Snow going in February 2012

February is a month of hope for some. For me it’s just about the breaking point.

The days are cold, short and gloomy. I plod about my house confined by the everlasting night time, the idiot box on spieling out bad news and mindless “entertainment” whilst the useful hours of the day consumed by hours of work and commuting. February is as close as I get to being unhappy. But as close as I get sometimes, it’s not in my nature to get a bee in my bonnet, so I just keep my head down and stiff it out.

The weekend’s outdoor work is all about clearing away the death of the previous year’s growth which becomes boring. A guy somebody knows who has an orchard made the comment that "Leaves can drive you mad you know". No truer statement can be made of the February cleanup when you have a garden larger than you can chew.

My compost pile has grown to levels I never though possible and the clean up is only half way done. It’s full of browns so will need mixing in with nitrogen rich grass clippings during the season to break it down into something useful. I think there will be several tonnes ready for next year.

I need help, loads to do and not enough time in the day to do it!

Progress slowed to a standstill for a couple of weeks during the early part of February.

Several inches of snow will do that to an outdoor project. Still the garden looked lovely in its white blanket and the trees didn’t look quite so bare.

The sheep out back didn’t appear too fussed as they huddled closer together throughout the week and just got on with it. They seemed happy enough with the supplementary feeds. I went out and regularly chipped the sheeted ice from their troth so that they had water too.

The boy’s usual enthusiasm for snow lasted a day or so, and then they too were content in seeing it out from the inside rather than out.

The wood burners came into their own during the cold snap, heating the farm house in a way that only natural fire does. The smell of burning logs releasing happiness into an otherwise shit month.

Cosy was the word, frustrated and confined were two others.

Still, just before the onset of the snowfall I had help from Trevor, a friend to remove the remaining beech hedges from the vegetable plot.

Then by the second weekend and no thaw in sight we braved it into the garden and got to work winter pruning the apple and pear trees. This hadn't been done for a couple of years and most likely would not have got done again this year had I been able to continue the in the vegetable patch. So not a complete loss! Steve, Ellie and I cut dragged and burned what we could. I am happy with the openness of the trees we managed to do and considerable height has been removed from the youngest of them which should keep it in good shape for a while to come.

The following few days after that brought milder weather and light rains. With it so did the snow quickly disappear.

Problem was that the garden looked a right old mess. I had been putting off de-wintering the borders for so long and the look a mess. There are a few plants and bulbs attempting to put on their first signs of life. So Last Saturday I cleared out four of the beds creating a ridiculously large pile for the compost before getting into the vegetable patch for the last hour.

With the beech hedges gone I decided it was probably a good idea to get the rhubarb back in as it had been hanging about since I lifted it in November. The two old clumps were divided into several clumps. Each had a nice sized hole dug, a spade of sand, and another of pea shingle and some compost. It didn’t take long to do.

I then cut all the autumn fruiting raspberries down to the ground. Dug up and replanted all the strawberry plants, ever so slightly pruned the gooseberry but left the blackcurrant bushes.
Everything was then weeded and mulched with a few inches of compost. I was really chuffed to see that one of the gooseberries had layered in two locations. Layering is where the plant stems touch the ground and take root. I have two free accidental but welcome plants.


The Sheep were transported for lambing yesterday, they wont be back for a while which gives the meadows a chance to recover. There’s a tonne of sheep crap to collect for the compost mountain. Not my favourite job in the world but Ill takes picking up sheep crap for the compost pile to watching Eastenders or Hollyoaks any day of the week.

Redesigning the vetetable garden from scratch

Im a big fan of raised beds, you can bring in the ideal soil/aggregate conditions to grow the full range of vegetables which might be very difficult to do if you are relying on the soil that you inherit. The other benefits include not compacting the soil by not walking over them. You should make the width of your raised beds such a distance so that you can reach the centre comfortably from either side without having to climb into them to do so. Industrious people have suggested a width of four feet is ideal. They can also save a huge amount of effort by addopting the no dig approach. If you add clean topsoil, compost and possibly vermiculite then the properties of your soild be be a rich, water retentive, stone free medium. You may have to do the odd bit of weeding from the odd weed seed that is present in the upper layers of the medium. But once you have dealt with those you should keep well on top of infestations that can occur everytime you dig your soil over on a traditional level soil approach. Raised beds also have the added advantage of warming your medium faster which means that you can often steal a few extra weeks at the beginning and end of each season. The final biggy is that you can do away with rows and follow an instensive planting approach such as square foot gardening which I will cover in more detail another time.

The downside to raised beds are that the medium can dry out a lot faster because the drainage is much better than traditional method's. However watering efforts can still be managable by applying a decent mulch whilst sufficient moisture is trapped in the medium and you add water retaining houmous/compost and or vermiculite each season to assist in reducing the amount that you would need to water your beds.

The other is the initial cost of the project. I had gone down to the local wood merchents and nearly gave up on the whole idea of raised bed gardening altogether when I was quoted several hundred pounds for the timbers, then there was the paving which would have cost another twelve hundred and the local garden centres charge about seven pounds for a hundred litres of compost which would had set me back a small fortune considering I estimated That I would need in the region of twenty two tonnes of compost/topsoil to do the job properly.

So I tried other means and couldnt beleive my luck when I won all the paving I needed for just sixty pounds on ebay. I also found a local salvage firm who sold me over six hundred feet of only slightly used scaffolding for just two hundred pounds. Finally after contacting a company that made their own compost in Bedford they kindly put me in touch with our local commercial composting initiative who we able to offer topsoil/compost mixed to any cocktail and gradient for fifteen pounds a tonne. I also had to buy a few tonnes of builders sand to lay the paving on. All in all I have spent less than seven hundred pounds to get hold of all the materials for this project which

There was a lot of "dead space" that was taken up with pea shingled paths that I thought to myself I really didn't need. The paths here are one and a half feet (forty five centimetres). Enough to get a barrow down and comfortable single file up and down.

The raised beds are four and a half feet wide by fifty two feet. Thats a lot of ground to plant up.

Hoping to grub out the remaining beech hedges and get the rhubarb in before the ground freezes up. I dont usually feel the cold but boy its brass monkeys out side for the moment and it looks like we are due a three week snap.