2017 Gardening Recap

Oh dear. Is it really 2018 already?

The past few months are a bit of a blur, honestly. Sometime in October, my brain chemistry decided that it hates me, so it has taken all of my energy just to keep myself more or less presentable for work and try not to let the house devolve into a squalid mess. Every once in a while, I'll summon the will to do some work in the garden or chip away at one of my crafty projects, but it tends to be a few stitches of embroidery here, a bit of weeding there--nothing that seems to be worth publicizing to the world. That said, this blog *is* called Things Made Slowly, so I suppose I'm living up to the name.

Three months after the initial assault, my brain still hasn't quite let go of its enmity toward me, but with 10 whole days at home with absolutely no commitments over the holidays I began to feel like I might just function long enough to do some work in the garden. While standing outside on New Year's Eve, shoveling dirt in a drizzly 3 degrees Celsius (festive, no?), I couldn't help but be a little impressed by all we've accomplished in the past year.

When we bought our house in late summer of 2016, the backyard consisted of a 10' X 10' square of grass, with another 10' X 8' of concrete paving slabs. Idealists that we are, we looked at it and thought, "This will make a great vegetable garden!"

We pulled up the pavers, used our cardboard moving boxes as sheet mulch over the grass, re-arranged the paving stones into paths between three long beds, and hauled in several car-loads of free compost and wood chips from the local council to pile on top of the cardboard. We started a compost pile and bought bags of rock dust, vermiculite, coir fiber, a wormery, and a soil block maker. We spent the winter of 2016 watching YouTube videos on organic, no-dig, and square foot gardening, looking up first and last frost dates for our area, and creating spreadsheets to help us keep track of what we were supposed to plant and harvest when. In spring 2017, we set about making soil blocks, sowing seeds, and generally making our first truly organized attempt at growing food.

There were setbacks, of course.

Not a single one of our onion seeds germinated. Despite bringing in at least six car-loads of compost, when spread it across all our vegetable beds, it only gave us about 2-3" of topsoil. Underneath was solid clay interspersed with large chunks of rock, which our root vegetables simply couldn't penetrate. We were away from home during what turned out to be the hottest, driest week of the year and our entire brassica bed bolted without giving us even a single edible radish. While we were replacing a fence post that had rotted away below ground (which was another saga in itself), the heavy post fell over, directly onto our row of pea plants growing a few feet away.

While the negatives are what tends to stick in my mind, we weighed and recorded everything we harvested throughout the year, and jotted down the market price per kilo where we could find one. In spite of our setbacks, starting from a square of grass over awful, dead clay, we* still managed to grow 53.67 kg (about 118 lb) of food worth £264.90. Not too shabby, eh?

Of course, a significant chunk of those 53 kilos was potatoes and chard (oh god, so much chard), but it's a marked improvement over our previous efforts in Scotland, which only yielded a handful of snow peas, broad beans, salad greens, and a single, delicious pumpkin.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should also add that we spent more than we saved on the garden this year, but we bought our consumable products like rock dust and vermiculite in bulk quantities that should last us several years, and our biggest expenses were pieces of infrastructure like our wormery and scaffolding boards to build raised beds for next year, so we won't need to buy them again.

Speaking of infrastructure, this finally brings me back to what we did with our holiday break.

From the time we moved in, we knew that we wanted raised beds in the back garden, but it took us until this November to find the right materials for the right price. During the holiday break, Steve set to work measuring twice, cutting once, and generally making our backyard look a lot more tidy than it did before.

The first raised bed in place.

Putting up the raised beds involved lifting the paving stones that we had placed roughly last summer, leveling the dirt underneath them and replacing them, digging out the dirt around the edges of our vegetable patches to make room for the boards, and staking everything securely into place once we were sure it was level, parallel to the garden wall, perpendicular to the patio, and not overlapping the edge of the badly-eroded and messily-poured concrete path that runs the length of the garden. The beds are currently only 7.5" high, but we've left the stakes tall enough for a second layer of boards to be added next year, bringing the total height up to 15".

Oh, and did I mention that we still had vegetables growing in the beds during all of this?

Installing the raised beds around the vegetables. Plenty of
spinach, chard, celery, etc. still growing in late December!

We transplanted or harvested what we could (which was most of it), and composted what we couldn't. Digging around our garden beds was an interesting reminder of how awful our soil was to start with, and how far we've come. Everything below the level of the compost that we bought in is still solid, heavy clay, but where it used to be almost completely lifeless, it's now teeming with worms and other subterranean critters.

If we're going to be able to add the second row of boards next year, we'll need to start generating a lot more compost to fill the space. Buying in large quantities of compost (or renting a car to pick up the free compost from the council) is not particularly cost-effective, so we're doing some research and keeping an eye out for sources of compostable materials in our neighborhood. We also bought ourselves a compost tumbler--not one of the expensive ones though. It's basically, a big duffel bag made of heavy-duty plastic. You fill it with your kitchen scraps and carbon-rich materials and just roll around on the ground to aerate the contents. We'll see how it goes.

Apart from getting a better handle on this whole composting business, our goal for 2018 is to basically do the same as last year, but better. While 53 kg seems like a lot of food from our tiny back garden, it's still a long way from food self-sufficiency and keeping on top of it was a lot of work. This year, we're hoping to grow at least the same quantity of food, but make fewer mistakes and spend a bit less money or a bit less energy.


*Although I say "we," it was mostly Steve who planted, transplanted, fed, harvested, and cooked all of that food, so I can't really take credit for much more than footing the bill and the occasional slug-murdering spree, but I'm pretty pleased all the same.