Once upon a time, we had a beautiful and well-tended vegetable plot at the top of our garden. Once it won a prize, for the best combined flower and vegetable garden in all the kingdom (well, the village, anyway). Then some stuff happened, the plot became untended, and the bindweed sprung up, leaving it looking more like the hedge around Sleeping Beauty's castle than the thing of ordered beauty and abundance that it had once been.
This year, we have Had Enough, and have vowed to restore it to its former glory, and the work starts here. It's largely been a bit of a slash and burn project, so far (which has been destructive but immensely satisfying in some horrible, primal way mwahahahaa), but needs must! The plan is to garden with as little chemical intervention as possible, despite the rampant Devil's Guts (aka the Bloody Bindweed), and with that in view we are adopting a very appealing-sounding "no dig" policy. Ho, yes!
Thus far, apart from the aforementioned slashing and burning, this has involved Mr Pennington laying down vast amounts of cardboard to exclude the light from the weeds, prompting him to comment that "It looks like flipping Greenham Common, up there" (no bad thing). O
nce this terrible cold has lifted a little, there will be a lot of compost and well rotted organic manure (we all know what that is) being spread around, ready for planting.
I thought I should out us on here, and give the odd progress report, in the hope that it will enforce CONSISTENT ACTION on our parts. Yikes. Where we will fit it all in, I don't know, but bring it on, I say.