Dahlia planting

I do love the fact I have to go to another country to be able to write.

The main curse of creating such a large garden is there is only me to manage it. And it feels like it has been a full time job for years.

And the harder you work physically each day, the more you are inclined to just flop of an evening and do an inventory of the aches. In the early days I used to write at night.

So this is the reason for the erratic behaviour of these posts. I can shove a picture on Instagram; but I’d much rather describe the process of this garden making lark.

I’m a very late convert to Instagram. Only joining in September last year. And I treat it like a glorious television channel when I wake way too early and want to be entertained.

Because it is far from informing. Far from anything but gloss and wow. And why does everything have to be condensed to a speed contest? I guess I am not the demographic here, but I’m obviously going to have to manipulate my algorithm to get more sensible content.

If I ever have to look on the perfect dahlia fields of some dreamy influencer again….

All flowers are work. And also a joy. I listen avidly to No Till Flowers, an excellent podcast about flower farming.

And I have yet to hear the challenges of mole rats eating your tubers underground over winter.

And that is what I have. What many of us have when we are challenged with gardening in the countryside.

And this year has been quite spectacular – an explosion of the beasties.

Our Beastie can hardly keep up. If she comes out to play while I am working in the potager where I grow the dahlias I can find her perched over a tunnel and poised to pounce.

Her tally each week is anywhere between two and five. And those are the ones she actually presents to me in the form of an icky gift. Watching her devour them in about three bites is not a sight you want to share.

It was for this very reason that I always grew my dahlias in buckets and sunk them into the soil. It was a fantastic deterrent. But it came at the cost of getting fewer blooms. And in the hot summer months, the production of flowers dwindled even lower than one would expect if grown in full sun.

So this winter, in the midst of an explosion of burrowing rodents, I decided to change techniques.

And accept that there would be losses.

And the really annoying thing about mole rats is you can’t see the damage in raised beds until it’s too late.

This process took a few weeks. As of course I decided that the chestnut grid system I had created on these small raised beds was too annoying to work or weed. So they came out.

And then there was the long careful look at these skinny beds with paths in between. Wanting my beds to flow gently downhill north to south means that these are numerous and annoying. Yes there is no soil compaction as I can just lean in and work.

But the paths…

So I decided to win a bit more soil and gardening room at the expense of a bit of bed treading.

I have so many tubers to plant out now. Way more than in the bucket system. As of course I divided and potted up.

And gave away and dreamed even bigger.

And all these flowers have to be crammed in among the crops as well. One isn’t going to sacrifice the home grown tomatoes, courgettes / zucchini, cucumbers and herbs.

So here is the action shot of me pulling up the tiny path between two beds. Cue laborious picking out of my pebble mulch to store in buckets, wash and use elsewhere. (It’s picking up lego for grown ups.)

Now there’s a shot that is never going to be starring on any Insta feed.

And then there is the biggest question of all. How to fill the space?

These are permaculture beds, so there is plenty of organic matter in the existing beds I wanted to join together.

But to fill in new bit I used my excellent compost. And thank goodness it was just behind me in the compost bin. Not quite entirely rotted down to black gold. But bulky and healthy and teeming with worms.

And really heavy to shift. I used my trusty hay fork… is it a pitch fork?

It surely has sharper tines than the normal ones… nope. It’s a hay pitchfork. Very long handle. Very sharp prongs.

I found this out when I did the dummest thing in 2025 thus far.

I stabbed myself through the shoe of my right foot and skewered my second to last toe.

That will teach me listening to a political podcast and expressing ire out loud and not watching where I slammed the last compost load.

And not wearing really heavy work boots.

So with a pause to track blood through the house to get to the first aid box and hope the antiseptic cream was up to the task I continued on.

I had already planted up the dahlias either side, so they had to be protected.

And then mulched over the top of this incredible rich compost with a very neutral organic bag of the DIY store stuff just to slow down the weeds.

In went more of the dahlias.

And in the middle I put up a trellis as I am surely not going to miss out on the chance of all this rich compost not feeding the climbing beans this summer.

Plus it gives me something to cling on to as I tiptoe down this wide raised bed.

As long as the cat can keep controlling the rodent problem and the slugs don’t get all the emerging growth, it will be fun just to see how the new dahlia bed performs.

I should have moved those chestnut stakes from the path in front of the new bed before I took this shot.

Next post, more almost aerial shots of the main vegetable garden beds…