Spider's Web

Today we spent marking out the planned kitchen garden. It's at the bottom of the site, on the lowest tier of the garden, in a space roughly ten metres deep, and most of the width of the garden. It's bounded on the southern side by the fence at the edge of the neighbouring horse field; on the east by the fence with the neighbours' stables, and there's a dry-stone wall to a second neighbour's horse field, lightly planted with trees.

At the moment, the site looks like the titular spider's web: we used most of a ball of string and several dozen bamboos and sticks to lay out the beds. The path down from the left of the garden comes past the main corner copse, and leads into the kitchen garden. Eventually, we'll put up an arched trellis, or similar, to divide it off. I'm entertaining slightly whimsical thoughts of growing an edible honeysuckle over it, as the boundary between the areas for food and pleasure (are the two separate?).

Once past the border, there's a bed to either side. One will have the blueberries, with gooseberries opposite. As the site widens out, the next two beds will be for raspberries, and protected behind (north) of these are a strawberry bed, and space for rhubarb. That's the end of the soft fruit: west of this is a squarish area of around 10m edge, divided into about ten individual beds for vegetables: four L-shaped corner beds, a small round bed in the centre, and three L- or C-shaped beds in between. The main production beds are the four outer ones, really; the smaller central ones are at least partly to add interest.

On the west edge of the garden, past the vegetable patch is space for 'the' shed---either the existing one, if it can be persuaded to stay together well enough to move, or a new one in time---and the steps leading up to the middle tier.

That's the easy work done, unfortunately: lifting the turves isn't an easy job!