Herb bed beginnings

Herb bed beginnings

Outside the vegetable plot, along the new fence line, will be a new herb bed. We need to attach weld mesh to the new fence posts. It is longer than the posts (deliberately) so we can bury part of it in the ground, to stop the rabbits burrowing underneath it. So it is necessary to clear the herb bed side of the fence before the mesh can be attached.

The herb bed slopes towards the south, so we also need to put in some edging at the bottom of the slope. The vegetable area used to be a track of some sort that surrounded the garden. That means it is hard going to dig it over as it is full of stones that formed the bed of the original track. We will soon have enough stones to create paths and tracks all over the garden!

The herb area before the new fence posts were put in place; as you can see, the slope is quite gentle:

 And afterwards:

Along the new fence line used to stand another fence – it had concrete posts and then properly tensioned wire through them. This separated the track from the garden, but appears to have been left to fall into disrepair when the track was incorporated into the garden. However, three or four of the posts are still lying around the garden and despite them being tapered, will make good edging material for about half (or less) the length of the herb bed. The rest will be edged with some thick pieces of wood for the time being, as we want to use what we have. Not only does that make economic sense, it means we have less ‘stuff’ to get rid of, yet we are still tidying up the garden and ‘being green’.

So today, we made a start on clearing the top edge of the herb area for the fence mesh and put two of the concrete posts in place along the ground at the bottom of the slope. The mass of roots from brambles and nettles is making progress really slow though, so we didn’t do as much as we would have liked.

In addition, there were two piles of debris from previous clearings of weeds and unwanted bushes that had to be moved to the bonfire. 

One of the two debris piles; it's bigger than it looks:

The pile is growing quite large now, so burning that is becoming more of a necessity. We just have to wait for the wind to be in the right direction, so we don’t smoke out the neighbours!

The growing bonfire - and this was before we had finished moving all the rubbish!