Kitchen Garden Forum

This is my first post i have been reading KG mag for teh last 6 months while i have been awaiting the completion of the cottage i have just moved into. A nice thatched place built in 1620's. Anyway i digress, the property has an acre of well kept garden and at the end a paddock of a third of an acre, its currently used only by the neighbouring farmers sheep and cows. The paddock is slightly lower than the rest of the garden and a small stream flows along the side of it. I would like to turn the whole thing into a set of raised veg beds and maybe a crop rotation type set up. As might be apparent im very new to this and im really going to be feeling my way for the first few years. Does anyone have any advice on the ''changing a paddock into a kitchen garden'' step. I figure on turning the ground over, digging the grass in, adding alot (hmmm tons) of better loamy soil and then adding manure whilst building the beds up (railways sleepers or the like). One thing i have noticed however is walking around at the weekend (devon and its been raining lots) is that the paddock is very very wet with puddles. What do i do regard that issue? dig away and ignore the water, try to dig a drainage tract? Do i wait till its dry?
Also with it being a third of an acre it looks like a great deal of shovel work and while im a big fella and not shy of getting amongst it should i get hold of some more serious kit?
sorry the ramble but any thoughts??

Hello Hannabusses, and a very warm welcome, sounds a smashing place you have got yourself.
I think the first thing i would do is pop round and see the farmer, to make sure the paddock doesn,t actually flood in the winter, especially with a stream running along the side of it.
Maybe thats why the garden is slightly higher.
If it does flood you will really struggle to work the ground all season.
I don't mean to put the dampers on your project, but i think it will pay just to check.

What a simply lovely sounding place.
Yes, I would agree about the water. We made our kitchen garden from a paddock, on the higher part of a slope. The soil is thick red clay - do you have the very similar Devon sandstone clay? - and the lower part of the garden gets very wet in winter.
We did it by covering the whole area with black plastic for a year while we did other things. Since we had stacks of rabbits, and anyway I have always wanted a walled garden, at the end of the year we had a wall built round it. (V expensive, but oh we love it.) Once the wall was built, we peeled back the plastic, found quite a number of grass snake skins otherwise all the grass, docks, nettles, buttercup, etc. plus all their roots, had been totally absorbed into the soil, which was a shiny red. Brian then dug it roughly with a fork (hard work, but much much easier than it would have been to dig up growing grass) and we hired (and then bought our own) a rotavator and he rotavated it all over. Then we divided it up into beds, by the simple expedient of roughly measuring the beds with string and then walking between them to make paths, and planted up.
The first year we had really good crops and it was obvious that the fact that all the humus and nutrients of the paddock cover had been absorbed had made the soil really fertile.
Tips: I think we have a winter-time spring in the middle of it, as part of it is really wet over winter, so we have had to provide drainage channels out of the walls, and also there are two beds that I don't have anything in over winter as it is just too wet for them. So it really is a good idea to check right now when it is so wet and see what your water levels are like.
With clay, you need to have as much compost and humus as possible to add to it every year, as although the rotavator broke it up beautifully, after the first year it does tend to bake and crack in the summer unless there is enough humus.
Once the soil had been rotavated and planted up, although we had no perennial weeds in situ (and curiously enough practically no slugs) once the growing conditions were good, millions of seeds from the meadow seed-bank germinated overnight! So you really need to keep running a swoe along the surface just to stop them getting too rooted in. Or else, as we are doing, cover the bed with a mulch or plastic in the autumn to kill them all off again. I'm afraid the slugs did proliferate in their thousands later on!
We raise practically everything in seed-trays and small pots, and then plant out as small plants, rather than sowing direct into the soil. Direct sowing gives very patchy results, apart from parships and carrots. I think the mice get them!
If you don't want to wait a year while it is under black plastic, then you could mow it, hire a turf cutter to peel off the grass (which composts beautifully) and then dig and rotavate, but you won't have the advantage of having all the top growth in effect composted into the soil before you begin. You also end up planting closer to the subsoil, having lost the grass layer.
You could try digging up the grass and turning it over and planting into that, but I would have thought the weed problem would be a complete nightmare and the texture of the soil difficult to plant into.
Alison.

Gosh Alison, ever thought of writing for a gardening magazine, very impressed indeed.
Or maybe you already do.

if i fead your post right you are putting in raised beds and digging or rotovating the grass to get rid of it.
just a idea if the grass is short enought then mark out your beds and edge them with the wood ,then cut the grass away inside and fill it with the loam you are buying in then the grass outside the bed makes instance paths.
best put all your perminants ie fruit trees on your north side so it does not cast shade on the veg, and try to split the remanding plot into 3rds that way one 1/3 can be manured each year, each group that you plant put tall plants at the north end down to small at the south to give maximum light to all plants.
water barrels and troughs dotted around the field are good even if you have a stream because it saves your leg with all the walking

Hi Hannabusses

I have 'broken in' much new ground in a variety of gardens using a variety of methods. You have a number of consideration first.

1 Drainage - This will need to be addressed - is the soil saturated to capacity because of the rain or is the water table high or both? -

Also, you say the cottage has been 'completed' - have you had builders machinery/vehicles on the paddock - it could be holding water in puddles due to compaction - no other reason.

2 type of vegetation present - is it just pasture, or is it a mixture of grass and 'weeds' - is there couch grass or creeping thistle? Nettles are relatively easy to deal with but some things are a battle, and just digging/rotavating without eradicating the nasty weeds can make problems for the future.



If you are prepared to buy in organic matter, then I can't reccommend highly enough the green waste compost produced by eco-sci in plymouth - £6 to £8 a tonne plus transport. It's weed free and has gone through an industrial composting process which is strictly controlled.

Personally I would start by killing off the vegetation with glyphosate weedkiller it breaks down very quickly and saves a lot of trouble - then be organic from now on.

No need to dig unless you really like it. If the ground is compacted, aerate it with a garden fork plunged in full tine depth and rocked every 6".


Raised beds can quickly be made by

1 spray off top growth with glyphosate - wait to take effect - 3 weeks
2 In meantime Assemble bed edging in situ
3 Top off with 6" deep mulch of greenwaste compost - 20mm screened or smaller
4 Get growing


I have seen this method used on a large scale - 30m beds over poor messed up soil (old WW11 barracks), it works, believe me.

There are other methods which give just as good or better results, but also others which give worse, but none which take less work.


Good luck


Mole

Devon resident too

With the stream there it is best to check that the area you wish to use really is above the highest level of the stream, otherwise drainage will be impossible to guarantee, whatever you do.
Allan

Hire in a man with a mini-digger and put in some proper land drainage across the plot into the stream.
It should not cost a fortune, go down about two to three feet and put in the proper perforated drianage pipes.

My allotment plots get soaked every winter by the run-off from a primary school playground and field as I am downslope from them, very little I can do about it as the main track lies between my plots and the nearby ditch and, to boot, has a gas main running under it.

Some excellent replies that I would just like to add to.
Do you work at all? Because an acre of garden and a third of an acre of paddock to convert to a kitchen garden is a huge amount of work. I'm not trying to put you off at all - just some advice to think carefully about ways that you can save yourself as much labour as possible. I recently got Bob Flowerdew's No Work Garden off Amazon for £2.99 and it has a lot of invaluable advice for saving yourself work, especially when starting an area from scratch.
One thing I would warn against is having grass paths between beds, as you're going to have extra work trimming the grass all summer. If you don't trim it, it'll seed into the beds.

One can assume that a lawn mower could cope with the grass paths in a domestic plot but there is always a little strip against the boards that the mower cannot do. I have been known to use a strimmer on that, currently it has been treated with (dare I say it?) glyphosate while the beds are empty, to be followed by groundcover Terratex in which case the strimmer will be useless, so will a flame gun.I suppose one could fold back the Terratex, strim and then unfold.

Allan

whatever you do with grass paths , they need a regular input of time to keep tidy. i was lucky i was asked to replace a large patio, loads of 2 inch thick paving slabs to be taken to the tip and repaced with patterned ones , well the old slabs ended up between my beds. fraid i just dropped them ontop of the grass paths, which means a wee bit of grass pokes through between the slabs, but it has slashed the time needed to maintain the paths.

Wow all you great people!! This has been an awsome amount of help for me.. Things that come to mind now that i have read all teh great advice..

The stream running down the side of the paddock is probably 2 foot lower than the lowest part of teh paddock so some drainage should be viable..

The cottage is done but nothing appart from the neighbouring farmers cows/sheep have been on the paddock for years so nothing has compacted the land.

I think the water logged nature is dude to the amount of rain but i will find out for sure incase its an on going issue with the water table..

I have 14th - 27 december off work this was going to be for me and a friend (the lucky guy!) to prepare the paddock.. I appreciate now that maybe rushing into it so soon might be unwise given the comments above..

If possible i would like to have no chemicals at all and try and do it all the most eco friendly way.. (in 2 years if something doesnt grow then ill be changing route maybe!) remember im a complete novice so ill eat any words i have to. I was very keenly into plants when i was a child even to the extent that i was working my summer holidays in a cactus nursery pricking out opuntia and being paid in cactus! hard core huh. Anyways since then i have been working in londons financial district harbouring future plans to set up back home.. This draws me on to Organic Freaks point.. I still work monday to friday in london while my wife and kiddies live back in devon. So i will realistically be doing 10 hours during the weekend is that too little do you think? Will i be able to keep up with it..

Another aside point while i blerb all this out is im buying a Hartley Botanics greenhouse is called a victorian lodge http://www.hartley-botanic.co.uk/ranges/victorian_range_07.php and im waiting for planning consent.. has anyone ever had a problem with that do you think id get away with just building it and getting teh planning retrospectively..

Mole raises a good point the paddock is basically all kinds of rubbishy grass and weeds nothing like a normal grassy garden but spraying hmm.. maybe i dont use it for a year and follow the advice of Alison by putting a BIG plastic sheet over the whole paddock and looking at it again in 12 months.. hmmmm shame to miss a season tho.

Re the grass paths i think for ease id probably get the paths covered with plastic sheeting then some nice gravel ontop of that just to cut down on that element of work..

Can i build a wall on a paddock (fruit south facing etc etc) or are there rules about doing that?..


ok more thinking for me to do thaks again for some super responses its been a great help to find this site i shall keep a keen eye out!! Ill keep you posted as to what i do!

Word to the wise keep your fences straight the 2 big black bullocks that were looking in at me in the kitchen on sunday had their way with my cooking apples! after 10 mins of myself and my wife waving sticks we got the 2 big fellas out the way they came but i wont be letting my fences fall into disrepair again!

Ian

Dear Ian, you didn,t say if your wife is a keen gardener or not, or whether you will be getting a part time gardener.
If your main garden is an acre and you want to have a big veg plot as well, you will really struggle to keep on top of it all.
And theres nothing worse than being a slave to a garden, it takes all the ejoyment out of it.
I would have thought a veg plot 90feetx30feet would be a nice size to start you off in the first year, just to see how you get on.
AS for your greenhouse, i take it your thatched cottage is a listed building, i would tread very carefuly with the planning, if you upset the planners they can make things very awkward.
May i add i'm very jealous of you getting a Hartley Botanic, a superb greenhouse.
Sorry to keep putting hurdles your way, it's most unlike me i can assure you, but it just sounds like an awfull lot of work.
I was in the building trade for years, and now a full time gardener, so i know roughly what can be achieved in set times.
Please don't let me dampen your enthusiasum though.

Good points OldHerb. My wife is happy to do a little work in the garden but she wont be doing much and i wouldnt describe her as a keen gardener.. i will be getting a guy to come in and do all the grass and keeping teh boarders in check maybe a few other bits too a couple times a week.. yeah it is grade II listed although its not conservation land, none the less i degree of respect for them is probably required. Right im going to take what seems to be sage advice and go a year with a smaller patch and look at improving the paddock for potential future use.. As the main garden is big enough and currently already has a veg plot, fruit nets, orchard (i didnt mention that did i).. Apparently the veg plot that exists has been there as a small mkt gdn for '00s of years so the soil is very good and its probably 40ft square, brasiacs and a few leeks are all that remain oh and a few artichokes.. So sounds like i do a year as best i can with that and just spend a year preparing the paddock then.. and ill have fun with the green house of course when that eventually arrives..

Cool i have a plan thanks to you all

Hi

If you can wait a year, then the easiest chemical free way is to use a light excluding mulch i.e polythene or 'mypex'. Do it in spring. If you strim off the greenery, and leave it there, - could even cover with compost/manure before covering- then cover for a season you will have lovely weedfree soil Digging should not be needed. Possibly bindweed and horsetail will reappear if they were present.

Johnboy usually suggests heavy weight damp proof membrane (black not blue - 1200g/m) as good stuff to use - it should certainly last well - silage sheet can rip easily if a bullock steps on it

Good luck