Planting Plans For One Person

Sylvan

Thanks silvercharming and harib0uk.:T

Yategirl, how do I find your blog? (and yours haribo)

Yategirl

i wish I knew some teenagers willing to earn a little cash... i have to bribe dh to get help :rolleyes:

my blog is in my profile

Yategirl

http://coopette.com/blog/cardboard-composter will be interesting to read how the cardboard composter experiment goes!

Sylvan

Thanks Yategirl - I enjoyed your blog very much.:j

ceridwen

Hi Yategirl

Went off for a looksee round your blog - and sorta got defeated by the green background. Is there a way I can "change" the background colour from my end just for a look (obviously twouldnt affect the look of it for anyone else!)

Yategirl

am not sure tbh.... i'll see if I can change the colour....

Yategirl

does that help?? or is a different colour better??

Yategirl

http://simple-green-frugal-co-op.blogspot.com/ a post on sq ft gardening.. and more to come

Karmacat

Sylvan wrote: »

:eek:Structural damage sounds terrifying Karmacat.

I *am* terrified, tbh. I literally tend to tiptoe around that leaning wall, which is stupid, I know. Its not tied in to the house wall, and where it joins on hte house, its about seven feet tall.

Are you on clay?

No, well, sort of - chalk and flint, think Sussex Downs. Certainly, if you walk on soil round here in wet weather, it puddles underneath you like clay does.

It would be lovely to see your garden before you clear it and then again as you get it sorted, if you have the time to post pictures.:D

I took some photos in the summer to show my American cousin the job I faced, she was thinking I was exaggerating I'll try and resize and post on here, I don't fancy doing anything too difficult today

If you know any 14-16 year olds who don't have jobs they'd probably be quite happy to clear your patch for £4 an hour (and there you were thinking mine were digging for love:p)

yes I was! :rotfl:

or you could dig out the worst deep-rooted perennial weeds and then cover it with newspaper, thick cardboard and straw or muck (or possibly large stones). You can even plant through the mulch, and by the time it has rotted down completely your weeds ought to be well and truly dead (unless you have ground elder - oh please tell me you don't have ground elder!).

The weeds will be dead unless you leave the mulch so long that more soil and weeds accumulate on top I am a bad, bad person

Will you be wanting to move your garlic later? If not you could just plant them straight into the ground.

Oh, this one, I can answer! The place where the garlic *will* go is still covered over with those 6" of weeds, and I know from long experience that clearing a couple of square feet doesn't hack it - when you have to dig down deep enough to dig up weeds, everything goes all over the place, does for me anyway.

Off to find those photos.

Karmacat

http://www.photobox.co.uk/my/photo?album_id=28926408&photo_id=1549995032

Okay, not sure how this will turn out. But on the left is where I plan to put the veg patch. This overgrown path will form one border to it; the front will be just in front of where I'm standing to take this photo, the border there is a stone terrace wall, with a couple of feet drop, so thats secure. You can see the beginning of that in the photo.

The far side of the patch will be about three feet in - somewhere under there is a natural path that cats and foxes have used, which at one stage I bordered with fallen planks. And the far side will be bordered by running up against the compost bins in any case, but I'll limit it to about three feet at first. Mind you, the spiders that live in that first compost bin are *huge*, and this site is quite shady. Just out of sight on the right of the photo is a big conifer, which I do trim, but is still very big.

Instead, I could move the plot a few feet lower, to what is laughingly called grass:

http://www.photobox.co.uk/my/photo?album_id=28926408&photo_id=1815415754

The plot would be on the left. When I've climbed up the steps to the garden, this is the first bit I get to, apart from the 18" wide terraces directly by the patio, the lower of which has a few herbs in. When I eventually sell, this bit is the only "grassed" area - that doesn't really matter does it, I've realised.

Okay, what do people think? I'm tending more to the lower "grassed" area, actually. One border is the bottom of a stone wall at the back, the rest would be bricks/slates etc.

This looks horrible.