A couple of months in and I keep encountering new types of sessions in my post: my first raised bed party, the first of our Grow Your Own courses and my first meet up with the steering group. That’s what I call interesting variety in a job!
Sow and Grow was the focus of our first session down at Elgin Gardenshare on Forteath Avenue last Saturday. In no time at all we converted an empty 3 metre by 3 metre square of soil to six wee beds with loads of different veggies and simple woodchip paths in between.
We showed how easy it is to implement a simple crop rotation – for brassicas, legumes, aliums, roots, squashes and some salad crops thrown in for good measure. In a crop rotation we move around the group of crops in a particular area of our garden plot each year – this ensures healthy plants as it minimises the risk of diseases that attack certain crops e.g. potato blight and clubroot on brassicas, from building up in the soil. Also, each type of plant uses different nutrients and some – the fantastic legumes – actually add nitrogen based nutrients to the soil from the atmosphere. Nature ain’t half clever.
Brassicas include cabbage, broccoli, kale and cauliflower; legumes are peas and beans; aliums include onions, leeks and garlic. Roots are – as the name suggests -those we eat the roots of, such as carrot, beetroot, parsnips and tatties. Also spinach and chard are in this family. Tatties often have their own place in the rotation as we want to allow space for lots of them. The squash family includes courgettes, pumpkins and summer squash. Crop rotation with salads such as lettuce, rocket and (my favourite) the oriental greens is less important, you can even stick them in before and after your main crop.
Participants learnt some good techniques for sowing seeds and planting out wee plants into their final destination. We built structures to support the plants and covered plants with netting where needed. And for good measure we put tatties into the adjoining square of ground, just digging the weeds and grass into the trenches so as to add some lovely nitrogen into the soil and avoid weeding first – so quick and easy.
We finished off by planting up a Belfast sink with a selection of Mediterranean type herbs, making sure we mixed a good bit of gravel in with our lovely peat free compost to aid the drainage.
Last week I joined in my first raised bed party with the Elliot family – we built one of our metre squared beds made from decking and filled it with a variety of plants and seeds, finishing off with netting it from the cheeky birds; even me snapping one of the willow hoops didn’t spoil things – a roll of tape is always good thing for a gardener to have to hand for such moments! A mint filled welly also joined in the fun.
And a return to Action for Children yesterday – assembling two raised beds with the kids – to be filled and planted next time – before carrying out some evaluations with them to get a taste of how they’re finding the sessions.
I’ll keep putting in a few tips or ideas of my own into the blog – but of course there are as many opinions about gardening as there are gardeners… if you have any good tips you’d like to share please do get in touch.
The second Grow Your Own session is this Saturday 27 June 10am at Forteath Avenue – focusing on raised beds. Worth getting out of bed for!
