My raised beds are made out of dense hollow concrete blocks, which have two big holes in them. This gives me extra planting holes around the edges of the beds, although I have written before about the perils of picking the wrong plants for them.
Our broad-leaf sorrel (which is Shchavel, from the Heritage Seed Library) has been happily growing in several of the holes for a couple of years. We don’t much like it, but the chickens love it and would happily eat it every day. As such, during the redesign I am relocating as many plants as possible to the ‘chicken’ bed at the bottom of the garden.
Pulling up the sorrel plants that were growing in the holes has been quite hard. They have rooted down through two blocks, and into the soil beneath. At this time of year they are like icebergs, with sparse top growth covering endless roots. Hopefully they will survive my rough treatment and settle into their new home, but if they don’t then new plants are easy enough to raise from seed. I have already moved two perennial kales and the Buckler Leaf Sorrel into the chicken bed; the Buckler leaf sorrel should make a nice (edible) ground cover.
Progress on the redesign is slow, so there are no new garden photos today. Each of those concrete blocks weighs about 25 kg, so there’s a limit on how many I can heft about in one session. And some of them have bedded in to the point where I need to use a crow bar to lever them up; only I can’t find the crow bar, so I am having to use the pick axe….
Linda Penney wrote:
...on Fri, Dec 9 '11 (161 days ago)