First of May, public holiday, great weather – gardening time!

This year I’m decommissioning the planting boxes in the kitchen garden. They’re more hassle than they’re worth. I can’t say they’ve been useless – the home-grown peas were nice – but overall just not worth it.

Most of all I’m tired of the endless watering. Maybe it’s because they’re raised (heated by the sun from the sides, no buffering from the soil around them). Maybe it’s because of the soil I’ve bought – much of the soil that is sold is very peaty. Maybe both and then some more. But the soil dries out so fast that I can never get a break from the watering. And then we go away for a week and come back to half-dead plants.

The work might be worth it if the yield was great. But with strawberries, for example, a planter fits six plants, which altogether yields a couple of breakfast bowls of strawberries. Maybe three. To share between the four of us. Enough to whet the appetite, but it’s not like we could eat home-grown strawberries with our cereal all summer. So to make it worth it, we’d need to have a much larger kitchen garden.

The raspberries, which I had hopes for – larger plants, more fruit – just died. Could be because I couldn’t keep up with the watering?

So now I’m giving up. I don’t know what I’ll do with this part of the garden instead, but whatever it is, it’ll have to tolerate dry conditions and shallow soil and survive without daily coddling. And as for strawberries, we’ll just buy all the strawberries that we can eat.

I’m using the soil from the planting boxes to fill in sunken bits of the lawn. I recall the lawn as being much more even when we moved in – now it’s got dips and bumps and depressions all over. If I really cared about the state of the lawn, I could invest much more work in evening it out properly, but this might at least improve the situation while utilising all this soil I have. Throw some grass seeds on it, and it’ll be good enough.