‘No Dig Veg’ – Well Almost!

I’ve been distracted this summer by our new vegetable garden – our first! Our small back garden had been lawn for as long as anyone can remember so the challenge, back in February, was how to turn it into a productive veg patch. We didn’t have grand plans – just growing what we could for the fun of it – the idea being some fresh healthy food – from plot-to-plate – in just a few minutes.

Following ‘no dig’ principles (to minimise damage to the existing soil biodiversity), the first thing we had to do was build raised beds directly on top of the lawn. Each bed is 1.2m wide, with access both sides for easy maintenance. This created room for 3 new beds and a small area set aside specifically for composting. Hopefully the garden compost, plus green kitchen waste, will eventually find its way back on to the growing beds – a sort-of virtuous circle. In addition, we also kept a small area of the lawn. Half of this was left to grow wild – uncut right through the summer and the other half we used for picnicking on warm days.

Regarding the construction of the raised beds, these are made from treated ‘second quality’ scaffold boards, bought on line. They are held together at the corners by long galvanised decking screws. I used a spirit level to roughly align the tops of all the boards as the lawn is not level. I then placed a layer of cardboard on top of the existing grass and filled the beds with a mixture of top soil, farmyard manure and compost. Next year I may add another level of boards, to double the soil depth.

Although we live on the  north coast of Aberdeenshire, our coastal strip has a mild microclimate, very similar to that of Cornwall, but with less rain!  BBC Weather only ever shows a single temperature for the area of Scotland between Dundee and Inverness, which is daft. Geographically, this area includes the Cairngorm Mountains, so a general figure is actually meaningless. Our coastal strip is normally much warmer than the BBC forecasts. It seems few people know about the microclimate or the beauty and history of North Aberdeenshire. It is surprising how often we ate outdoors last year between March and November. The garden is a bit of a suntrap, normally sheltered from the sea-winds – the main issue living close the shore. So I had high hopes for our veggies!

But on Friday 17 February 2023, just after I’d started building the raised beds, we were hit by storm Otto. Winds reached 80mph, plucking slates from some roofs. Great gusts surged through our garden and scored a groove along the middle of one of the newly-filled raised beds – right down to the cardboard! Our new compost ended up everywhere. It was a harsh reminder just how destructive the weather can be.

The raised beds were quickly refilled once the storm had passed and planting began in late March. Although the beds are small, we decided to plant as wide a variety of crops as possible, to see which ones grew best and also to see which ones we made the most use of in the kitchen.  Here is a full list:

Orange and purple carrots, turnip, swede, beetroot, potatoes, radishes, root parsley (a bit like a white carrot and great for soups) and the leaves can be used as normal parsley. Other herbs, planted in the gravel along the footpath edge, included rosemary, mint, parsley, coriander, dill, chervil and chives growing in pots.

Zucchini, broad beans, sweetcorn, white and red onions, spring onions, plum tomatoes, large tomatoes, chillies, perpetual spinach, green and red lettuce varieties, chard, artichoke and rhubarb.

Strawberries, raspberries, gooseberries, dwarf varieties of apple, plum and cherry trees (for the years to come).

Most of the above plants have grown surprisingly well. The only casualty was our rhubarb which suffered broken roots early on due to the continuous wind-rocking. In addition we removed the swedes, turnips and beetroot as their large leaves grew quickly, making life difficult for the surrounding plants.

In terms of harvesting, we are enjoying a glut of zucchinis, both fruit and edible flowers; our potatoes were grown from unused supermarket varieties sold to eat, but which had sprouted in the cupboard. They have been a revelation – so tasty when dug and cooked within 30 minutes – and each plant produced so many tubers. The beat spinach, lettuce and radishes (root and leaves) have also done well and a second crops of radishes and perpetual spinach are already being eaten. The onions also grew well and are useful in so many dishes that they are now all eaten. We had a few strawberries and raspberries but the blackbirds got most of them and all of the gooseberries too – fruit net required!

A superb way to use the very large zucchini is to remove the soft seedy pith, then grate them. Squeeze out the water using a muslin cloth (takes a few minutes as needs doing thoroughly), add an egg and grated onion, season, mix well and fry as small pancakes – delicious! There are many things that can be added to the mixture before frying – just experiment!

I definitely planted everything far too closely, in an effort to cram as many varieties as possible into our small space, but that said, everything looks super-healthy. We had a great crop of broad beans, boiled and eaten within a few minutes of picking.

We grew lots of marigolds (in SeeHow) from seeds collected last year and planted these in groups in the beds to deter some bugs. Like everything here, they have also grown well and have now been flowering for many months. They provide a fantastic splash of yellows and oranges amongst the veg. Checking at the time of writing, there are still many more buds to open. In addition to marigolds, we also planted tall hollyhocks at the back of the border against the high boundary wall. These have done very well, growing to almost 2m in height and are still in flower. Garden poppies seem to keep popping up too, perhaps self-seeding from previous years and we now also have several sunflowers that may have self-seeded from the bird-feed! 

Although the veg garden has been a distraction from SeeHow, which is about planning for year-round garden flower colour, veggies also offer lots of colours too, as I hope the photos show. Potatoes have very beautiful and quite long-lasting flowers; nasturtiums provided many weeks of brightly coloured flowers that can also be added to salads. Chard comes in many colours, although for me the taste is a too bitter. Bean flowers can be very colourful depending on bean choice. Our broad bean flowers this year were white and black. Our dill now has umbels of tiny yellow flowers. The beef-steak tomatoes grew well from seeds collected last year and although they produced a few yellow flowers, so far these have not have turned into fruit, whereas the small plum tomatoes are covered in red and orange fruit.

In addition, veggies provide a huge variety of leaf shapes – think of long narrow (and tasty)onions leaves, huge zucchinis leaves like dinner plates or a wall of climbing beans as examples, creating a huge varieties of form and structure. And, because vegetables tend to be planted in groups, the overall effect is of ‘drifts’ of plants, just as recommended by the great garden colourist, Gertrude Jekyll herself!

As Monty Don - @themontydon - said last Friday in Gardeners World - @bbcgwlive - it really does feel that Autumn has arrived, even here on the mild Moray coast -#beautifulABDN. Looking back, I would say that our new veg garden was very successful in so many ways. Apart from the garden simply being a ‘happy place’, fresh food, straight from the garden to the plate simply cannot be beaten. Although it may be autumn, we are still harvesting our salad crops, plum tomatoes, chillies, potatoes and zucchinis as well as our herbs. But that said, we are also already preparing for next year - planning our new beds to maximise what we will eat - can’t wait!

The above Text and all Photographs are copyright of Wincenty (Wicek) Sosna. Please contact SeeHow for permission to reproduce in any way, in part or as the complete text.