Work in progress - Garden Update

It’s been a busy few weeks and we're starting to get the garden ready for spring planting; M made some raised beds a week or so ago from some (found) timbers - i.e. we raided the neighbours skip and rescued some old shelves and bits of wood - which he made into two raised beds, and he also wove a beautiful support frame - for tomatoes and beans - from some bamboo we had left over from last year. 

Before

After

I have quite an ambitious list of vegetables to seed this year, but we’re really excited about getting some staples from this year’s crop. We plan on growing potatoes, onions, carrots, garlic, tomatoes as well as courgette, beetroot, lettuce, sweet peppers, strawberries, raspberries, peas and beans. I’ve started mapping out my seedling planting plan, and so far, I've seeded onions – in seed trays on the windowsill in the kitchen –sweet orange peppers, lettuce and I planted garlic cloves - from organic (already sprouted, handy!) garlic from our local greengrocer - and I have a couple of potatoes “chitting” on the windowsill in the kitchen, all looking good so far!

Small glasshouse, which has now been dismantled to add more space, alongside new raised bed - old Cheyenne bush pumpkin patch

Basic garden plan - still working out where everything is going to go!

garlic, lettuce and onions

Dual purpose (up-cycled) shelf - great for hanging saucepans and very handy for stating off sweet orange pepper seeds

Up-cycled/rescued shelves - remade into a raised box for strawberries/herbs

Unfortunately, as the kitty has been making good use of the garden beds over the winter, we will have to dig out the top layer of soil, replace it with topsoil, dig in some well rotted manure and compost and then immediately cover the beds with netting to stop her digging it up again *sigh

It’s been such a mild winter so far (and I hope I haven’t just jinxed it!) but I can’t wait for Spring to get sprung, I’m ready for some seedlings and blossoms now!

Guerrilla Gardening Perth

October/November '11 - March/April '12 - Perth WA

Although we had a very small patio-ed yard behind our little "two up, two down" townhouse in Perth, there wasn't much earth that we could use for planting.

M built some raised beds in patches of the yard where there weren't any bricks - using other bricks that we'd found on walks around the neighbourhood (skip-diving) - and we managed to grow some (tiny) vegetables and a huge watermelon plant...no melons ever appeared through, I think the roots may have been too confined in the small space, the plant really flourished though and it had small yellow flowers for about a month of Summer.

We noticed the area behind the townhouse - just behind our parking bay - seemed to be all scrub and weedy wasteland, it was pretty much out of sight from the path and we were the only people (apart from friends) who came up that way..... and we realised we could reclaim a patch of it and extend our small garden, it was close enough to water and pretty much hidden from view 

Guerrilla Garden - somewhere in Mount Lawley

cherry tomatoes, carrots, beetroot, butternut squash, courgette

We started by clearing the weeds and assessing the soil - mostly sandy - and as the area was in a suntrap with little shade, it got really hot up there, hmmmmm...

We weren't deterred and within a week or two - after weeding and digging some bags of manure compost through the sand - we'd planted some cherry tomatoes, potatoes (from sprouting potatoes we had in the kitchen), beetroot, onions as well as baby sweetcorn, butternut squash and a courgette. This small space was the biggest space I'd ever had for a garden and our local garden centre had a nice selection of seedlings and seeds - carrots and peas we grew from seed and the rest of our experimental seedlings were mostly vegetables that we liked the sound of and really wanted to try

The tomatoes really took off in the Summer sun and in a matter of weeks they were 3ft tall and still growing, the butternut squash spread itself liberally across the small patch we'd cleared and started wandering down the slope towards the car bay. 

                  

After a slow start, our potatoes did well for a few weeks - we had about six plants in total, from a variety of potatoes - but they got ravaged by a infestation of black furry caterpillars that devoured chunks of the plants overnight. I caught and disposed of as many of the caterpillars as I could, but unfortunately a lot of the plants died and after harvesting, we ended up with a small selection of baby potatoes, just enough for a meal for two

Harvest

We ended up with a nice selection of (small) vegetables; beetroot, carrots, lots of cherry tomatoes, potatoes and a few baby sweetcorn. The courgette flowered but didn't produce any fruit and the butternut squash had lots of beautiful yellow flowers, but no fruit either... I think the full sun combined with the poor nutrient sandy soil was just too much for the plants.

Baby carrots and beetroot

Fantastic guerrilla gardening website here