Raised Beds, Marrow Rum and Cold Frames

Last year when I got on the gardening band waggon I wasn't too sure what it was that I wanted to achieve...however I did know one thing...no matter what I wanted to achieve a raised bed would help me do it! So I waited a few months until I found a raised bed that was on offer from B&Q then with a bit of resourcefulness managed to get 20% off on top of sale price...happy days.
I'd like to point out that B&Q is normally not my first port of call (primarily because you can get pretty much everything they sell cheaper somewhere else) and when it came to making raised beds this year I took a completely different approach.

I decided in the end to purchase 2 raised beds and staked them out roughly going north to south which I had read that was what I was supposed to do. Once both were down I thought it would be a good idea to have one that was a bit more sheltered and protected that the other for the less heady vegetables and so brought some timber to turn it in to a cold frame with a lid on hinges.



I think that this would have been a good idea if I had more experience and had have known which vegetables to plan where.  I signed my self up for a free subscription to a veg plot planning website that list most veg and also has a square meter gardening feature which would tell me how many veg to plant per box on the raised beds (that's what I've marked out with the string).

At the time I did this I planted 3 courgette plants in the cold frame at the far end...this was my first mistake, I had no idea how quickly these grew and how big they got!  After a few weeks the lid was constantly open as otherwise the courgettes would have all died.  Initially I had a problem with the courgettes that they were growing small fruit but then the flower would grow a mildew type residue causing the fruit to rot which looking around on the internet appeared to be a calcium deficiency.  To rectify this all I did was cut off all the fruit, give the plant a feed with a cheap soluble plant food every few days after this the plant just kept producing more and more fruit, so much so that in the end I let a few over grow, hollowed out the middle and made some Marrow Rum(this is the recipe I used but there are many more).

In the other half of the cold frame I put a few different things:
Now that these are starting to mature I think that this might have been a mistake putting them in the sheltered side as they seem to have grown really tall, and I'm not sure if this is because they have bolted or if it's just how they're supposed to be but I don't think nature intended for that stalk below to support a cabbage head!


The Chicory grew really well and now doesn't seem to want to go away, tastes nice and not too much of a slug problem either, managed to plant quite a few in a very small space and just pull off the leaves when I need some.



Not too sure how broccoli is supposed to grow this may have bolted as well, or maybe I was supposed to mound the earth up around the stem, anyways here's how that's looking (the centre row).


The unsheltered side doesn't seem to have faired well, I would have thought this is mainly as I didn't protect them in the snow and so were under a foot of snow for about a week.  On this side I have:

The beet leaf at the moment is not looking to promissing [right], the Lettuce are looking ok [front left] (not too sure how large they should be at this stage (harvest is March - May, but as I planted them late I'm thinking more towards May) and the Spinach in the back ground has got a fair few months to go.


Quite pleased with the Pak Choi however, a colleague at work informed me that they grow quite well and I have done nothing to mine since putting them out and they've done well (they too were under lots of snow but it doesn't seem to have effected them).

All in all I think that the raised beds have helped and this year I have created two deeper ones for root vegetables as the carrots that were planted in the shallow bed didn't grow well at all (see post Giant Tea Spoon or Tiny Carrot).
  

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