Spring Planting regime

A few friends came round the other day. We decided to get together and try to organise the joint planting of the vegetable seeds in a slightly centralised fashion. We jointly bought the seeds from a variety of catalogues. I have ordered a load of seed trays. The poly tunnel has just been erected. The infrastructure for a watering system is being planned. We are nearly ready to go...

Having looked through the seed catalogues it seems clear that we should be able to harvest cabbages all year round. We should be able to get carrots ready to eat for 10 months of the year. We should be able to grow salad crops to keep us going from New year to Christmas.

Last year we did not do it quite right. I was campaigning for the local council elections during March, April and May. The old wooden framed greenhouse gave up the ghost at Easter. (I have chopped this up and made parts of it into an excellent coldframe.) Very little got planted last year, and what did all ripened in August when we were on holiday.

This year I am determined to do better.
I have a new vegetable patch, a new poly tunnel, a new watering system and a new attitude.

It should be a better year all round!!

Well! Well! Well.

When we moved here, we had to replant the garden from scratch. We put in many new trees, a new vegetable patch, a green house and several flower beds. All the work would have come to nothing, had we not been able to water the vegatables, the saplings and tender plants sufficiently over the summer and until they became established. Our outside tap is a bit of a joke. It takes nearly 4 hours to fill the water butt, so you can imagine it is of no use for watering the garden.
Luckily we have an old brick lined well, with an old hand pump (which looks nice but does not work). Heaven only knows when it was dug, but it is 75 feet deep. When we arrived it had 12 feet of water standing in the bottom.
I purchased a borehole pump and plumbed it and wired it in and "Hey Presto" there was a veritable fountain spraying forth, and at some pressure too. The water butt is now filled in ten minutes (it is an IBC container and holds 1000 litres).
The water level in the well hardly dropped at all the first summer. Nor did it during the winter or spring or the following summer of 2003. But come September 2003, the well was dry. It was not a serious problem for the winter months, other than we could not easily wash the cars. However watering the next summer was murderous. No rain (to speak of) fell that summer or autumn and in fact the well has been dry until about January 2007.
This winter has been wetter than the last few. We live in a chalk valley, but the hills behind us are covered with clay. When there are more than a few millimeters of rain, puddles form and then run off down the valley. When the stream meets the chalk it starts to sink in to it. (It is a nationally important aquifer). When the chalk begins to get saturated, it flows down the valley and eventually it comes down what we have always called "The Gallops" (but what previous inhabitants have called "The Water Meadows").
The water table in the chalk has been rising all winter and in December it reached the base of the well. In the last 2 months has come 10 feet up it. Enough free water for the whole of next summer I hope!

I need to mow the grass again.
After a really hot July, when I did no mowing for 4 weeks in a row (due to the drought conditions and hot sunshine), August has been very wet.
It is like spring again! The grass is growing in that bright epidote green again. It looks great...but I have had to mow it 4 times in 8 days to get it back under control. We heard from the next door neighbour, on our return from holiday, that it rained every day while we were away!
Now it is September. Spring and Autumn seem to have joined together. Whatever next?

The dry old vegetable patch

I have got to move the vegetable patch shortly.
After three years of watering the growing vegetables every other day, I have eventually worked out that the large tree nearby is using all the water. It is a Lepidodendron Gigantium or Giant Redwood.
When digging up some potatos I saw a cluser of new tree roots that have appeared and now they are everywhere. A couple of days ago, an inch and a half of rain fell and it soaked well into the ground. I dug some potatos a day or two later and found the top 3 inches damp and then it was dry as a bone lower down. These little roots cleaarly suck the water straight out of the ground.
Mind you, the tree is a Wellingtonia and is about 80' high. Someone told me they use about 2500 gallons of water a day in summer. No wonder the vegetable patch is dry, and the pootatos are never larger than a tangerine.

The new vegetable patch is going to be about 25 yards away, but it is in a direct line away from that huge tree. I have killed the grass . I did not do this the last time, and spent the next 3 years pulling tufts of grass out from between the vegetables.
The new patch is also close to an old cow shed, so I can use the rainwater off the roof to do much of the watering.
I have put a 1000 litre IBC container under one end of the gutter and it fills with a very rustic tea coloured liquid after every rain storm. I think the colour leaches out of the moss that is growing on the corrugated roof. Either that, or there are some bugs doing something unspeakable in the water!
The next job is to scape the old grass off and level the site. I will ask John, the JCB driver , to do this when he comes over to dig some other holes that we need.

Then I need to get the edges in. I am going to use old railway sleepers. I have some round the old veg patch and will shift them when I feel I need some excercise. Actually it is not too difficult with a large wheel barrow. I bought these some time ago. Now you can not buy sleepers that have been treated with creosote (i.e. nearly all sleepers). You have to buy fresh ones which are twice the price.