Fancy building the vegetable garden of your dreams from a weed-strewn wasteland? Lucy Chamberlain shares her sage advice
For culinary gardeners, creating your own edible garden sets you on an almighty high. It can be daunting at first if you don’t know exactly what you want, but for most of us that isn’t an issue – we’ve been planning it in our mind for years. You may be standing eye-high in couch grass, but if you just close your eyes, grand visions of raised planters and manger beds come meandering in.
For our rural setting I’d envisaged timber-edged beds, gravel paths, espaliered apples and regimental rows softened by cottage garden billowiness. In reality I was standing by an old brick wall barely visible under decades of vegetation. Above my head was a dense canopy of hazel and walnut, while beneath my feet lay a generous tangle of ivy, nettles and ground elder. We knew this 40 x 50ft plot was once a pristine vegetable garden. Now, 30 years later, nature had reclaimed the land – goodness knows when the sun’s rays had last warmed the soil. One almighty hazel tree, alongside a walnut tree in the neighbour’s plot, had given rise to the thicket of saplings. Despite not being able to see a square inch of bare earth we had hope – you must have hope.
Continue reading...from Gardening blog | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2osW1gz
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