Ed's Simple Life

Well the Carrot harvest the year was an interesting one. I'd steered clear of growing carrots due to stories about carrots pulsating with carrot fly which honestly made me want to vom.  I decided to face my fear and armed with my B&Q Value F1 Carrot packet of 1500 seeds it was time to plant some carrots. Above is the resulting crop from my seeds, I didn't plant too many as I was lacking for space and needed to fit them in-between the Chicory and the Broccoli in the cold frame so I wasn't expecting a bumper harvest.  I wasn't too concerned about the meager quantity because after all it was just a trial...but the size?! Above are the same carrots but this time with a tea spoon next to them...not a table spoon a tea spoon! They did taste great, but I was a little disappointed with how small they were.  I figured that I hadn't prepared the soil enough for them with the soil beneath the cold frame being too compacted. My solution to all of this (...

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 c...