Six raised beds

As much as we all love the idea of gardening, if your garden space is limited, the soil on your property isn’t great or you simply want gardening to be easier, here’s a seriously perfect solution. Give yourself more room to grow with Vego’s modular raised garden beds. They’re sustainably made, they last decades longer than wood, they’re easy to assemble, and will adapt to your available space, regardless of size, shape, balcony or backyard. And another plus: For something so functional, they’ll look great in your yard.

Talking about my efforts last week to remove violets and ivy from under the apple trees generated an interesting conversation about the weeds whose presence we disliked the most in our gardens.

As I ramble around the garden whilst summer continues to progress towards autumn, I find myself constantly assessing the borders and their contents, making mental decisions on what should be moved and where, and what has outlived its usefulness. Several borders are due an overhaul, with plants removed and split or removed as required, and the soil enriched before they are replaced, but that will have to wait till later in the season. This exercise has made such a difference in other borders, and I have found it well worth doing.

Clematis have done really well here this year, despite a slightly later start for some. C ‘Duchess of Albany’ (above), flowering for the first time, is a real beauty and I welcome her with open arms.

Whether you made a New Year’s resolution to cut your carbon footprint, or the credit crunch is putting pressure on your food budget, now is the perfect time to try growing some of your own vegetables. You don’t need a lot of space, or expensive kit, to get started – and it doesn’t need to take up a lot of your time.

When the sun shone on Saturday morning, and the rain promised to delay until midday, we hatched a plan to build two more of the raised beds in the garden. One half of the garden – 6 beds – was completed last year, leaving 6 more to go. We don’t have space for them all until we take the old shed down, but we found room for two next to Ryan’s workshop.

On Saturday we managed to build the remaining 4 raised beds for the back garden, which is now nicely symmetrical. They’re made from (eco-treated) half sleepers, which are not light – building a raised bed means a lot of heavy lifting. Even so, it was the weather and not the effort involved that has slowed us down. We’d been waiting until the garden dried out!

Over the bank holiday weekend, Ryan and I came to the conclusion that the front gardens aren’t working for us as they are, and came up with a fairly drastic plan to annex one of them into the back garden, in order to provide us with an outdoor dining area. That plan is simmering away in the background, as we work out one or two niggly little details.

Last weekend Ryan and his dad built the first six of my raised beds (ultimately there will be 12 in the garden, giving me a little over 17 square metres of prime planting space). Now they need filling.

Over the last few years there has been increasing interest in unusual edible plants. One of the big advantages in having an allotment or a large garden is that it gives you the space to experiment with new tastes without having to sacrifice any old favourites, but some of the exotic specimens can be very tricky to grow.

Did you sleep well last night? You would not have felt so cosy if your mattress had been infested with bed bugs (Cimex lectularius), an ancient pest that is making a comeback in the modern world, complete with pesticide resistence. Looking for a new solution to this age-old problem, scientists from the Universities of California and Kentucky took their inspiration from reports written in the first half of the twentieth century (sadly not available online) that describe the use of bean leaves (in Eastern Europe) to trap bed bugs so that they can then be destroyed.

It has been rare this winter for free time, spare energy and decent weather to all come at once. Yesterday Ryan and I had a day off in the sunshine, so we made as much progress in the garden as we could (bearing in mind it is still waterlogged!).