I bought a house in Fife towards the tail-end of last year, renovated it and moved in in April. During the renovations I was able to take some time out to try and rescue some of the garden. The house is set in almost an acre of walled garden, with 12-foot-high walls, on a south-facing hillside and with the ground having been worked for decades. No excuses there! However, the old feller who'd owned it before had been finding it a bit much for a few years, and I just had to cover half my chosen vegetable plot with carpets and liners and concentrate on getting the other half going for this year. I've lifted dozens of metres of tree-roots and am thinking seriously about taking down the sycamores (and I'll certainly take down the dreaded Leylandii!) and replacing them with a natural hedge of rowan and hawthorn.
I've tried to attach a pic from a couple of months ago on the half I got going on, so about five or six months in. Just behind me I even have a little stream running through the middle of the vegetable plot, which is nice on a summer's day.
I'm a complete newbie, but it's good rugby training so at least I've put the work in. It was covered in thistles, nettles and (worst of all) creeping buttercup, which I have grown to hate as it extends across the whole garden and seems to grow at a foot a week or so. So I've been hoeing several times a week for months and it's still not completely died down! Still, I've been eating my own tatties since the first earlies (best I've ever tasted!), and shouldn't run out for a while yet (four sacks in all). The onions were great, the beetroots wonderful (especially the white ones), and you may all be used to being able to eat raw sweetcorn off the cob but for me it was a revelation! I'm definitely planting a lot more next year. The strawberries and rasps were a bit sparse, even before the birds took their bit (not to self: finish building fruit cage!) and nothing much at all off the rest, but the place has fifteen or sixteen fruit trees, to which I've added more pears and an almond on the south-facing wall, so I've got about 40 gallons of various wines and ciders going
The big failure was the cauliflowers, which have been devastated by birds and pests despite attempts with cloches and netting. And it's frustrating having all that asparagus, horseradish etc that I can't harvest this year!
Anyway, now that the harvest is pretty much done on all but the brassicas, salsify, swedes and the like, my Dad and i are working on getting an old rotivator going that we found in a shed: stripped it down and rebuilt it, and it just needs a new throttle cable now before we try to start it up. Once that's going I'll open up the second half that's been under cover for a year.
Plans for next year: more of all the stuff I tried out, especially tomatoes. I kept tasting stuff, being amazed and realising I needed to plant four times as much!
(thanks)
and welcome