PROJECT: Veg Patches – The First Bed Gets Filled!

For the last few years, ever since I started the task of creating a front garden (from brush and old burning heaps – sigh), whenever the locals stopped to talk to my husband they’d always ask if we were going to plant potatoes or turnip in the area that was being cleared and worked.  I never understood this because I thought it was a blindingly obvious thing that in the front of the house there would be a garden with flowers and shrubs. But, thinking about it that could have been me, the transplant, thinking with my urban hat on.  In the countryside there’s outdoor beauty all around you, so I can see why effort of digging and preparing beds (for flowers and shrubs) might be just as confusing to the locals as this is the same effort needed to dig vegetable patches – with the added reward of food as a result.

My flowers do reward me too, though.  I’m quite a visual person and seeing a flower bud appear and bloom, and a plant grow in a healthy, happy way brings me great joy and relaxes my brain.

I will admit though, for those beginning years I did get a little frustrated by the repeated potato and veg question.

But, this is 2020 and we are all in the throes of uncertainty.  Can I say that our sense of instability (or insecurity) has gone viral? (Bad pun? Too soon?) Anyway, because of this virus which has spread across the globe, we have decided to try our hands at growing veg – not at the front of the house!

We’ve dug a few patches so far.  I say we, but really I have to give all the digging credit to the Hubs for this.  I tried to relieve him one day and I couldn’t even get the spade past the roots of the wild grass.  Usually at this point for the flower beds I pull out the hoe-pick and get cracking.  But the Hubs had a very neat and methodical method for digging the beds and keeping the sides straight and breaking off excess earth from the turf roots, in rows. So that when he took a break or ended for the day, the patch – no matter what size it was – would be perfectly ready for planting.  Usually he’d carry on with the patch until the ground got too rocky or until the size was sufficient for the quantity of seeds we had.

While patches are still being dug (along with all of the other projects we have on the go), I have managed to plant up one of them so far – the onion patch.

Onions grow well here, I’ve been told.  I had the seed onions and also had carrot seeds – the two are good companion plants – so I decided that this would be the first veg planting of the season while we waited for the potatoes to chit well.

Onions and carrots are good to plant together as companions because the smell of the onion deters the carrot root fly and the smell of carrot deters the onion fly.  I learned this online when I did some research.  Leeks also deter carrot root fly but my leek seeds hadn’t arrived in the post yet, so onions and carrots it was.

First I got the hubs to cut me some sticks and find me some string. I’m so lucky he’s a joiner and has a workshop here!

Then I got all the other necessary items together for my little hike to the veg plot: seeds, trowel, gloves, scissors, measuring rod (home-made) and a bottle of water.

The measuring rod is very important.  I decided to mark one side to the spacing of every 4 inches and the other to every 5 inches.  These are quite popular spacing requirements for different types of veg.

I decided to sow the onions every 10 inches, and since this would be the only patch with onions I mounted the string on the wood stakes for these drills.

The carrot seeds got sown every 3 onion rows (I didn’t want to overcrowd the patch as both of these are root crops).

And then in the spare space to the end of the patch (at one side) I scattered some rocket seeds left over from the herb garden that I stuck in there as well. 

Fingers crossed everything grows!