I recently Confronted the State of the Veg Patch, after planting a load of seedlings out in May (I waited WEEKS for the frost to clear, finally got a few nights that were several degrees above freezing, planted them all out in a great rush, and then the frost came back for one night only and set the courgettes and beans back by weeks) and then neglecting them for (checks notes) nearly two months.
Everything shot up in June, including the weeds. The brassicas (kale, cabbage, kohlrabi, broccoli) had a brief moment of glory before being absolutely destroyed by slugs. I didn't get to harvest any of them. Got an early crop of radishes, then the rest have disappeared under the weeds and are probably powdery and huge now. The Asian greens (pak choi and tatsoi) looked promising for a couple of weeks but then bolted before I had a change to harvest them, so I missed them entirely. Almost all the dwarf bean seedlings died, and the ones I planted direct never germinated. But the climbing beans and courgettes have finally recovered from their frost shock and are doing well. I lost two courgette plants out of six, and the other four are getting big now. We've got the first yellow courgette flowers and the first purple climbing bean flowers (French Blauhilde), and the beans have reached the top of the frame. Carrots, spinach, beetroot, chard and lettuces are flourishing, totally overcrowded amid thickets of weeds and increasingly full of holes due to slugs.
I did a nematodes treatment mid-May after noticing the brassica destruction, which kept the slugs at bay for six weeks, but a week or two ago it wore off and they started making a comeback. So actually I didn't quite neglect the veg patch for 2 months, but all my available gardening time was taken up with mowing the nettles back, building the bean frame, keeping it watered and administering the nematodes treatment.
A couple of weeks ago I attacked the less crowded end of the patch with a rake for some large-scale weeding, while looking after E. It was a bit tricky to manage with childcare: the nettles were making a resurgence and E got stung a couple of times, and although they were enthusiastic about weeding, they also started getting enthusiastic about pulling leaves off bean plants. Still, I kept them engaged with my process and talked them through it, and they were really interested and adorable. I told them that the plants need their leaves to eat the sunlight, and explained about the difference between food plants that are good for us to eat, and weeds which are good to put in the compost to make soil. We found a volunteer lettuce that had self-seeded among the weeds, and E adopted it as a Food Plant. I said they could pull a leaf off to eat, so they tore it into tiny shreds and carefully placed a tiny piece of lettuce on each bean leaf "for the beans to eat so they'll grow big and tall". (heart eyes cry emoji)
I wanted to finish the weeding, but in order for E to be able to share the space, my next priority was to take care of the nettle situation. The veg patch is a deer-fenced area about, I don't know, five metres square? it has paved path around the edges, and the whole thing was hummocky grass and bramble and nettle when we started. We took the turf off two thirds of it, dug it over and dug in a bunch of compost and mulch and blood and bone, and that's where my veggies are planted. The other third, at the back behind the bean frame, remains hummocky grass and nettles. From there nettles spread amongst the rest of the plants and are unfriendly to toddlers, which makes my plan of Gardening With Child a bit tricky. I'd mowed them back once already, but now they were knee height again.
So on Sunday while Leo was in the garden and E was bobbining around between the two of us, I mowed them back again. Before doing this I had to lift up the planks I'd put down as a nettleproof walkway/buffer zone alongside the edge of the beans, under which I discovered Many Slugs. I found an empty kitchen compost caddy with a lid, filled it half with water and used it as a Goodbye Slug dropzone.
I also found a TOAD. It was hiding under a plank being very dry and brown and flat, pretending to be the ground. I did not want to mow it, so I went to scoop it up, and it jumped into the veg patch. That was probably a fine toad spot, but I was planning to weed it and didn't want to accidentally tread on the toad or stab it with a fork, so I got hold of it and put it in a tray that had a bit of rainwater in the bottom in the shade, for E to look at. E brought it a handful of grass, which was ignored, and a stone, which was sat on. After the toad had been admired and had tried to jump out of the water table a few times, I took pity on it and we took it round to the back of the garden where there are still very tall wild grasses, nettles and brambles, and released it in the shade where there was lots of tall foliage. It was a good toad. I hope it thrives.
So anyway, I mowed the nettles and then spent a happy afternoon covering the mowed nettles-and-grass patch with mulch to slow down regrowth and prepare it for planting next year. Forking grass cuttings off the top of the compost heap and wheelbarrowing them to the veg patch and spreading them out with a rake made my body feel so good: sweaty and exercised and strong. It was cloudy, but warm enough I took my long sleeved t-shirt off and went topless under my dungarees. My arms and shoulders felt muscular; I felt very sexually attractive.
Then I made a plan:
- Weed the rest of the patch
- Lay down the Marvellous Trickle Hose (!!!!) that Leo got me for my birthday
- Mulch the whole patch around the crop plants to slow weed growth
- Plant more plants in the spaces (but how does that work with the mulch)
- ???
I've recently heard of a thing called No Dig Gardening where you mulch, and it fertilises the soil, and then you plant and mulch more and the plants grow through the mulch, and you keep on adding more mulch without ever having to dig into the ground. It sounds good, particularly given how much I enjoyed the physical activity of forking and lifting and moving and spreading (much better for my back than crouching and weeding). But I'm not sure how it works yet. I think I need to watch some youtube videos.
What with going out to the farm park on Sunday morning and spending the afternoon in the garden, I spent the whole day outdoors. It was really good for me! I'd been so fatigued and exhausted and flat the day before, and so I very much enjoyed the sense of vitality and vigour I felt during the gardening session. I don't get to feel this good every day, I like it. It was one of those idyllic days: the sort of day I yearned for when I was in my twenties. Child and animals and gardening and homemade food. The good life.
My initial plan was to garden during my parenting time, but it's been a struggle - the nettles are inhospitable, although less so now, and it's almost impossible to stop E pulling leaves off the crop plants, and they get bored quickly if they can't participate. Now that I'm back into the patch I'm really motivated to stay into it, and I'm reassessing my priorities. It makes me feel so good I think it makes sense to start doing it in my discretionary time when we have childcare support, time I would otherwise spend working or having my adult relationships. Even just half an hour on each childcare day it's not raining. It's good exercise (and I'm not making time for Tai Chi at the moment, so anything that gets me moving is good) and way cheaper than therapy (which I am also doing once a week, but more self-care is good, and gardening is good for different stuff anyway, I think).
Since then I've got out there twice. The first time I weeded under the beans, which was slow fiddly going and took 45 minutes without making much of a dent in the total patch. Today my new organic pet-and-child-safe slug pellets arrived (nemotodes were totally sold out), so I went out and distributed them on the weeded bits. I hadn't realised it when I bought them, but they're a barrier-around-the-base-of-your-plants thing, not a "treat the whole area" thing, so it only works to put them around plants where I've weeded, otherwise they'll get dug in when I weed and go to waste. I did another chunk of weeding, prioritising the chard which is getting chomped the most. Checked all the chard plants and pulled a bunch more slugs out by hand. The bucket of pellets did the beans and the chard I'd just weeded, which was about a quarter of the chard in total, and that was it. So I need to buy another couple of buckets of pellets, and weed the rest of the patch and put the pellets down, and then we can play with hoses and mulch, and
then we can see about planting more things. Meanwhile we've eaten fresh chard every day this week, and when I was weeding I saw that the carrots and beetroot look pretty much ready to harvest.
I am glad to be back in the veg patch. It was stressful seeing how choked it was with weeds, and seeing crops flourish and then get got by pests before I could harvest them. It's been a bit of a race against the slugs to eat the chard before they do, but I've been grateful for the incentive to get out there regularly, and it's lovely gradually reclaiming it from chaos and seeing that there is food under there after all.
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