Progress comes at a cost with my poor wee thumb paying the brunt of it!
On the up side I have been focusing mostly on trying to fence off the lotti as last year I had numerous visits from local dear who grazed just about everything down to a few shoots. So a fence of sorts has gone up and I am hoping it is enough to keep the deer out.
I managed to source some recycled wood from Dundee and Angus Wood project in Dundee, used up an old roll of chicken wire that was lying around and patched it up with other odds and bobs that were lying around to create a six foot fence.
The soil at the lotti is clay and pretty easy to hammer post into as there do not appear to be many big rocks in it. Not great for growing though and hence I have to keep adding to it to improve conditions for growing. Just a few more bits to ‘patch up’ and hang door on and then it should be secured. I have left a wee gap under the chicken wire so that any amphibian friends and hedgehogs can move freely in and out of the space, just hope that we dont have rabbits otherwise I will have to re-address this gap.
Also over the winter I made a strawberry bed. One of my neighbors has one in her patch and I tried to copy her one as she seemed to have great success with it. Again the wood came from Dundee and Angus Wood project. It is purposely long and thin so that the fruit can hang over the sides and not on the earth.
I had some potatoes left over from the crop last year which were small and undamaged from the slugs. I was going to throw them away as my crop was damaged by these horrible wee slugs. There seemed to be a slug in every potato. However, I decided to try to grow them in a raised bed . . . maybe the slugs are not in that soil? Let’s see what happens . . .
In the pic on the right there is one of the potato slug pests. Other than picking the slugs off and disposing of them somewhere else I don’t really know what to do about them. I can’t use slug pellets as the birds and other small creatures eat the slugs and then you end up just poisoning the wildlife. I may give them a dish of beer to drown in!
Last year I was given a purple sprouting broccoli plant which I popped into the garden. I waited, and waited, and waited for it to produce broccoli but nothing other than lots of large leaves appeared. There were a few occasions I thought about pulling it up and discarding it as I did not think it was going to produce anything! To my delight last week when I went over to the lotti it had started to produce lots of tender little stem florets.
Other things I have planted in the last few weeks – red onion sets, broad beans, beetroot, marigolds, red and white cabbages, Brussels sprouts.
I am now going to focus on getting the fence finished and work on a bed for peas and beans to grown in.
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