the job, and a variety of other timber for the courtyard garden we're also building this week. Yesterday I started the deconstruction of the fence, enough to get a single bed extended (the rest will be done in the autumn) and got to digging the margins for the boards. Last night the timber arrived, so today I made the new bed which is now full of about 2 tonne of the screened soil, a good bit of compost and some well-rotted manure, which the hens have already done a pretty good job of incorporating into the somewhat sterile soil.