This afternoon, J and I went out to continue preparing the front yard veggie bed. Actually, I prepared the garden while J dug holes with her hands and unintentionally buried the seedlings that we planted during the week.
The extensive roots of the carpet roses are still right throughout the bed, so preparing the soil requires some heavy work with the mattock, then adding cow manure and mulch before planting. I’m generally disinclined to do hard manual labour, preferring instead to lean on my shovel while P does the hard stuff. We helped his brother move house this morning, so gardening in the afternoon wasn’t a popular suggestion. I think that J only agreed to help because the alternative was a nap.
I’m conscious that my veggie bed in the very front of the front yard is very much on display, and I’m very keen to make it look attractive. I hope to plant some flowers through the bed to attract bees and make it pretty, but my main strategy for the garden is just to pack it so full that it’s overflowing with greenery. I figure that a teeming-full garden bed with reasonable variety within it must look ok.
So after today I have prepared half of the bed – 5 square metres – and planted with the following:
- Silverbeet
- Lettuce (little gem)
- Baby Carrots
- Rocket
- Leeks
- Cauliflower
- Broccoli
- Cabbage ‘Golden Acre’
- Mini wombok cabbage
- English Spinach ‘Winter Giant’
- Brussels Sprouts ‘Long Island Improved’
- Red (Spanish) Onion
- Brown Onion
- Golden Shallots
- Turnip
- Swede
- Dill
- Coriander (slowbolt)
- Continental parsley
- Chinese broccoli
Still to go are the legumes – broad beans, greenfeast peas, sugar snap peas and other things that I can fit in front of those.
I hope to get the rest of the bed cleared out, prepared and planted this coming week so I don’t have an obvious difference between the two sides.
500m2 in Sydney 