The land on which I wanted to grow vegetables has never been cultivated. It had been a gravel tennis court for many decades, then grassed over and watered with brown acidic borehole water which creates an acid soil. So I had to start from the beginning.
With lots of help I dug a 3m x 1 m hole, layered the bottom with cardboard, and roughly cut up branches from my olive tree which needed pruning. Then layers of dry, brown vegetation (and paper) and wet green vegetation. In between layers I put compost. and watered well. The plastic conduit piping and gumpoles were a fairly useless attempt to keep out the Great Danes, and the Hadedas were a problem for a while. As I neared the top of the hole I placed my screwed together pine planks around the edge.
At this stage I picked up a book on Square Foot Gardening from Oasis Recycling and adapted what I had done to create 27 blocks of 30cm x 30cm each. The plastic edging was placed to dissuade the Plumbago from crowding out my patch.
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Clearing grass and weeds. I still had the original fence which did not keep out the Great Danes
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Once we had cleared the grass and weeds, I placed layers of newspaper on the soil and wood chips which I had sourced very cheaply
The next step was to build a fence. This was David's design which I think is absolutely perfect. The gate is hinged using rings which screw into the posts and the gate closes with a loop which I pop over the nearest pole.
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The new fence designed and made by David. The sun was quite low in
the sky by this time. |
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| The best of all is the gate! |
In this bed I have lettuce, onions, snap peas cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, parsley, and parsley. (all planted a few weeks ago). More recently we have started another hole on the far side of this bed for a tripod. I want to try out the design Jane Griffiths suggests in her book - Jane's delicious Garden. I will post photographs of that while I build it up.
