Friday 9 January 2015

Raised Beds - Recycled

The excitement of this morning has been the arrival of the three raised beds my husband ordered from a recycling company north of the Solway Firth.  This business, Solway Direct, collects surplus farm plastic and converts it into useful agricultural items of many kinds, included our three linked beds.

These are in our garage waiting to be assembled.  This stage will be another test of our joint instruction-decoding ability. In times past we have been known to jest that an additional exercise, which does not find its way on to any marriage preparation courses, should be the challenge of an item of flat-packed furniture, with accompanying instruction leaflet translated from a non-Roman script and printed in a very small point size.   I hasten to add that I do not anticipate any problems with our recent Scots purchase.

It was a happy coincidence that after the invoice arrived yesterday, paid in full, that my husband decided to go outside and bury our compost kitchen waste in a bean trench.  The plan is that the beds will be placed side by side close to the path edge of our kitchen garden and that beans will grow in the space between them and the concrete block wall which divides us from our neighbour.

Why plastic, you may ask after so many years of pallets?  Well, our neighbour on the other side of the wall told us that he was tired of his wooden raised beds rotting away in the wet conditions of the north west.  Also there is another consideration.  An allotment is not literally, on your doorstep.  You can enter the site confident that fellow allotmenteers are unlikely to compete in outdoing one another in their outlay.  Far from it.  However, upon looking out on the garden from the kitchen whilst washing up, or entertaining relatives to afternoon tea, one does wish all parties to receive an overall impression of order, tidiness and substance.

So onwards to planning of rotations, assembly, and building up the soil above the water table.

No comments:

Post a Comment