Garden: A New Strawberry Patch

One of the very first things to go into our new fruit cage was a batch of strawberry plants.  The variety was Charlotte and considering that the fruit garden was on an area totally devoid of topsoil, nothing but blue or yellow clay and exposed boulders, they cropped pretty well for the first two seasons.  In the third year the harvest was almost non-existent, or the slugs did very well, and never a runner was sent out by the plants.  My plan was to take new plantlets from runners and establish a bed in the real, actual soil of the vegetable garden, but obviously such was not to be. 

Garden: Planting up a Clay Bank.

Now that we are in that little lull between getting the vegetable plot up and running for the year and starting to deal with the inevitable gluts, I'm taking time out to plant some pretty stuff.  We are slowly turning a bit more of the field into a garden, working from the house out!.

When the house was built in 2009 a steep-sided and unstable bank was left where the platform was cut out, 2m at the highest point, dropping to about a 1m at the lowest.

The bank in early spring 2010

Building a Pond

Any serious wildlife gardener has to have a pond.  And anyway, where better to sit and take stock, look at the view, watch the dragonflies, and have a beer?

Our plot slopes, so we wanted to site the pond near the top of the hill, where the mountain views are least obscured.  When the house was built, a large drainage ditch was dug across the plot to take water away from the construction site.  As this naturally fills with water in wet weather, and is an already partially dug hole, it seemed like the obvious place to choose.

Although we are on very heavy clay, we decided to line the pond with an artificial liner, anyway.  We weren't quite sure how long a traditional clay-lined pond would last with the temperatures in the 30s and low 40s and no rain to keep the clay moist and water resistant!

The drainage ditch running east-west across the plot.

Developing a Glow Worm Colony

Followers of this Blog will know that we have a lot of slugs.  An awful lot of slugs.  And snails, although as these are regularly collected, purged and eaten they are perhaps less of a pest!  We are tyring to make the garden as attractive as possible to any slug munchers out there.

From Clay to Clay Soil in Just Three Years!

It has taken three years to get the vegetable beds in my yellow/blue soil-less ground into state that might loosely be termed a suitable growing medium.  I began with just clay.  No, I lie. I began with clay with boulders.  Rocks that ranged in size from fist to Deux Cheveaux.  Slight exaggeration, but you get the idea.  One of the downsides of a new build on a hillside was that all the topsoil was stripped off and lost as part of the basic groundworks.  Not that there was very much to start with.

The first year of growing was somewhat akin to pastry making.  Add a dollop of well rotted manure to the ground and try to rub it in to the clay.  Fail. That first year was thankfully hot and dry so my clay was more like smash-able concrete than the thick gloppy slick it is today, after the wettest first five months of the year for decades.