Saturday 15 March 2014

THE Bed!

Regular readers may remember my failed attempt to grow Butternut Squash last year. One of our problems in growing anything, is that the large poplar trees surrounding the garden suck all the goodness out of the soil. We are forever digging up roots in the potager... Those trees will have to go...

In order to prove this I have created a special bed... It was going to be a raised bed, but as that meant buying timber, instead I dug a hole...

It was then lined with some strong visqueen and into this went a good layer of leaf mould covered with a layer of soil. Yes, I did put some small holes through for drainage...

This was then covered with a good layer of our home produced compost together with a little general purpose fertiliser...

Then the secret ingredient... "Chicken Sh1t"

Then more soil...

and with a top dressing and a little more general purpose fertiliser... It finally looks like this...

The chicken whisperer 'Elizabeth' has been training the chickens to do more 'secret ingredient' between the posts... Not a lot of success though!!

It will be planted with a more squash and perhaps some other test veggies... Watch this space!


3 comments:

Jean said...

Looks like a lot of hard work........
I'm sure it will be worth it!!

Tim said...

Fine so far...
It now needs mounding up...
with the accumulated muck you've been gathering in "The Hole" and some more chickin' pooo and some soil...
50:10:40 ratio will be good...
and then mulch it with your first lots of mowings and plant through those.
It needs to be 25 to 30 centipedes higher...
And put a band of mowings round the bed for the squash to ramble across.

Colin and Elizabeth said...

Thanks Tim... will raise it up!! C