And our New Year project is finally finished!!

And finally we’ve finished our new year project! When we moved in, our orchard was surrounded by high nettles and brambles, blocking out the view up the Yarty Valley and stinging you every time you walked past. Last year we started cutting back stretches of the vegetation to build new vegetable beds – starting with a test bed for potatoes and squashes, and then making an asparagus bed out of the old greenhouse base sleepers.  

In the autumn we made a start on a new part of the bramble hedge that we’d not really touched, cutting back the weeds and making the most of a weekend with a rotovator to clear through all the tangled roots. Then, in January we started digging the area up to build the new bed. The heavy clay and never-ending stones made it much harder than we expected it to be. The wet and cold weather didn’t really help either – the last thing we wanted to do was spend all day outside digging, with the clay soil sticking to our boots and picking up all the gravel from the paths around the house.

But we had a deadline to get the bed built. We’d inherited a huge cultivated blackberry plant that was planted against one of our derelict barns, and needed to be moved before we had our trial pits dug (to check for foundations under the various barn walls) and before we rebuilt the barn itself. We’d decided to include an arch in our new vegetable bed to trail the blackberry plant over, but hadn’t appreciated quite how hard it would be to dig out a large established plant! Especially as we found a load of old farming machinery buried under the plant that had been covered with a sheet of metal to minimise the amount of soil required… it was slightly unnerving before we knew this – digging and feeling the ground bouncing beneath our feet!

Once we’d got the arch in and the blackberry plant moved, our second objective was to create a cold frame within the bed. We’d been given two old windows from a renovation in our neighbouring village, and they fitted perfectly into the vegetable bed frame. They weren’t in the best state though, and it took us a couple of months to restore them, replacing putty, strips of wood, and repainting both sides. Now we’re just waiting for the weather to warm up before we move our seedlings from the conservatory to prepare them for colder outdoor weather.

Our next project is to build a proper vegetable bed in place of our temporary squash & potato bank… we’ve started digging it already but paused to finish off our new bed. Although it’s a bigger area – and stonier – we’re hoping we can complete it in the next month before the potatoes need planting. Always good to have a goal, we guess!