THE GOOD LIFE

Ideas and advice for would-be smallholders in the country and the city

You can’t picture Easter without thinking of hens and yet, quite frankly, I’m ready to throttle the lot of them. They’ve spent a blissful six months scratching up my raised vegetable beds, making a glorious mess, and now they need to go back in their run. I love seeing them strutting around the farm – they’re such characters – but few things are more heartbreaking for a gardener than watching newly planted seedlings flying through the air, propelled backwards by an eager claw.

The chickens love my raised beds and so do I. I don’t grow vegetables any other way now. They’re a doddle to weed – no more painful bending over – and I find that pests such as pigeons and rabbits tend to leave them alone. When I built my raised beds, I filled them with the best soil and compost I could find, giving myself the ultimate head start. And, every year, a thick layer of mushroom compost replenishes the nutrients with very little digging – it’s gardening at its easiest. Despite being a keen recycler,

I don’t use old railway sleepers for raised beds – they can leach out toxic chemicals for years after. I prefer new, untreated oak sleepers; you construct the beds like giant Lego bricks and screw them together, at the corners, with long sleeper screws (sometimes called landscape screws). The bed can just sit straight on the bare earth – it doesn’t need a base. I line the inside of the walls with thick plastic membrane to stop the moist soil rotting the timbers. The beauty of oak is that you don’t need to treat it – it will just silver gently over the years.

Height-wise, it’s up to you. I have beds of two heights. Low, one-sleeper-high beds work well for herbs (which tend to be left alone by ‘nibblers’), climbing vegetables such as peas and French beans, and rhubarb, which nothing seems to eat. Most of my vegetables, however, go into beds three sleepers high (about 50cm) – I find it’s the ideal working height for pulling up and cutting, and allows plenty of soil depth and drainage for the plants.

As for crops, the world’s your oyster.

I sow things in neat rows and blocks, partly for ease but mostly because it satisfies my obsession with perfectly neat potagers. It’s wonderful to see the lines of seeds grow into blocks of vibrant, delicious colour. And the hens? Well, they just have to watch, greedily, from afar.

It’s wonderful to see the lines of seeds grow into blocks of vibrant, delicious colour