About
Welcome to the Waltons…..we are a large family who have always nurtured an interest in gardening and what we eat. So in Mid 2010 we decided to convert an area of the back garden -which had formally been occupied by a large number of hens, ducks and a Goose- into a large L shaped raised bed and smaller square bed for vegetables.
Luckily with a landscape gardener in the family this didn’t take long to construct out of large sleepers and left over decking boards. We filled the beds with two large lorry loads of a mixture of horse manure, mushroom compost and topsoil all hands to the deck (wheelbarrows) and the beds were ready for planting.
We started planting fairly late into the season but even so managed to eat fresh lettuce throughout the summer, along with some peas, broad beans, cucumbers, radishes, Spinach, beetroot, courgettes and tomatoes. Although our neighbour supplied us with a large quantity of her produce on the odd few occasions and left us wondering what she did just over the fence that produced fairly high yields. We guessed she had started off very early producing plants from seed in the greenhouse. So once the beds were cleared in the autumn our planning began.
We planted leeks and broccoli that had really taken off when the cooler weather struck in late autumn/early winter and we left them in to see what would happen not expecting much especially after they were buried by 8-10 inches of snow during December and January. The Broccoli met its match with this weather and went mushy which the pigeons took as a sign they could finish it off, the leeks reveled in this cool weather and made a good accompaniment to a couple of casseroles early in the year.
