I started my veg patch last year with grand ideas for a beautiful, productive garden. It would be aesthetically pleasing as well as bursting with goodness. It would be built in a parterre style, with formal beds separated by paths, but with a wild twist and underlain with permaculture ideas. I would look out of my kitchen window and admire it. Friends visiting would gasp in wonder.
I began with a circle. I marked it on the ground and instructed a digger driver, who was here at the time doing some other work, to scoop off the thick kikuyu grass from my future veggie patch. (In hindsight, this was my first mistake; although it solved the problem of the invasive grass, it also took a lot of topsoil, which I have since had to compensate for.) With careful measurement, I divided the circle into eight wedges, divided by paths. A small central circle completed the basic design. I loosened the soil, spread lime, loaded it with compost and manure. I planted seedlings and seeds. I spread sawdust on the paths. I filled the central circle with herbs, flowers and a bird bath.
My vision of a beautiful and productive garden began to materialise.
And then the picture blurred.
It’s surprisingly difficult to plant straight rows of vegies in triangular beds. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but you can’t get even rows. The geometry doesn’t work. I thought I’d solved this by planting across the bottom of the triangle and down the middle, then filling in the smaller bits. I also thought I liked higgedly-piggedly veg patches; a certain amount of disorder. And I do. But it turns out I like straight lines and order more than I realised.
The parrots flew in and started eating my tomatoes. I tried netting them but it’s surprisingly difficult to net triangular-shaped beds. The parrots found ways under the netting, gaps in the corners.
It’s also surprisingly difficult to harvest things from the middle of a triangular bed, unless you step in and walk among the plants, which is less than ideal if you are trying to keep your soil loose and friable.
And it’s surprisingly difficult to water a triangular bed with a sprinkler without wasting most of the water on garden paths.
It turns out ‘triangular beds’ and ‘surprisingly difficult’ are words that go together well. Which I suppose is why most gardens don’t have them.
I went back to the drawing board. Or at least to the top sheet off the pile of scrap paper than inhabits my desk drawer. I reworked the design, overwriting the triangular beds with straight beds radiating out from the central path, while keeping the main four dividing paths and the central circle. Trouble was some things were still growing in bits that would become paths, so I couldn’t immediately transfer my new design to the ground. Not without ripping out everything and starting again. I wasn’t prepared to make that sacrifice, so I have had to treat it as an ongoing work in progress.
Slowly, it’s coming together. I laid out some bamboo poles to give myself guidelines for where the borders between the beds and paths will be. Any built-up soil that is within the paths, I dig up and put on the beds. Where the old paths form part of the new beds, I dig up the compacted ground and lay compost and mulch on top. It will be a few more weeks before I can finish this process. I’m waiting for the last of the watermelons, pumpkins, okra and tomatoes to be harvested. When these crops are finished, I should be able to deconstruct the last of the old design and finish the new one. Then I’ll add sawdust to the paths to give the whole garden shape. The beds will be easier to plant and harvest. I can reach the middle of them from the paths without putting a foot on my precious fluffy garden soil. It will be easier to keep track of what is planted where so that I can rotate crops effectively. I will be able to net veggies more easily if and when required. (That’s really when required; saying ‘if’ is me being overly optimistic.) It won’t have the wow factor that the other design promised, but it will be much easier to manage. I’m hoping the burgeoning produce will provide ample wow factor.
See you outside,
Jill