Hoping for some great salad days (From Blackpool Citizen)

Hoping for some great salad days

11:26am Thursday 19th April 2007

• Print
• Email
• Share

I'VE never grown anything in my life - but now I've decided to go green and cultivate my own vegetables.

In the coming months, I will find out whether I've got green fingers or whether I'm just plain cack-handed.

I have nurtured the idea of growing vegetables and salad crops for a while now and, when we moved, I saw this as an ideal time to start.

I wanted to see if it would be easy to turn over a small part of our urban garden at the rear of our house in Darcy Lever for growing greens - organically, of course.

At the back of my mind, I remembered reading somewhere that raised beds offered a very efficient way to intensively grow vegetables and flowers in a small space.

I think something similar may have been used during the Second World War when everybody had to Dig for Britain and I seem to recall a similar system being used in France as well.

But once intensive, artificial fertiliser-based farming became the norm to feed the growing millions, the old system fell out of favour.

After trawling the internet, I came across an American book called "The All New Square Foot Gardening: Grow More in Less Space", by Mel Bartholomew, which seemed to answer all my questions.

What Mel has done is to refine the raised bed idea into a manageable, intensive grid gardening system for people who have limited space and no inclination to dig the garden every week.

Mel has designed four-foot square raised beds for intensive growing. Into this six-inch high patch, you put his mix of peat moss, vermiculite and blended composts.

This way, he says, you avoid using your own polluted soil, which may have low fertility, be waterlogged or full of weeds and bacteria, all of which may damage or even kill your plants.

The only thing you add is the seeds of plants and vegetables you want to grow, as well as high quality compost on a regular basis.

According to Mel, you can make the four-foot square boxes by screwing bits of untreated wood together, but this has its drawbacks as it could soon rot, even if you paint the outsides.

Also, you cannot use pressure-treated wood or old railway sleepers in case chemicals leach into your soil.

Once again, the internet came in useful. I found a Derbyshire company which makes plastic click-together frames called Link-a-Bord, which should last forever.

The Link-a-Bord frames come in four lengths and are made from recycled polypropylene. They are double-skinned, which should help keep the soil warm in winter and cool in summer. We had worked out that the strip of garden we want to use would take five frames, four for vegetables and one for flowers.

My friend John has levelled out the sloping patch in our garden for the frames and put weed-suppressing cloth across the patch where the frames will be sited.

Every Thursday, I plan to update readers on how my green patch is going, what I'm growing, the failures and the successes.

Gardening this way takes a little time and money to set up and I will outline the costs and effort later.

But once everything is established, it should be very cheap to continue and maintain. At least that's what the book says -but we'll see.

• Useful web addresses:

wwwamazon.co.uk
www.linkabord.co.uk
www.squarefootgarden
ing.co.uk

• Print
• Email
• Share