Home-made butterfly defences

The things I need to make my homemade defences against butterflies finally arrived in the post - garden netting and string. I lashed sets on three sticks together with the string to make arches:

Lashing

Then I put a row of them into my veg patch, along the line where I wanted to sow my brassicas (cauliflower, cabbage and swede). The rising height is more due to inexact stick-breaking than intent.

I planted the brassica seedlings along the tunnel. I'm not sure how well the swedes will do, they were particularly rootbound, and I think I ended up snapping a lot of each individual plant's roots when I separated them because they were so intertwined - most of them had grown roots at most of the way down the length of the pot. That's the price of buying seedlings on special offer because they're past their best-before date and leaving them several more days while you wait for butterfly defences to arrive. Still, at 50p per pot of seedlings, it was worth a shot.

Rootbound swede seedlings

I then planted the lot in the space down the middle of my stick arches and covered the whole lot in netting, which I weighed down with some of the pieces of stone at strategic points along the whole length and at each end.

Home-made netting tunnel , and slug rings

The idea is that so long as the leaves of the plants don't touch the sides of the netting, butterflies won't be physically able to get to them to lay their eggs on them. No butterfly eggs = no caterpillars. No caterpillars = half decent chance of being able to eat the veg myself.
The last time I grew a brassica (broccoli), there were so many caterpillars they covered about half the surface of each of the plants, making them pretty much inedible (I decided that picking 10-15 caterpillars off per floret was too much like hard work, and quite aside from that, too gross). Don't worry about the local butterflies. Both my next-door neighbours have large buddleia plants in their gardens and butterflies thrive on the stuff. All I'm doing is using a bit of netting to make sure they choose the buddleia not my veggies to feed their babies on.

Buddleia

In case you're wondering what the copper-coloured rings are around some of the plants, they're exactly what they look like - copper rings. I got them from Slug Rings. The idea is that if you use them properly (make sure there aren't any slugs or slug eggs inside them to start with and that there aren't any gaps under them or bridges over them (e.g. leaves drooping over them), they protect the plant inside from slugs. The people who own the company are actually the parents of a friend of mine, so I've seen them work, but I've yet to prove that I can use them successfully. Watch this space for further news.

The first changes - hard work for very little visible result

I put my first vegetable bed in today. The soil was rock hard and riddled with stones, so I sprinkled a few watering cans of water over it first. Even then I could only get the fork in an inch or two the first time I dug it over. I  must have taken out over 50 stones that were getting in the way of my fork.

Before

After

I had to be quite inventive about where I stuck my fork to get it in deep, but I did manage it by the end of my second dig. 

That was when I decided to use the compost from the compost maker the last owners had left in the garden. Unfortunately, it turns out that the last owners weren't so much making compost as storing grass clippings, ants, spiders and flies. When I opened the flap at the bottom dozens and dozens of creepy crawlies started crawling out. The very bottom bit of the compost did look pretty well rotted though, despite the fact they put the compost maker on concrete instead of soil and didn't put anything except grass in it (two no-nos of composting). I didn't have any other organic matter to hand (and was too worn out to go and buy some shop-bought compost), so I decided to use some of it anyway and keep my fingers crossed that the ants and flies in it don't decide to set up permanent home in my veg patch (last I saw it they were crawling all over it).

The sticks are for my beans to grow up. I didn't have any bamboo sticks, so I went and scavenged some sticks from our local woodlands - they're a bit brittle, so I may have to replace them. I have now planted seeds from each of the packets in yesterday's photo, but I'm waiting for some netting and string I ordered online to arrive by post before I plant my seedlings, as I'll use those to try and rig up the netting to protect them from butterflies (and caterpillars).

Day one in the garden

We just moved into a new house and my plan is to transform the entire back garden into a giant vegetable patch - and preferably an organic one that looks pretty at that. This blog will document the transformation and my triumphs and failures and what I learn along the way.

This plan is based considerably more on optimism than knowledge. I've got about 8 years of gardening experience and most of that experience tells me that I find flowers a lot easier to grow than veg.

The garden is a pretty average sized back garden on the back of an Outer London semi. At the moment it mainly consists of grass, a load of overgrown shrubs, a large shed and a concrete path that mysteriously stops short of the right-hand corner of the shed.

The original plan was to cut down all the shrubs and then lay out the garden in a series of beds. I also kind of hoped an attractive layout would materialise in my head and I'd just know what to do with it. But two things have got in the way of that. The first is that I have chronic pain and I'm in a flare up at the moment, so cutting down a load of overgrown shrubs is rather outside the scope of things it's sensible for me to do right now. And secondly, we just went to B&Q and I spotted a load of vegetable seedlings and seeds that
you can still sow in June and got all excited.

So, the revised plan is to start by digging up the patch of ground next to the shed and plant the vegetables I bought there and go from there.

I watered the spot today because we haven't had rain in days and it currently looks rock hard. I've got my fingers crossed that this will make it easier to dig, as my back is definitely not up to very hard work at the moment. Also, I spotted a cabbage white butterfly while I was taking these photos, so before I get planting, I need to find a way to protect my brassicas. The last time I tried to grow a brassica (broccoli), I ended up growing roughly equal quantities by weight of broccoli and caterpillars, making the the broccoli pretty much inedible.