I wanted to show you how my front garden has developed over the past growing season. As you can see from this photo from my previous blog the garden has really changed and matured since I created it just 7 months ago.
Back in April when planting out all the perennial fruit and vegetable plants, I spaced them out a lot to give them room to grow, thinking that I’d be planting in-between them later in the season with some annual veg.
What ended up happening is that I only ended up planting out the Rainbow Chard (in the sunniest spot near the front of the garden) and nothing else. This was because we’d discovered that we had a Bindweed problem and wanted to get on top of that before planting anything else.
When I observed the garden last year, I noticed a very small amount of Bindweed, but nothing much to worry about – or so I thought! I believed that the mulch I was putting down over the whole garden would be enough to suppress and perennial weeds, but I was wrong. In fact the Bindweed spread it’s root system under the mulch until it found a way up through the mulch and started to spread rapidly through the garden, which gave us a lot of extra work!
What I could have done differently
I could have mulched the whole garden for a whole season, so as to kill the perennial roots system through the Winter before I started planting out. This would have been ideal, but it hadn’t been possible because I wasn’t well enough to do anything to the garden until I did.
We had a lot of cats using our newly planted space as a giant toilet. I could have prepared the beds with sharp sticks to deter them. But this resolved itself over time as the plants spread and covered up the bare soil, so the cats gave up using it so much.
Silver linings
We had to do a lot of pulling up of Bindweed throughout the growing season and it was quite time consuming (but not actually that bad). It gave me an opportunity to spend time gardening there and chatting to neighbours as they passed me by about what I was growing. It actually provided a great opportunity for passing on the word about edible gardens and that it was possible to create them in the front garden and not just on an allotment. I enjoyed cutting down the large chard leaves and giving them away to children to take home for dinner.
Another positive outcome was that because I ended up leaving a lot of space between plants, they all had plenty of room to grow and thrive, so that by the Autumn we had a very healthy-looking green garden.
I was pleased that the Rhubarb, although it was slow to start growing (at one point I thought we might even have to replace it), eventually grew absolutely massive and healthy-looking.
The Asparagus looked tall and healthy and grew massively, and by Autumn it turned a beautiful shade of rusty yellow before I cut it back. The strawberries seemed to thrive underneath them, so my polyculture seemed to work.
The Peppermint grew and spread a great deal and smelled lovely, and I was able to harvest quite a lot for herbal teas.
The Silver Birch seemed to settle in well and grew it’s new white bark. It’s so attractive. And the black current bush underneath but out a lot of new growth, so next year I hope to harvest some currants.
I had lots of positive comments from all the passers by who stopped for a chat, so that was also a nice yield. All in all, I’m very happy with the first season of my new front garden.
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2 Comments
our garden looks lovely. I remember reading when you first did it. You have my sympathy with the bind weed – that, couch grass & horse tail are no respecters of mulch or weed membrane! Keep pulling, it may yet give up.
Thanks Ann! Yes I’ll keep pulling and hope for the best!