to this!

Many front gardens are paved over and often this is a neglected space. If you don’t use your front garden for parking and would like to use the space more productively you could try the simple idea below. Our front garden is ideal for this as it’s south facing. If you don’t have enough space, try growing veg and/or planting some flowers bees like, in pots or containers instead.

You will need:
Tools for removing the paving. We used an old wallpaper scraper to loosen the mortar around the edges, and an old chisel and hammer to lever the slabs.

- A spade for removing sand and mortar.

- Some topsoil and compost if your soil is of low quality.

- Veg plants/seeds and plants to attract bees.

This is how it looked to begin with:

The paving was a haven for weeds and easily became untidy.

Decide on the design and how many slabs you would like to remove before you start.

If your paving slabs are as heavy as ours there is some physical labour to do, and a bit of effort is required to loosen the slabs at the beginning.

However once you have lifted one of the slabs it is easier to lift the others.

When you’ve lifted all the slabs you will probably have to remove some sand and mortar. This, along with some of the heavy clay soil, was used as a sub layer for a raised bed created in the back garden, which will be used to grow salad crops.

We added topsoil/soil improver to the beds in the front garden which was delivered in a bulk bag from a local supplier and some peat free compost.

We created four beds: three for vegetables and one to encourage bees!

Tomatoes and peas were from plants and runner beans and sweetcorn were planted direct from seed.

The plants in the bee bed so far are mainly herbs that produce flowers bees are particularly keen on including an ornamental salvia, fennel, lavender, chives and borage.

We ate our first produce at the weekend!

How to convert this

to this, without unnecessary digging.

I did this several years ago on a piece of land which had been left to go to grass, and I didn’t want to have to remove all the turf before starting to grow veg, as it is such hard work.

So, when I converted some of my lawn to a veg bed this year, I thought I would provide a step by step record for others to use.

You will need:

1. Measuring tools
2. Bamboos or rope for marking out
3. Spade
4. Slow release organic fertiliser
5. Enough cardboard to cover the growing area about one and a half times *
6. Bricks or weights to secure cardboard if you are not covering it with a mulch straight away
7. Home compost or  leafmould, or bought soil improver to cover planting areas to depth of 75 mm
8. Weed excluding membrane, normally available from a local nursery or garden centre and scissors
9. Wire cutters and pliers
10. Heavy gauge wire to make  into large staples
11. Enough bark to cover path areas to 50mm depth. I used play bark as it was more uniform in texture
12. Plants in waiting to be installed in your new veg plot #

* I have always got the cardboard I needed from a small company who supplies electrical equipment, as they have to pay to have their cardboard taken away for recycling. Try a printer cartidge refill company or a local white or wet goods supplier. Remove all the plastic wrapping tape as it will not compost down. White shiny cardboard works fine as it is not normally a plasticized finish.

# The best plants to use in the first year are those that require growing in pots or modules and then planting out. It will not be possible to grow seeds in this veg plot until the cardboard has fully broken down. I used tomatoes and courgettes, and will shortly be planting Tuscan Kale, winter white cabbages and leeks. Other plants that would be suitable are squash and pumpkins,  cucumbers, and beans grown in pots or modules.

• Work out your layout. Because I had a reasonably sized area, I decided to keep a 1.2 metre grass width all the way round the bed where there was no existing path. I had a largish area, so I subdivided it into areas where I could reach over to the centre without standing on the soil. I don’t believe in walking on soil, and so always use a bed system. For a shortish person the optimal width of a bed is 1.2 metres, but you will see here that none of the beds are straight, and so I needed to make a rough guess by stretching to work out the best layout for beds. If you have a smaller area then make your grass edging strip smaller, say 30 – 45 cms,  unless it is practical to convert all your lawn. In my case it was not as I needed to access flower beds and further down the garden.
• Mark out the area which you want to convert. I used a series of bamboos lying on the ground  to mark it, but you could use hosepipe or rope, or anything else to hand.

•  Using  a spade cut the lines of the edge of the beds. I just marked out the beds and also the edges of the paths where they joined up with the existing  grass I was keeping.

• Dig over the areas to one  spit depth with a spade,  turning the grass over with the rest of the soil. This is the only bit of digging on this bed you will really need to do, except for occasional loosening of the soil if weather compacts it badly. ( I would rather not have had to dig it at all, but the area had been used as a lawn for over 40 years and children had played on it, so I knew the soil would be too compacted to grow veg without loosening it first.) You don’t need to cover the grass with soil, as it will be covered with cardboard later. Don’t bother to dig the paths over, as they are better kept well compacted with the turf in situ. The paths will be covered with weed suppressing fabric later. At this stage, also remove a small v shaped wedge of turf where the paths join the grass surround. This is to act as a defined boundary between the bark covered paths and the mown grass.
• Don’t forget this step, as I did. Spread a generous amount of organic fertiliser such as chicken pellets on now. If you have sandy or very clay soil spread some manure or compost on now to a depth of about 25mm. This will be taken down by the worms immediately and will provide soil improvement and some nutrition until the cardboard has decomposed and the compost laid on it as a mulch becomes available to the worms to draw down.Once you have covered it with cardboard you will not be able to put fertiliser into the soil the plants are growing in. Although fertiliser spread on top of the final mulch will eventually percolate down, it will not do so fast enough for young plants.

• Next, cover all the growing areas with flattenned old cardboard boxes. Overlap them well, and put several layers down if you think the light is not excluded enough. WARNING: do not leave the cardboaard unsecured in this state. It can very easily be lifted in the wind and be blown around damaging plants nearby. Although damping it down can keep it in one place for a time, this is short lived as wind and sun has a habit of drying it out quickly. I made the mistake of leaving the cardboard unsecured at my allotment once and came back to cardboard litterred everywhere, and some quite acerbic comments!

• We actually pegged and roped (with biodegradable string) our cardboard down as we knew it would be a while before we got round to covering it with mulch.

• Cover all the cardboard areas with a mulch at least 50mm deep. This will keep the cardboard in place, and will retain the water, so that as the cardboard finishes its job of excluding light from the soil under it, it will have decomposed and added to the organic matter in the soil. I used a mixture of my own compost and leafmould, and purchased organic well-rotted stable manure, as I didn’t have enough of my own organic matter. Once the cardboard has broken down, the compost will become assimilated with the soil and you will find that next year you have a veg bed in very good heart.

• Cut weed suppressing membrane to strips about 30 cm wider and longer than your paths.
• Make staples/pegs from heavy gauge wire. You will need to staple in three places at each end of the path and where the membrane overlaps itself. Along the edges of the path it will need to be stapled approx every 50 cms. I needed about 60-70 staples for my area. Make sure you make some spare, as, as sure as eggs is eggs, you will need extra after a few months to secure wayward pieces. I made incomplete U shapes, to save on materials, as shown below.

• Staple down the membrane as descibed above and cover with approx 50mm of bark.

• Now you are ready for the fun bit- planting! Lay out your plants where they are to go (if they are in pots), clear the mulch from the cardboard and cut  a large X in the cardboard. Fold the edges of the cardboard under itself and dig a hole for the plant. In the picture below, you will see that I didn’t bother to fold the cardboard under since it had already been in place a while and had started to disintegrate.

• Now this step is essential if you have moles in the vicinity. Fill the hole full of water. If it drains away faster than you are filling it, then you have dug across a mole run. It will be a waste of time planting there, as the moles will ruin your plant’s roots. Since it is virtually impossible to dissuade moles from a worm rich soil it is better to learn to live with them. Dig the hole in a new position far enough away from the mole run to avoid it.
• Fill the hole with water again, or if you didn’t have a mole run, make sure the hole is filled to the top. This step is to give the plant a racing start as it starts to grow its roots into the surrounding soil, and minimises the number of waterings you need to apply to get it well established.

• Plant your plants, firming them well, but not too enthusiastically. And voila! A minimal dig new veg bed ready to supply you with tasty, low mileage, healthy veg.

• Maintenance will consist of weeding, once the annual weed seeds start blowing in and keeping the soil in good heart with annual applications of organic matter. I avoid digging at all costs. It brings up long dormant annual weed seeds to the surface, so you have years of combatting weeds until they have exhausted themselves. It also, and more importantly, destroys the soil structure, by continually turning soil from 15 cms down up to the surface, shocking all the deeper soil organisms. Organisms in soil occupy very specific niches and are happiest when those niches are not disturbed. If you do not tread on the soil, it does not get compacted, and so does not need digging for aeration.
• Enjoy yourselves and persuade someone else to do it too!
• The veg bed may not be quite as productive as a heavily dug bed this year, but in future years if looked after, it will provide as good a yield as if you had thoroughly dug it over. And you will not have had to do the back breaking digging.

9 Sept 09. Just to prove that it does work, here is today’s photo.

Leeks on the left at the front, courgettes, at the right, beginning to look a little tired, but still producing. Tuscan kale protected from butterflies and birds further back on left, and white cabbages and more courgettes at the far end. In the middle on the right you can see the remaining stalks and supporting canes of my tomato plants. They succumbed to blight during the week I was away on holiday. I managed to catch them before too much harm was done, stripped off all leaves and all fruit already affected for burning and then took the vines under cover to my conservatory to allow the unaffected fruit to ripen. Those fruit which looked like they might be in the early stages of being affected I cooked as green tomatoes (google on recipe green tomatoes and you will find that they can be cooked in much the same way as ripe tomoatoes). You can tell if a fruit is likely to be affected if their calyx (the green spikey bit at the top of the tomato) is starting to go brown, or the fruit is downside of brown markings on the stem. Not foolproof, but I have succeeded in getting quite a few fresh tomatoes to full ripeness using this as a guide.

Whatever you do with the plant debris DO NOT COMPOST THE FRUIT! Blight stays in tomato seeds even after composting and will affect tomatoes and potatoes next year.