Two major garden jobs – done!

I don’t know whether it was the four straight days without rain, or the need to make up for the delay in submitting our planning application, but it feels like we’ve made serious progress since our last blog post. We’d started our long weekend by taking a break and walking to the other side of the valley in crisp sunshine; but got straight back to work early on Saturday, finishing the final repairs and repointing of the kitchen garden wall. We massively underestimated the amount of time this would take – starting by thinking we could get it done in an afternoon, and instead taking four days! At least you can see the difference though – and hopefully the wall will last a good few years now. 

Our other success this weekend was finishing replacing the raised vegetable beds. The space we have is fabulous – a lovely square next to the main farmhouse that catches the sun most of the day. But when we moved in, the raised bed wood was rotting and the beds had started to collapse. While we have the time and space, one of the first jobs we decided to do was to replace all four square beds with eight narrower beds that could easily be reached from the gravel. We must have started this back in August, but other priorities and poor weather meant we never finished. 

So once we’d completed the wall, and with two more days of dry weather, we decided to focus on finishing the beds. Despite a slow start on Sunday, and remembering the summer when it took us a whole weekend to replace one bed, we managed to get both remaining beds dug out, and new ones built and installed in just two days. Clearly a combination of learning new techniques (digging only round the edges) and using muscles we never used in London, has paid off!! This means that we’ve ticked off another two major garden jobs in a single weekend 😊 

Having proper space to grow vegetables is part of what attracted us to Ley Farm – anyone who came to see us in London will have seen vegetables crammed into every spare space in our garden. So it’ll come as little surprise to know that we’ve already planned out each bed with fruit bushes and vegetables (and the odd flower to attract the bees and butterflies) – complete with a post-it note design. Of course it sounds over the top, but we’re so excited to get stuck in! 

Added to which – we’ve just found out our peach and nectarine trees (to replace the dead nectarine tree we inherited) are arriving tomorrow. Our kitchen garden will soon start to look lived-in!!