Guest Blogger ~ Joyknitt

The Veg Patch
by
Joyknitt

You may (or may not) remember from my last guest blog that rog and I moved about 18 months ago away from busy, noisy outer london - sorry, postal address was surrey, but still really outer london - to wiltshire. the house we bought was attractive to us for two main reasons, the first being a really well-built, but unfinished, outbuilding designated originally as a billiard room and now on course to become separate workspace for each of us, and the second being the garden which, while not being too big, is a nicely enclosed blank canvas for us to work wonders on.
we already have plans in hand for the renovation of the outbuilding, so I'll be blogging about that in later months, but for now as we wont really be able to do a great deal in the garden until the builders have been and gone, I have decided to take a small area of our very rough grass (I hesitate to call it a lawn) and turn it into an organic vegetable patch for use this coming season.



I have spent about three or four hours on and off over the past few days out there so far, and have double dug a small area and partially filled it with my own compost, made in a compost bag using kitchen scraps, fruit peelings, leaf rakings etc, and the contents of last years grow bags. I hope, as long as the weather continues to stay dry and not too cold, to have the entire area dug and filled before the end of march, so I can start planting in april.



what really motivated me to get going on this was something really silly. I have been buying organic desiree potatoes grown in bromham, which is only five miles from here, at the weekly market and the other day I read in the newspaper that gordon ramsey recommended that particular variety as the best one for making home-made chips. I found a few potatoes in the bottom of the bag which had gone past being ok to peel and eat, so rather than throw them away (call me cheapskate if you want to) I thought "why not plant them in the garden".



Rog has promised me a greenhouse, but that, again, will have to wait until after the builders have been and gone, so I have started off a few seeds in a seed tray which sits next to a lovely big east facing picture window in the dining room.



So over the next few months I'm hoping to have the opportunity to show you how the veg patch is coming along, and possibly the renovations to the outbuilding as well.