This is my newest garden bed.
And see beside it there? That’s the pile of broken concrete I had to dig out. Or half of it – the other half is in the wheelbarrow and I’m not bringing it back for the photo.
Worse than that – growing up and through and around that pile of concrete was asparagus fern and fishbone fern and jasmine vine. Do you know asparagus fern? It looks lke asparagus but you can’t eat it and it has horrible thorns all the way along each frond. And it’s invasive, and deep rooted, and a bugger to get out. All tangled together. My hands are smashed. I have holes from digging out thorns and skinned knuckles s and friction burns from trying to pull out jasmine.
And all that for less than a square metre of garden space.
All of which is why is it my newest garden bed, and not one of my oldest, despite the fact that what you can see next to it is a fence, perfect for trellising, and through the fence next door’s lawn bathed in north-facing sun. It’s the end of the fence we built a couple of years ago, the rest of which has held up passionfruit and Madagascar beans and cherry tomatoes for several seasons now.
I’ve been looking ruefully at that mess of concrete rubble and weeds for a couple of years. All that beautiful photosynthesis fuel pouring down on lawn! (We do get the lawn clippings, donated to our chook-powered composting system, but still …). I would have planted a tree there, to harvest next-door’s light over the fence and next door’s soil under the fence. But it’s the north side and a tree would shade the rest of the back yard.
A couple of years ago, when we were fresh into this retrosuburban adventure, I wrote in a post about Tardissing the site: “It all just boils down to sun, soil and water, and on a small, urban site, sun is the limiting factor.” Attention to the sun path and solar aspect is a real key to designing well, anywhere, but especially in suburbia. That bit of north facing fence was worth it. Solar energy is the source of everything living, and it’s ephemeral – if you don’t catch it, it’s gone. Worth every bandaid.
