Angie’s Garden

The journey of a purely ornamental garden into a productive permaculture garden!

These pictures shows some of the progress I have made with the garden up to 12th June.

If you want to see what it used to look like check out the Old Garden page.

I am trying out ‘Planting by the Moon’ this year for the first time ever and am keeping a ‘Plant Diary’ to track my progress.

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Wednesday 12th June 2008 – Tonight when I was watering I went up to the top concreted level of the garden and was thinking about something else, I looked up and thought eek – how did all these plants get here. It just sort of sneaks up on you, you sow a few seeds, someone gives you a few plants, you sow a few more seeds and so on.

My potatoes in the bin bag are still doing very well as are the runner and french beans. I have gone a bit overkill on the beans this year, having all this space has gone to my head, think I may have to get another freezer as there are only 3 of us and eldest is off to Uni in Sept. I am growing 16 ‘painted lady’ in two tubs, 6 french climbing in a smaller round tub, 8 ‘enorma’ in one storage container, 8 unknown red flowered in another storage box, yet another box has 6 which are a mixture of all of the above in it. I still have a about 8 that were late developers awaiting somewhere to grow which I have no idea what they are.

Will have to tie some strips of holographic metallic wrapping paper to the canes this week as it stops the birds from pulling off the flowers, I don’t think they mean to do it they are just looking for insects but the bean flowers are quite delicate.

The photo now at the top of the page shows one of my tubs of french beans, my fig tree is hiding behind them. Up on the wall where 5 of my pots of tomatoes are I evicted 2 hydrangeas, that were in a dreadful state, growing in a narrow gap between 2 walls, they will have a lovely new home in a friends large garden.

Also removed was a clump of ancient pinks in dire need of division, pinks are ‘Hardy Perennials’ which means they don’t die but flower again every year, their foliage does not die down and disappear, it does with some other hardy perennials in the winter. All perennials need to be divided every 3 – 5 years, the centre of the plant starts to die off or just look scraggy by then and all the new growth is towards the edges of the plant. These pinks might be beyond dividing, I have heeled them into a temporary home until I have time to have a proper look at the weekend. You can also take cuttings from them, I had already taken a few cuttings from it a few weeks ago that have taken. I used my usual method of taking the cuttings completely ignoring all conventional advice, I just pulled a few bits off of the parent plant, striped some of the lower leaves off and stuck them in the edge of the nearest pot, no rooting compound, no covering with plastic, I have about a 80% success rate with this method. No fuss they have two choices live or die, I might experiment sometime with doing it the right way.

Coming back to this page and seeing the garden as it was at the end of April was a shock everything has grown so much. Tending to everything on a daily basis you don’t notice how much it has grown.

This is the raised bed at the bottom left of the April photo.

There are leeks, carrots and onions that are doing very well plus a few beetroot seed that I added to gaps. This bed is usually covered with fine mesh to keep the carrot fly away.

This is the raised bed to the right of the April photo.

It has kale (Nero Di Toscana) which I must check when I can sow more of as I use so much of it in the winter, I am eating quite a lot of it now in salads too. Turnips which I think are far better raw in salads than cooked, peas which are taking over a bit must get some dwarf ones for next year as these are coming a bit thuggish.

There are also second sowings of radishes and beetroot ( which I need to sow yet more of as I keep eating too many of the leaves) lurking under the bigger vegetables.

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Wednesday 30th April 2008 - As you can see I am a bit behind with charting my progress, I have been busy finding posts for the front page and doing a lot of work in the garden which has not left me with a lot of spare time.

I have tried to fill in as many gaps as possible. Some of the things I have been doing are very boring like putting up screening and moving vast quantities of stones around the garden.

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Sunday 28th April 2008 – Transplanted my radishes, turnips and curly kale into my second raised bed.

Finally got around to planting a few potatoes in two of my sawn off ecover tubs. Will only get a few meals from them, your own new potatoes are so good I can spare a bit of space for them.



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Saturday 27th April 2008 – Finished getting all the soil and compost into my second raised bed, ready to plant out my first seedlings tomorrow.

Made 50 paper pots from newspaper and sowed all my runner beans. Enorma and Painted Lady.



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Sunday 18th April 2008 – At the Ventnor Permaculture meeting , Wendy gave me 4 pepper seedlings, Ken donated 4 basil seedlings and about a dozen cape gooseberry seedlings.

Had to put them in the bathroom as I have run out of windowsills, seedlings everywhere.

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Friday 17th April 2008 – My next door neighbour gave me three rhubarb crowns, I had to put them in my top raised bed that I had ready to transplant a load of my seedlings into as a temporary measure as I had nowhere else to put it. I started on making up my third raised bed to make somewhere for my seedlings to go.

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Wednesday 16th April – Managed to get the rest of the shrubs out of the border quite easily this morning no major problems at all.

According to my ‘In Tune with the Moon’ book yesterday was a ‘red’ day when you should not cultivate, sow or harvest due to lunar and planetary nodes. Not sure if if was a coincidence that getting the shrubs out was such hard work yesterday or if they would have been a pain anyway. Think I might take more notice of the ‘red’ days in future, just in case.

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Tuesday 15th April- I had forgotten quite how difficult it can be digging up shrubs especially when most of the border that they came out of was only 15 – 18″ wide. There is a wall one side, lawn edged with bricks on the other and as it was continuous row of shrubs all grown into each other you could only dig from two sides. I also discovered that there were concrete fence post holders every few feet to add to my joy. I only managed to get three of them out today but it was from the hardest bit. Had to cut the first one back hard to get it out. I have splinters, scrapes and my back is killing me. Plus I broke the handle of my larger fork, my son helpfully pointed out that it was probably not designed to have someone like me jumping on the handle when the other end is under a stubborn shrub!

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Monday 14th April – A picky day of doing odd jobs like sweeping the paved area outside the back door, no matter which way the wind blows leaves and rubbish always seem to end up here, took ages to move everything, sweep and put back.

Then back to the dreaded stones – all the borders in the garden are covered in a deep much of stones, which does look attractive and it is very effective but when you need to dig up 8 shrubs that are under them all they are a bit of a pain. I have been gradually attacking the job, picking out a tub of stones every day but there are always more. Have to step it up as I have a friend coming to collect the shrubs on Thursday, so spent most of the day collecting stones. Have 10 tubs of them and there are still loads left. Will have to sieve the rest out after the shrubs come out.

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Sunday 13th April – Have four large white tubs that were used to hold Ecover cleaning products that I am going to use as planters for growing potatoes and other things in. I have been trying to get the smell of the products out of them for a couple of months and I have done it to two of them by accident. I had half filled them with water to weight something down a few weeks ago when we had all that strong wind and just left them. When I went to empty them out to cut the tops off today the water inside had turned green and smelly, when I emptied and rinsed them I found they no longer ponged, obviously now have to do that with the other two. I got my trusty saw and drew a nice straight line around the top to follow and cut the top off. It is a source of continual frustration to me that I cannot saw a straight line, so I went off to search for some sandpaper and a file to try and straighten them up. Could not find the sandpaper so got huffy and gave up for the day. Going to try sanding, putting a layer of pva on them and painting them nice bright colours, eventually.

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Saturday 12th April - Thought I ought to do something about my sadly neglected strawberries, they have been living in a long plastic planter since last summer with the plants that I made from the runners still in their margarine tubs . I did have another plastic tray of them but I don’t think I had enough holes in it and the plants drowned during the winter. Not having much growing space as yet I decided to put them in the wooden box on legs that I made last year when I only had a patio to grow things on.

I tidied up the plants first and cut off all the dead leaves and runners so I could actually see how many plants I had. Then had to evict the lavender plants from the box, I put them in the corners of the raised bed I made yesterday, thought they might deter carrot root fly. Removed over half of the soil which can go in the bottom of my next raised bed and replaced it with some new compost. They are probably not spaced far enough apart in their new home but at least they have a bit more space than they had before and they look happier.




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Friday 11th April – Sorted out my first raised bed today, it is made from a wooden old packing thingy. I think they are used to protect appliances in transit and they stack on top of each other. I plonked it down on the lawn put in a layer of cardboard, a layer of half done compost (I admit it, my composting skills are sadly lacking), followed by the old compost from the tubs that I grew my runner beans in last year, some multi-purpose compost and some JI type soil to mix with it. All I need now is some plants to put in it.



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Thursday 10th April – All the shrubs on the left hand side of the main level of my garden have to come out so I can plant my raspberry canes against the wall and add raised beds for my veggies. I might have left some of them but there are five hypericum and three forsythia shrubs, I am not fond of either. I am going to try and find new homes for them if possible but I had to wantonly destroy (which I thoroughly enjoyed, I really do not like them) one of the hypericum’s today as I was having a new roof put on the small top shed and it was in the way – honest!

Managed to summon the energy to wire brush then paint the front of the big shed, going to do it a side at a time so that it does not seem so big a task. I am painting it blue to match the raised beds, I like having something colourful to look at in the winter.



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This page has the following sub pages.

• Plant Diary
• Old Garden