The Good Life

After much planning, anticipation and several trips to buy materials, the day to build our vegetable bed arrived.  With a bit of luck Sunday was a lovely sunny day too.  In the past, we have grown various vegetables in pots semi-successfully but have always been keen to expand this.  The back of our house is east facing and a large portion of it is shady, so I'd more or less given up on the idea until my mother-in-law made the great suggestion of building a raised bed on our patio.  It would also break up the huge expanse of ugly paving slabs at the back of our house - two birds with one stone!
 
Diagrams were drawn, supplies bought and drills charged ready for the great build.  Matt's parents arrived to help (hopefully not regretting that they had made the suggestion in the first place).  Matt and his Dad were in charge of constructing, his Mum tackled our forest of wild garlic whilst I supervised, oh and made some sandwiches for lunch.

Planning time

Step 1 complete

Compost time

Work in progress

Chief supervisor

Planting up

The idea of the L shape is that I will be able to sit on the edge of the bed, as I find crouching very tiring, so giving me a rewarding manageable gardening project and hopefully lots of lovely vegetables!

Once the two boxes had been made, they were fastened together and it was time to start filling them up using compost from the bottom of our heap, which we'd been saving specially, and some bags from Homebase.  We will also get some rotted down manure from Mum to help fill the second part. 

 

Part 1 finished

After a brief lunch break it was time for planting.  Chris had kindly brought some runner bean plants with her.  We made a quick frame from some old canes and they were the first thing to go in along the back.  In front of them we put in two rows of onions, carrots, beetroot, spinach, sweetcorn and salad leaves.  We'll add another couple of rows of spinach and salad leaves in a couple of weeks to try to spread out the crop.  The other part of the bed will have courgettes, some herbs, radishes and more salad leaves once we have the rest of the compost.

Finally, we covered the bed with netting to keep out squirrels and pigeons, and I am very definitely on snail patrol until we manage to get some copper wiring.  Fingers crossed we will have some lovely home grown veg over the summer!