As I mentioned in a previous post, I started my little veggie garden/farming project in August, 2017, making it a little over three months now. (As an aside, August in South Africa is the end of Winter and the optimal time to start planting bed preparation and soil enrichment.)
And, in three short months, it’s gone from a grass-filled, dry, dilapidated space to a thriving garden from which we can harvest food on a weekly basis.
There is an existing shade cloth structure which was in desperate need of repair when we began the project. It was overgrown, dry, dusty, and had grass growing to knee height.
We first started clearing the grass away from inside to allow us to move around more freely, then we began clearing the tree branches and leaves from the roof. These had accumulated over the years and had many little insect (especially spiders) residents. Needless to say, our improvised methods of cleaning the roof, which included hitting at it with brooms, left us full of dust and unwelcome visitors. But, eventually, we managed to clear the top.
Most of the surrounding trees were cut back to avoid the leaves and debris gathering on the roof again.
This is what it looked like when we started (first week of August):
Later, we then started to patch the holes in the shade cloth, and we sewed the panels which had either been cut to allow for the clearing of debris, leaves, and branches, or which had split from age back together. It was very good exercise for the arms, as one has to work above one’s head to reach. Luckily, the structure is not that high! Otherwise, I bet we would have still been there repairing shade cloth now. 😛
Once the actual structure had been repaired and the area cleared, we could start bed planning and preparation. We decided to go with the keyhole approach, so that the beds would be a bit more accessible. We left a wide, main path and a secondary path, connected by a shorter path. As you can see in the photo below, we used dry grass as a mulch, which was mostly due to convenience with the plot having an abundance of dry grass and leaves.
Second week of August:
Towards the end of August, we started our first planting. Yay! All the hard prep had finally paid off! 😀 Most of the seedlings came from my favourite seed and seedling supplier – Living Seeds from Henley-on-Klip. When planting the seedlings, we added a layer of seedling mix from Just Nature Organics to give them a good boost and because we didn’t know what kind of soil we were really dealing with yet. You can also see in the second photo that we put up an extra layer of bird mesh fencing around the base of the shade cloth structure because the shade cloth had so many holes towards the bottom.
Ps. The lemons in the photos came in with the mulch. 😛
So that was August in a nutshell – lots of manual labour, sweat, and hard work. But also a great reward with the first planting. 🙂