I've finally got the first of my beds built! I've built the fruit bed and the first two vegetable beds. I would've blogged this last night but just as I sat down to the keyboard there was a mass exodus out the door to see Iron Man 3 and I just had to go with.
The long bed that runs along the East fence is the fruit bed. The shorter one in the centre of things is one of the veg beds.
You want broken bricks in the bottom for drainage. If you can only get so many bricks but have a bunch of slabs then divide them as follows: bricks under the veg beds, slabs under the herb beds. The reason for this is that slabs have a higher pH than bricks, and herbs can generally tolerate a higher pH than veg.
I dug a pit and filled it with broken bricks,
-parked a bed over the pit,
-and half-filled it with soil.
As you can see from the plan, these are bed 1 and bed 2. The finished beds will project twice as far.
This week I'll be shopping for compost to fill the remaining space with, as neither my compost nor my leafmould are fully decomposed and ready to use yet. It looks shabby just now but this is the bare bones, and even that much isn't finished. Once I've got stuff on the grow it'll look better, and better still when I've got grass growing in the rows between the beds and perennial plants like herbs in the herb beds and fruit in the fruit bed. The rosemary will really set it off.
Lastly then, because I am a fantasy gamer to my bones, a little flourish:
So the tumble dryer broke. In a household this big, a broken dryer is not good news. I've now got a line across most of the garden to get the clothes dry in this glorious sunshine; meaning I can't be dragging pallets about and staining wood for fear of ballsing up the laundry. This limits my worktime severely, but there's bugger all I can do about it.
Meanwhile, the front ramp needs work done. To facilitate this, the buddleia's going. Once the work is done on the ramp I'll probably put in a pergola. Pics to follow.
Et voila, pics! How naked does that ramp look? Makes the place look like a GP surgery. Plus I've finally gotten to all the rubbish that berks have shoved into my hedge when they couldn't find a bin. It filled a sack and was mostly comprised of empty cans of cheap lager.
Meanwhile, is there anything that conveys the wonder of nature more succinctly than just watching a bud unfold?
By next post I should hopefully have my lawn replanted, unless drama has ensued.
I built the shed yesterday. It took two of us all bloody day; mega thanks to Tauren who I now owe a pint.
I'm gonna offer a review of the shed: it's not a well-made thing at all. One of the windows didn't fit the frame, such that I had to carve the frame to size with a wrecking knife. It has too many bits and they don't fit together very well. You need to buy a silicon sealant separately lest it leak, yet it doesn't say that anywhere until after you've bought it. The roof felt supplied is too small to adequately cover the roof, so I'll need to buy a bucket of pitch to cover the roof.
I bought this from a major DIY chain, one of the big three. I'll go down there tomorrow and ask them for a bucket of pitch and a tube of sealant; if I don't get them then I'll publish the name.
Pics:
Glad I'm not claustrophobic...
Now that the shed's no longer an immense strew of timber, I have the opportunity to get stuck into building the beds. I've spent this morning dividing the pallets and stacking the wood ready for reassembly, though it'll be a couple days yet as I've just ran out of nails.
In cuter news:
Bill has investigated the roof of the shed, the climbability of the new trellis, and found them both to his liking.
George and I like to sit together and watch Gardeners World, me for the tips and George for Monty Don's old retriever. "George, you wanna watch the dog show?" So today our Sam says to me "this isn't about George liking the dog at all, is it? You're watching this because you like gardening!" Well no shit, Sherlock.
Mike has celebrated the new Spring with some new growth:
It's my day off from caring today, so I shall be spending the evening in Skyrim.
The compressor box is off the wall and I've built the shed bearers.
Now when you buy a shed or similar structure it'll usually say in big letters GUARANTEED AGAINST ROT FOR TEN YEARS, then down the bottom in tiny letters it'll say the guarantee is only good for one year - not the full ten - unless you put it up on bearers. You need the bearers for the ten year guarantee. They'll try and nudge you towards buying their own bearer kit made of timber and steel with ground spikes. If you're putting the shed on soil then you'll need this, but if you're putting the shed on a hard surface like a patio or other paved area then you don't need the steel or the ground spikes and can just as readily build your own timber bearers.
This cost me £25 for the timber. A bearer kit is £50+. I already had the screws and the stain in the house. STAIN YOUR TIMBER! If you don't treat it with some kind of protective stain or exterior varnish then you might as well chuck a bucket of mould right at the shed and have done.
If you're buying a kit shed then check the instructions to the shed carefully. Beneath the floorboards there'll be joists. You need to know if those joists run parallel to the long side or to the short side before you cut your timber. If the joists run parallel to the long side then your bearers must run parallel to the short side, and vice-versa.
My shed is 8' x 6'. The joists run parallel to the long side, so I've cut 2x 8' and 6x 5'6". If the joists ran parallel to the short side then I'd cut 2x 6' and 5x 7'6". All the timber is two by four. It should be built so that the two inch sides face into the ground and sky, giving you four inches of ground clearance. That way any ground rot has to penetrate the stain at the bottom, creep through four inches of wood, then penetrate another layer of stain at the top before it can attack the joists. The thicker your bearers, the longer the joists are protected.
I've stained them two colours. The shed is blue, so any part of the bearers that'll see daylight is also blue. The blue stain is about seven times as dear as the red stain, litre for litre, so any part that isn't seeing daylight I've stained the cheaper red. No sense wasting the good stuff.
I've held the timbers together both with heavy carriage bolts and broad-threaded timber screws and with a good blob of wood glue. I'm a big fan of the belt-and-braces approach, particularly where something has to take a lot of weight.
These'll look after my shed a treat. The shed itself is going up on Saturday. I've stained the panels blue but I still need to paint the trim white. It's a kit shed, I know what's going where, so it's easier to stain it while it's still laid out flat.
I guess that's it for now. The shed goes up on Saturday, the beds go up on Sunday, the lawn gets replanted at some point this weekend. Big flurry of activity coming up, but it'll all be worth it afterwards.
The shed arrived on Tuesday. I've improvised the bearers using old paving slabs and the sides of a wardrobe. Where it's meant to be going however there's a compressor unit on the wall. The compressor belongs to a lift that no longer exists and should've gone at the same time, but it didn't. I'm now waiting on that being removed, so meanwhile the shed is still in panels, stained blue, standing on pallets with a tarpaulin over the top.
We have moved from a state of stagnation without shedparts to a state of stagnation with shedparts. I guess it's progress of a sort.
The shed - paid for before I thumped my right hand - is being delivered Ikea-style on Monday. I'm in no fit state to build a shed, though thankfully I've got help.
I went up to B&Q in Chiswick today to pick up some woodstain: 2.5L of Cuprinol garden shades in Iris if I could get it, else Barleywood. I've been planning where the shed is going for well over a year now and I always pictured it as stained dark blue with the trim (doorframe, corner edgings) painted gloss white. I don't know why I pictured those colours, but I did, and now that's what my shed looks like.
Turns out they do the range in 2.5L, and they do both Iris and Barleywood, but they don't do either of those colours in 2.5L. They stock everything but dark blue in 2.5L. Bugger. I could buy two 1L cans, but they're £14 apiece while a 2.5L can would be £19, meaning I'd be paying damn near 150% the price for only 80% the amount of woodstain. Sod that for a laugh!
So the shed's coming, sure as Winter in Westeros, but I've got no stain, half a hand, and I've still not built the bearers yet.
Here's the finalised layout for the arable side of the garden. I've got the wood ready. All I'm waiting on now is for my hand to heal up and the damn thing's as good as built. This is just the right half; try to imagine that off to the left is the path and then the lawn. All unmarked greenery is Rosemary whilst the purple is climbing flowers.
So the builders have finished and I'm getting in the first of the raised beds. I'm putting in four of the main beds, so I'll be growing potatoes, carrots, leeks, onions, garlic, neeps and cabbages. No photos until it's done because right now it all looks fuck-ugly.
This is being hampered somewhat by the fact that I bashed myself in the hand with a sledgehammer yesterday. The right hand. The hand that was holding the sledgehammer. I'm actually impressed. It's swollen, turning purple, two fingers are lacerated, but no bones are broken.
Having bugger all else to do this weekend, I'm thinking I'll jump the train down to Egham for a night at the opera, the new one about the Ap-ocalypse.
Until next time.
Edit: apparently my hand's a mess. The joints function but I've got periosteal cracks, weakened tendons, an injured pollical system, the ulnar nerve got banged up pretty good. 4 weeks light duties: no heavy lifting, no heat, no xbox; lest I give myself a crippled hand.
I'm going to share this article, as with all the talk over the shooting of those schoolkids it is worth remembering that most people with mental ill-health do not go on to become killers. I live with depression, I'm also autistic, I even have the so-called "warrior gene", yet I struggle to think of any situation in which I could murder. Such a thing is either in a person or it is not, but most forms of mental ill-health do not contribute to it. The panic which follows such events will inevitably lead to some poor sod with hyperactivity or autism or mutism - or even just someone who is unusually shy - who has never harmed a person in their life getting lynched by a bunch of eejits (egged on by the Sun) who confuse different with dangerous. The problem has chiefly to do with culture.
I found this quote. It's attributed to Morgan Freeman, but then a lot of quotes on the internet are attributed to Morgan Freeman just because it gives them a measure of authority:-
"You want to know why. This may sound cynical, but here's why.
It's because of the way the media reports it. Flip on the news and watch how we treat the Batman theater shooter and the Oregon mall shooter like celebrities. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris are household names, but do you know the name of a single *victim* of Columbine? Disturbed people who would otherwise just off themselves in their basements see the news and want to top it by doing something worse, and going out in a memorable way. Why a grade school? Why children? Because he'll be remembered as a horrible monster, instead of a sad nobody.
CNN's article says that if the body count "holds up", this will rank as the second deadliest shooting behind Virginia Tech, as if statistics somehow make one shooting worse than another. Then they post a video interview of third-graders for all the details of what they saw and heard while the shootings were happening. Fox News has plastered the killer's face on all their reports for hours. Any articles or news stories yet that focus on the victims and ignore the killer's identity? None that I've seen yet. Because they don't sell. So congratulations, sensationalist media, you've just lit the fire for someone to top this and knock off a day care center or a maternity ward next.
You can help by forgetting you ever read this man's name, and remembering the name of at least one victim. You can help by donating to mental health research instead of pointing to gun control as the problem. You can help by turning off the news."
Whoever actually wrote this has gotten it bang on.
Thanks to the efforts of the weather, crap builders and one inconsiderate smoker (who has been soundly bollocked, fear not), my bench is in a bit of a sorry state. I've brought it in, planed it and sanded it. I also improved it by using the plane to round off the corners, making it more comfortable. Granddad Rab would be proud-ish. I'll give it another sanding tomorrow morning then varnish it. Jobs like these make me wish I still owned a belt sander (we lost it in a move), so when I've a few bob spare I'll have to have a shufti on ebay.
I picked up a trio of birdhouses today; they'll also go up tomorrow. I can make my own easily enough, but I had a coupon that made these more economical to buy. They're of a size to attract tits to the garden - stop sniggering! Got dirty minds the lot o' youse! Anywho, there's something of a debate on painting and/or staining birdhouses. Some say do it, it makes them look pretty and can ensure that they're in keeping with the look of the garden. Others say don't do it, that you don't know what chemicals are in your paint or stain and that it might poison the birds.
I have my own line of reasoning on the matter, and that is that if you put a glass over the entry hole and draw round it, then only paint outside the line, you should minimise the likelihood of stuff getting on the bird. You should also refrain from painting the roof, as water on the roof might drip in through a gap in the wood, and don't paint over the baseplate. The baseplate has gaps around it to allow air in and to allow any water that gets in to drain away, protecting nestlings from drowning or suffocation. Painting this can occlude the gap and cause these problems. Finally, never paint or stain the inside of the birdhouse. This should remain largely dry in use, it may even pick up oil from the bird's feathers, so there is really no need to introduce chemicals into such an enclosed environment.
Lastly then, I've found out how foxes are getting into the garden. It's hard to see scale in a vertical photo, but this lot is six feet high!
Pics of the finished bench and the birdhouses in situ will appear either tomorrow or Tuesday. FSM knows what I'm gonna do about Steptoe's Yard...
"Once they figure a way to work a dead horse, we'll be next. Likely I'll be the first too. 'Edd,' they'll say, 'dying's no excuse for laying down no more, so get on up and take this spear, you've got first watch tonight.' Well, I shouldn't be so gloomy. Might be I'll die before they work it out."
– Eddison 'Dolorous Edd' Tollett
Well, my part in the Christmas Clean is drawing fast to a close, Gods be praised. My black dog, Shuck, tends to make an appearance around this time. Two generations of Atheists (though half of us were still part-raised as Taigs) and still we gotta get festive. My cynical nature reckons that the season isn't in full swing until I've called the tree a c**t to its face. I hate Christmas, so the little acts of cynical pseudo-rebellion (like insisting that being Christmas no.1 makes Killing In The Name a Christmas song) keep the black dog from swallowing me whole. I never take it too far though, on account of the fact that the rest of my family seem to like this ever-repurposed holiday, and that it is bizarrely easy to spoil it.
Gardening then. I've had to change my plans for the beds. It turns out that a person can't work a bed of 5'x5' without stepping into it, which defeats the object. Better than having six of those is having ten beds of 3'x5'. Either way it covers the same amount of ground, but this way I get to grow more solanaceae and alliums, fewer beans and apiaceae, plus I can include things that weren't in the six bed rotation such as peas, wheat and gourds. Here's the new plan; it's to be read clockwise in terms of a given bed, which actually means that the whole thing'll rotate anti-clockwise.
More tatties overall, but in a rotation that sees each bed growing legumes once every five years rather than once every six. The beds won't reach all the way to the Eastern fence. Instead, there'll be a strip of land a foot wide, from which I'll grow fruiting bushes and vines up trellis against the fence. This is also where I'll grow borage, as any area of soil that has fruit growing in it has a heavy drain on potassium.
Other than that, the garden's ticking over. Got some manure coming soon. Got the baseplate to the composter coming soon. Once Commercemas is over I can start building for the coming year. I'll get a tool cabinet and a couple of bat boxes built. The beds will be built in January. I'm thinking railway sleepers for the beds, but you've got to be careful in buying them. For beds, the law says I need timber not treated with creosote. The shed likely January or February. Once the shed is in situ I can work on trellis plus further bird houses, bat boxes and other things. BirdCam will follow the shed. The greenhouse tent will go up in March and the first seedlings will go into the garden shortly afterward. With luck I'll be getting in the first of the early Harvest in June.
Lastly then, the post Why Biology? has attracted enough interest (second most viewed post on the blog) that I reckon it's appropriate to go further back. Science for me started when I was a tiny kid. I had a microscope before I could write, but I'd document my methods and findings pictorially. At 4 I used to sit and watch that cartoon variously known as Once Upon A Time... Life, and How My Body Works. Mam got me a chemistry set when I was about 5 and I grew crystals of copper (II) sulphate. The big thing though was Lego. I had Lego throughout my childhood, starting from the day I was able to play with things without trying to eat them or fit them into the orifices of the head. Physics, mechanics, timing, all can be explored with enough Lego.
I don't think I was raised toward Science though, I think it's better to say that I wasn't raised away from it. I had the tools because I asked for them and showed genuine interest. The kids who grow up to consider Science are not those who were told to be curious, but those who weren't told not to be curious. If that makes sense? I dunno. ROLL VT!
Today was the first frost of the new Winter, at least in London anyhow. Willing to bet my mate Lyndsey up in Tayside has been freezing her arse off for a month already. Comment that it's been two months in 3... 2...
So it touched the lawn but not the beans. It also bejewelled those bloody weeds that keep invading my lawn, so presumably this is the time to make a serious dent in their numbers.
Sparkly lawn! Alas for the hole in the bottom corner there.
The beans are coming along nicely.
Scarcely kissed by the frost.
Take THAT ya bastards!
That's all good, but today I also found that I had something to be really proud of. The roof of the arbour was covered in a thick layer of frost but not a drop touched the seat. That must mean that a) I got the roof seals spot on, and b) that I've successfully sited it for maximum shelter from the worst of the cold. Happy with that!
Frost
No frost!
Really chuffed with that. Right, I've got a day off tomorrow so I'll be racking the cider. Wish me luck!
Someone changed the boiler recently. The new one has a narrower flue and exhaust than the old one, which means the hole in the wall needed mortaring to a narrower gauge so as to be snug to the new pipe. Fair enough, but they didn't put a tarpaulin down before they started mortaring, so the stuff went everywhere!
It left indelible streaks on the patio.
It discoloured a chunk of my bench, which'll mean an afternoon spent sanding and revarnishing.
It gummed up the head of my leaf rake.
It got on the lawn, shot the pH up through the roof and killed a square metre.
Grass likes a pH of between 5 and 7.5. At 7.5 it gets sick, at 8.5 it dies. I'm treating the area with citrate over the Winter so that I can try and reseed in the Spring. Balls!
Things aren't all bad though. I need some manure and Nathan (the mate with the horse) has offered to drive some round in the boot of his car. This comes as a relief, because trying to cart a barrowload of poo on and off the train might raise a few eyebrows at the very least. He drives up from Redhill to visit his partner in Boston Manor, so Strawberry Hill is about 50p's worth of petrol as a deviation from the normal route. Easy peasy.
The house assigned me the task - a year ago - of de-jungling the garden and turning the larger West half into a lawn and recreational area, the slightly smaller East half into an arable patch for growing root veg and some fruit. This is the garden, not counting the patio, as it stands right now:
Yes, I'm in that interesting age cohort (I started school in 1989) where my mind thinks in millimetres while my hands and eyes think in inches. I've heard it referred to as metric schizophrenia, which is an unfortunate way of putting it, though not wholly inaccurate if you accept the omniprotean slang definitions of "schizophrenia". Anyways, here are the plans in inches. I've drawn up the garden as I would want it to look this time next year:
I'll grant you the handwriting ain't great. The black square is a 4' greenhouse, the orange squares are 5' beds, the blue circles are 330L composters. All to scale, of course. The East side (the top of the page is North, of course) is busy. The West side is quiet. Though I've only just committed it to paper, this is how I pictured it before I ever broke the ground.
I've hit a number of objections from within the household, which are somewhat frustrating. Time to vent!
That's so cluttered!
Not really, as beds take up little vertical space. Besides, the lawn is clear and that's effing large.
Why do we need beds to grow veg?
1) Species compete, and without a barrier in the soil the dominant veg will push out the other veg.
2) Because if I had a cricket bat I could stand outside our front gate and drop a tennis ball right into the Thames!
I don't want it to look like an allotment. You want to grow veg. No, let's be clear, you want me to grow veg. This would be significantly harder to accomplish whilst keeping the garden looking like Wimbledon on both halves. Do we need a greenhouse to grow tomatoes and herbs? Do we need a kitchen to cook food? No, but it improves our ability to cook food and broadens the range of food we can cook. Do we have to grow great frames of beans in rotation? Can't we just grow leafy things that sit close to the ground? Why the composter? The Nitrogen Cycle is an interesting thing and I suggest everybody acquaint themselves with it's basics. How it applies to the arable gardener is as follows: your tatties and carrots take nitrates out of the soil; beans put nitrates into the soil. No beans = nowt else! No - I tell a lie - nowt else unless you're prepared to save all your pee and extract the nitrogen from that.
Okay, that's that done. I'll have to argue this some more, methinks. If I'm gonna get the first earlies in for the coming year then I shall have to resolve these issues and get the beds built by the end of January. Wish me luck!
The seat should be made of 2x4 like the uprights, for solidity. Cut the ends to 45° (converging) and lay upon and between the horizontal beams of the back skeleton, as to be parallel to the hypotenuse of the cornerpiece. In this case, I've also encroached the seat onto the front-left part of the skeleton so as to create a wider sitting space.
The roof is the only part of this structure that could be considered flimsy, being built of palletwood. I've built up the corners of the roof in layers, so that there's no vertical gap through which rain can fall, but plenty of spaces for vines to creep through.
The blank spaces can be filled in with ready-built trellis, or you can make angular shapes with 2x2 as I've done here.
And here it's best to customise it to your garden. The front-right side is facing into the shady side of a tree, so instead of putting in framework for all the climbers that won't be going there, I've put in a shelf. The brackets for the shelf are just the 45° offcuts from making the seat.
While the front-left side is where I'll be growing some kind of flowering vines (maybe clematis, maybe jasmine), so here I've put in the highest density of framework.
At the foot of the front-left side I've put in a box. It's open-bottomed to allow free access to the soil. It's pretty much just there to protect my vines against the mower and/or strimmer.
And now it's all stained and squared away in situ. I had to get a neighbour to help lift it, as it weighs ten stone and it's the approximate cubic volume of two adjacent phone boxes.
24m of 2x4 and 12m of 2x2. Total cost of the wood was about £80. Total cost of the whole build was about £100. Buying one of these in the shops would be £300-£400 easily.
