The Croftless Crofter
At the end of last season I cast a slightly disillusioned eye around the garden at the things which hadn’t worked.
Lack of time, lack of attention or inhospitable conditions at the key times for certain planted things with Goldilocks syndrome (too hot, too cold, too dry, too wet) meant it had not been a productive growing season.
My natural optimism won out though and instead I took note of what had worked and why.
It had been the areas which had thrived on benign neglect, which had either been thoughtfully placed and then left to get on with it or done well despite lack of attention which caught my eye.
I vowed then to let that shape what I did in the garden this year - carefully plan for things which would do well with sporadic attention in the sort of short, sharp bursts which are characteristic of both my work schedule and my own personality of intense concentration followed by being distracted by something shiny and wandering off to focus on something else.
March has offered its usual mercurial mix of kidding us that spring has well and truly arrived only to follow up a day or two of short sleeve-wearing days with a fall of snow and three nights of heavy frosts.
But during a couple of sunshiney days last week I got the first seeds of the season sown and out in the cold frame and had a wander around the garden spotting what needs attention and what is doing just fine without any intervention.
There are leaves on the soft fruit bushes, the herbs are starting to come back, the areas we left to self seed with edible and pollinator-friendly flowers like nasturtium and borage are ready for a new layer of compost and then they will be happy left alone.
The mint garden under the decking is already starting to grow again and the strawberries in a gutter pipe all have plenty of new growth which was protected from the worst of the late frost by leaving last year’s dead brown leaves in situ as a sort of duvet.
Our home compost bin, which we got from Lochaber Environmental Group four years ago, has been moved a few times to empty it and dress the beds before starting the process again with kitchen waste but the current location has never really worked.
In high winds the lid always gets blown away meaning a game of Hunt The Compost Bin Lid is a regular part of clean-up activities the day after a storm and, along with welcome wildlife making a home in it, like slowworms, we have also had a pine marten visiting regularly, digging up inside from below and then dragging out partly composted waste across the garden.
It did make for an interesting family sweepstake on what the compost thief might be before we captured it on our trailcam, but having lost chickens to the pine marten we would rather they stayed outside of the garden, particularly as they are such messy eaters.
Inspired by a tip in a forest gardening book I am reading, we moved the compost bin into the centre of a raised bed this time.
Any liquid leaching from the bottom will feed straight into the bed. It will make for easier emptying straight into the bed. It is less accessible to visiting scavengers, or at least they will be helping to spread compost where we want it anyway and we have attached the lid to a stake in the ground so that should not be lost in the next storm either.
As usual after this burst of activity there will now be a natural break while I wait for seeds to arrive for the next phase of sowing, a free couple of hours and a nice day to be outside but the first moves towards this season’s plan of curated ignoring are in place.