More permaculture beds

Garden updates , , , 4 Comments

These things seem to spring up like mushrooms after autumn rain.

Meet the new addition to the tall permaculture bed family.

Two tall skinny raised beds up at the top potager.

Squeezed in the gap between the asparagus patch and the new line of jostaberry shrubs.

[And that is as far as you read when I stupidly left a draft in the stack! Sorry about that.]

And just so you don’t have to gaze on too much dirt twice. Here is a photo gallery of the construction. Skim past if you aren’t an afficionado.

You can see how narrow they are. Like boats. And the nautical theme is present with the clever locking system for the frames. (Anti cabbage moth butterfly frames.). Etienne built his own boat. So he used the same hinges.

Once he had built them and swanned off for the summer to the Mediterranean on his yacht, it was up to me to do the rest.

Cover with liner. Fill with logs, branches, compost, horse manure (and comfrey leaves), old soil, new soil, compost and two more bark chip layers sandwiched in between the compost.

And the fun part was of course keeping the cat off.

She just loved those lovely lovely layers of soft warm stuff.

And believe me this was like warm chocolate cake mix.

And if it wasn’t such a high climb into the bed I might have joined her. You can see the compost bins just three metres behind the raised bed. For once, (once!) in my life on this farm I didn’t have to go far for the raw ingredients.

Mind you, if she could have given me a hand with the endless endless buckets of sieved compost and soil I would have been more sanguine. But you only invest in this sort of labour once. That’s the beauty of these monster raised beds.

And then came the fun part. And yes this is way too early. I should have left it six months to settle down.

But the kale seedlings were busting out of their pots in the potting shed and needed to get growing.

So they went in.

And once this batch of babies puts on a bit of growth they can be shoved out for their winter season in about ten days time.

And I must get round to buying the netting for the sides. This ridiculously warm spell of weather we are having this week means there are the cabbage moth butterflies about.