Progress in The Kitchen Garden!

Wow!!

We have been so busy in the garden this past month and the changes are amazing!

I have removed the old trellises held in place by star pickets (only just visible to the far left in the pic below) with the aid of the neighbours' star picket remover (didn't know there was such a thing up to that point!).

We have also filled the kitchen garden with new garden beds and planted them out, so finally we have:

The bean teepee with 2 different types of beans- Dutchdry Pole and Sex Without Strings

In the far side bed:
- a herb garden containing stevia, peppermint, curry plant, thyme, rosemary, continental parsley and an old rhubarb plant that has survived from the last time this was a veggie patch! I have also planted curly parsley and basil seeds and a small Vietnamese mint plant.
- Romanesco broccoli
- Onions
- Broadbeans
- Oregon snow peas
- Dwarf snow peas
- Lettuce
- Strawberries
- Tatsoi
- Tri-colour heritage carrots
- Dwarf rhubarb
- Sugarloaf cabbages
- Garlic
(the parsnips and chives I planted in this bed don't appear to have grown at all, so will have to put something else in there soon).

In Pallet bed 1:
- Carrots, (Danver, Baby and All Seasons)
- Sugarloaf Cabbage
- Leeks
- Parsnips
- Raddishes
- Beetroot (Egyptian and Globe)
- Zucchini Green
- Rhubarb
- Mini Cucumbers

In Pallet bed 2:
- Mini Cucumbers
- Spring Onions
- Parsnips
- Perpetual Spinach
- Zucchini Black Beauty
- Mini Cauliflower
(there is still a small patch for something else in this one too)

In Pallet bed 3:
- Celery
- Mesclun
- Watermelon, Ice Cream
- Rockmelon, Edens Gem

In a large square bed we knocked together we are doing a 3 sisters garden bed with:
- Corn, Golden Bantam
- Beans, Dutchdry Pole and Sex Without Strings
- Pumpkin, Musque de Provence

In a bed along the Western border I planted 2 different types of Asparagus- Sweet Purple and Fat Bastard.

This bed also contains my potato growing experiment, a few Nicola potatoes in an open-ended half drum, which I plan to top up with tyres and mulch as the potatoes grow.

The Northern border was mainly taken up by weeds and the passionfruit vine, which hadn't been pruned in a while (4 years or so)...

So I trimmed it back and cleared the area beneath....

And knocked together another 2 narrow beds with a path down the middle. This bed gets a bit more shade than the others, so I looked up which plants might do OK in partial shade and planted out with:

- Lettuce, Royal Oakleaf

- Broccoli, Green Sprouting

- Cabbage, Red Drumhead

- Broccoli, De Cicco

The garlic down the end here was the first thing I planted and is still doing OK (I think!!).

This is another experiment, with tomatoes.

We have been building a small hothouse for seedlings, but it isn't finished yet and I really wanted to get some tomatoes in the ground, so I planted some seeds and popped a couple of salad containers with holes drilled in them over the top and pegged them down with wire.

In the centre is a bucket with holes drilled around the bottom and the top and filled with compost. The idea is to put water in the bucket and let gravity and the plants look after the watering.

When the seedlings are larger I will remove the covers and put up a circular wire support for the plants, fingers crossed!

I also planted basil and marigold seeds around the edges of the tomato bed.

The Kitchen Garden has also had a kaffir lime bush and some sunflowers added to the South-Western corner.

Looking forward to posting updated photos when everything starts growing!! :)