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Planting Our First Crop of Potatoes

Sunday, April 18th, 2010

planting_chitted_potatoesFinally today we were planted our first crop of vegetables in our rabbit proof vegetable patch! How exciting is that!! :) Already looking forward to eating the results!

We have got a number of varieties to plant including Maris Piper and King Edwards. We are also going to plant the non-raised beds with pots to help break up the soil and help keep the weeds down. I think we counted 86 seed potatoes in total…so I think we shall be setting up a road-side stall with ‘Waterloo Farm Potatoes’ later in the year! ;)

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British Sugar Supplies Raised Beds Top Soil

Sunday, April 18th, 2010
British Sugar Top Soil

British Sugar Top Soil

Having made the raised beds we now needed to fill them up, easy you might think! However, using a number of online topsoil calculators we discovered that to fill all 10 of our raised beds we would need over 20 tons … eeekk!

After looking around at local Norfolk topsoil suppliers we realised that a delivered ‘per ton’ price was coming out at over £70, so doing the maths this was going to cost over £1,400!!! However, a useful friend recommended that we contact British Sugar. British Sugar you might ask?! Well, every year they have a surplus of top grade arable land topsoil produced as a by-product of the sugar beet production process.

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Making the Raised Beds

Thursday, April 8th, 2010

Large Raised Bed (pre-dropping)

Large Raised Bed (pre-dropping)

Having marked out the vegetable patch and sussed out that it would all fit (we even re-configured the layout to get a few more beds in) we have started to make our raised beds. Fortunately we have an ‘old-fashioned’ wood yard up the road where we sourced our pressure-treated wood.

We ordered 12 ft x 6in (3.6m x 15cm)  lengths, which meant that when we cut those into thirds we could use the lenghts for the end panels. For 2010 we are only planning to make 2 large and the 2 small (wedge shaped) raised beds. So the large beds will be 3.6m long, by 1.2m wide by 30cm high and there will eventually be 8 in total!

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Laying Out the Vegetable Patch

Tuesday, April 6th, 2010

So, the rabbit-proof fencing has been finished and we have been making progress on the vegetable patch, hoping to plant our first crops in time for this year! I have spent more hours than I care to confess to in designing the layout of the veg patch, drawing scale plans of the raised beds and making a detailed crop rotation plan for the patch once it is fully established (more on that another time!). I guess all that makes me a little bit ’sad’ but I have really enjoyed it, and as the saying goes, it’s all in the preparation! (more…)

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How the Daffodils Turned Out!!

Wednesday, March 31st, 2010

You may recall  I planted several hundred daffodil bulbs around the garden last Autumn which had been kindly donated by some friends. In particular I planted loads in our front bed (read about it here) hoping to have a great Springtime display. Despite the fact that the front bed has, at times, been like a quagmire over the winter (sooooo wet and boggy), the daffs have done surprisingly well and have indeed treated us to a really lovely view for several weeks. There are some that need digging up and replanting as they came up blind, but all-in-all they were a great success, so many thanks to Kate and Andrew for the sackful on bulbs!

Front Bed March 2010

Front Bed March 2010

Daffs close up

Daffs close up

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