Creating a Kitchen Garden

The cottage garden proved to be a success, despite losing a few crops to some pesky squirrels, the only negative was the location. Being at the bottom of the garden, maybe 30m down from the house, and down being the operative word, meant that maintenance and harvesting wasn't the most convenient. 

Following our loft conversion, we had a pile of removed rafters floating around the garden.  We had thought of various uses for these rafters during the year they'd been sitting around, but nothing had yet materialised.

One idea was to relocate the veggies from the bottom of the garden to the top, so they were closer to the kitchen, thus easier to manage, more convenient and very much 'in sight in mind', rather than forgotten.

As lockdown was now fully set in due to CoVid-19, this design process became more of a focus of attention, keeping me busy and my mind occupied, outside of home schooling.

We came up with with a basic idea of layout and I set about structuring the beds with the rafters available, while retaining some garden space around the beds rather than consuming the whole top area of garden, and making the most of the sun cover.

Having looked through a couple of books, and googling 'companion planting', I came up with a rough plan for what I would plant and where, my next issue was sourcing seeds.  Garden centres were now closed, Amazon sold out and some websites with hour long queues, I eventually found some and got them ordered and eagerly awaited their arrival.

In the meantime, the beds were levelled and set.  We worked from the top bed down, attaching the back rafters first to the fence posts and levelling them, then making the sides and front level from there.  As the garden is slightly sloping, the top end of each rafter had to be dug down whereas the bottom end sat on the ground, and each bed was lower than the one above it.  The blueberries needed a more acidic soil, so we built a smaller bed within a bed for them, to contain that soil.

With lockdown properly set in, sadly a delivery of soil was not an option, and by now my propagator was full of sprouting seeds and needed planting.  We dug up the turf and relocated it further down the garden, which was a gravitationally preferable task to the next one, that involved relocating the fertile soil from the bottom of the garden to the top, and sieving it before tipping it in.

The finished product looks great and is a huge improvement over our previous beds.  We've noticed that we check on everything much more regularly, and watering and harvesting is much more convenient.  It is quite therapeutic to sit outside the back door tending to the plants, and this has now become a much improved kitchen garden.