The rest of bed three and a melon bed

This is a melon bed. It's good for growing the whole cucurbit family and it's bigger than it looks in this photo check out the relative size of the wheelbarrow to the right of it. I haven't put the polythene cover on it yet because I'm letting it settle for a day or two before planting it.

I'll describe the details below.

Planting was completed in bed 3 in the vegetable garden yesterday; to the north of the Arran pilot First Early potatoes  Solanum tuberosum I planted pink fir apple (A strange shaped long thin pink potato ) and to the North of that Kestrel second earlies. The potato is an incredibly useful plant. It has medicinal and other uses in addition to it's use as a staple food. The wikipedia article is also well worth reading.


At the northenmost end of beds 1 2 and 3 I planted about a half dozen seeds of artichoke  Cynara scolymus Violet de Provence (Has medicinal uses and is a curdling agent) These will be a permanent feature assuming they germinate and survive the rabbits (I will block their run in a day or two but I want to take a few for meat first to pay me for my lost beetroot seedlings and deter the others).

The potatoes didn't quite fill the bed so I did a block of Parsnip Pastinaca sativa  Gurnsey
and a block of Carrot Daucus carota sativus Cosmic purple (My favourite carrot it's purple outside and orange and yellow inside. Intense colours. Intense colours in vegetables indicates they contain a lot of flavinoids so a lot of the veg I grow is darkly coloured).

Another block of beetroot Beta vulgaris craca Boltardy and pea Pisum sativum
Oregon sugar pod all around the edges of the northern half of the bed.


On to the melon bed.

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You start by piling up about a metre's depth of unrotted horse manure and stable sweepings. (You can make it thinner if you just use horse dung without the straw but it makes much better compost with a decent amount of straw in it and you don't want it hot enough to burn your plants). You can make the bed as long as you like but 8 -10 metres is a good size. 


A melon bed can be used for melons, courgettes, pumpkings and squashes and cucumbers. For melons and cucumbers you leave the plastic on but you can take it off in mid june (In Southern England, cooler climates can leave the plastic on but it means more watering if you don't have drip feed) for the squashes and marrows.

This work really takes it out of you so if possible get help. You'll be moving several tons of horse manure. You often find that stables that keep their horses indoors are willing to give their manure away for nothing if you ask nicely. The more of this stuff you can get the better. This manure will be feeding the beds next year and will themselves become raised beds because they kill at the perennial weeds with their heat and the darkness under them. Hotbeds without manure have to be huge.

 You then put a layer of compost about 6cm thick on top of the manure. You can plant this quite densely because there is a lot of food in the hotbed below (Cucurbits love feeding they;ll get huge) This job could have been done a month or to ago to give the stuff an even earlier start but I'm a bit behind schedule in a few areas because of the sheer amount of barrowing to do. Once the main beds are made the pace will get easier.

 

 Use a pole digger to make holes about a metre apart for some hazel or willow poles, twist them together and tie them off.

 Tie in some cross bracing I just put in a horizontal pole here but I'll probably reinforce it with a latice of poles which is a must for windy areas. You leave it to settle a day or two before planting but it can be planted up even in frosty weather once covered. Not sure how far below zero though the other hotbeds have been fine down to about -5 so far but I'm not expecting too much more of that now although it's still possible.. I'll post another pic once it's covered.

I'm working on a big post as a status report on how things are growing and I've taken a lot of photos that need to be winnowed down so my next post should be soon. Not a lot you can say about barrowing manure hence my lack of posts recently.