Armorel's Shared Veggie Plot garden

I’m going to share this Veggie Plot with our elderly Uncle who is in his early eighties and has Parkinsons and DLB (dementia with Lewy Bodies). It’s been HIS veggie plot for about ten years but he has become less and less able to tend it. Bending, digging, sowing, weeding etc have all become more and more difficult for him. So, in the interests of keeping him actively involved in the garden AND with the intention of making sure that the plot does produce some veggies this year, I’ve joined forces with him to look after it.

Last year, the only veggie he grew on the plot was beetroot and that was a bit of a faux-pas. On a windy day last summer, he was bending down with difficulty, without his glasses on, his hands shaking as he tried to pour the seeds from the packet into a drill, when the wind caught the packet and scattered the beetroot seeds all over the plot!

The plot is a narrow strip of soil alongside an old, well-established Escallonia hedge, with a concrete path down one side bordered by a large loose granite stone wall, festooned with a heavy blanket of ivy, and backed by a serious thicket of brambles. So it is reasonably well sheltered, gets quite a good amount of sun and is easy to access. But it is also riddled with mint and ivy (both invading from the field on the other side of the stone wall), the roots of the escallonias and brambles, lots of couch grass (twitch) and plenty of windblown weed seedlings.

This morning, in pleasant sunshine, I gathered a garden fork, handtrowel and handfork, secateurs, bucket, wheelbarrow and kneeler and went to tackle the plot. Our uncle, obviously anxious about me doing anything to his plot, decided he would come out and ‘help’ me. So, while I dug and weeded, he chopped rather ineffectually at the overgrown escallonia hedge with a pair of rusty shears (without his glasses on, of course). Bless him!

I hauled out yards and yards of mint roots, couch grass roots and other roots which went on the pile to be incinerated in a bonfire later. I tried to winkle the mint out of the one remaining rhubarb stool but wasn’t very successful, although I did find another rhubarb stool which I dug up and replanted next to its friend, marking it with a stick because it’s not making any growth yet.

The soil is very light and sandy, lovely to work with but hopeless when it comes to retaining moisture – it dries out in the blink of an eye. So, when rain threatened at midday, our uncle pottered off indoors rather unsteadily and I headed out onto the beach with a wheelbarrow and fork. I only managed to collect one barrowful of seaweed from the beach before it started to pour with rain, so I dumped it on the middle of the two-thirds-dug plot and spread it about a bit with the fork. Then I dashed indoors to change out of damp clothes and make myself a hot cup of tea.

It’s a beginning anyway :)