As the heat of summer fades and early winter rain brings coolness to the earth, my thoughts turn again to a vegetable garden. My carefully prepared patch of a few years back has become overgrown with lavender bushes, which spring up unbidden all over the garden - fine if you are devoted to lavender, but I have no feelings either way, except that it's nice to have a variety of scented plants in the garden, and one bush is enough. I'm going to dig up those that are not on the perimeter of the bed and relocate them, and the others can be severely cut back to ensure healthy new growth in the form of a herbicidal hedge to protect the vegetables from wind and some pests.I also have a number of wild garlic plants at the perimeter which seems to have kept moles away all these years.
The obvious first choice of veg is spinach - fast-growing, we eat it often and it's pretty hardy. After that comes green beans, something I have never had any luck with, but I intend to pay much more attention to the garden than I have in the past, having seen the results this summer of regular feeding and watering. Preparation is the key, as with all things in life. If I don't put up the trellises and supports before I plant, it will never get done and the whole garden will become an overgrown, tangled mess with everything growing in the sand and being eaten by songololos.
In the early days, when we had racing pigeons and an unlimited supply of fertiliser, I successfully grew hundreds of onions, brussels sprouts, potatoes, beans and tomatoes, but now I will try out the much easier to handle liquid kelp. Should that fail, the entire patch will be turned into a rose garden!
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