This is an article about the total make-over of our kitchen garden last year.
For about 10 years, we have had raised beds in one part of the kitchen garden. The soil is fantastic, as we every year have added loads of manure. However, the paths between the raised beds have always been full of weeds, which have grown into the raised beds and it has been a lot of hard work keeping the weed out of the beds. Last year, we decided to transform this part of the kitchen garden to a beautiful potager, easy to look after!
This is what it looked like, that Saturday morning in May, when we started the project!
We needed my husband’s big sowing machine in order to build large planting boxes of thick wood.
We made the growing boxes 2m x 1,2 m and painted them with a mixture of linseed oil and tar.
This is what it looked like when we started off in the morning.
And this is what it looked like on the Sunday evening, that same weekend!
A huge tarpaulin was put over the ground, and I made tiny little holes in it with a fork. Then we put out all the growing boxes and cut up the tarpaulin inside the boxes.
The next step was to put grit in the paths and around the growing boxes.
It came out wonderfully!
In one of the corners, the ground was inclined, but we found this solution with big stones.
When all the grit was in place, we made a fence and a portal out of natural materials, in order to define the end of the kitchen garden. We planned for runner beans and french beans to climbe on it.
This is what the fence looked like!
Below are some pictures of how the kitchen garden developed during the summer.
A picture of another part of the kitchen garden.
Straw is a beautiful material that we use to cover the soil It gives the right “country look”!
An evening in july, we harvested these wonderful vegetables and strawberries in our kitchen garden!
The beans climbed so nicely over the new fence around the kitchen garden. It came out exactly as beautifully as we hade hoped!
Here you can see how lovely the beans twist around the poles of the fence.
The runner bean 'Czar' has got pretty white flowers.
We grow many different sorts of sugar peas too! In the middle 'Weggiser' and in the ring closest to the camera ’Sugar Snap’. In the other ring we grew sweet peas. It is nice to grow flowers and vegetables together.
In this growing box, we grew zuccines together with the beautiful variety of marigold 'Linné'.
A great combination!
At the end of the season, the beans had totally embedded the fence! It looked stunning!
We are very happy with the transformation of the kitchen garden and we look forward to a new wonderful gardening season of 2011.
