Few homes here come with gardens full of that rich, crumbly dark soil that is a gardener’s dream when it comes to growing mediums. More often that not Irish gardens contain a lot of clay soil, whether it’s the mushy, spongy type or the hard-packed, stone-filled kind. But if you’re willing to get your hands a bit dirty, you can change all that.
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00:00So as you can see here, I'm doing a bit of digging today, a beautiful weekend, the start
00:19of March.
00:21And what I'm trying to do is extend this bed that I'd done last year, right down to here.
00:28So along the path.
00:31And what I'm doing is I'm taking out the top layer of grass, and then mixing in compost
00:42and topsoil into that as well.
00:44This is clay soil, and I'll bring you down in a moment and show you what the type of
00:49soil that I have.
00:50It's not great for growing, it's very compacted.
00:55So I'm just taking it out in clumps, and then putting back some of the clay soil, and then
01:03mixing in compost and topsoil with it.
01:09So I'm just making sods here first, so that they're for ease of cutting, and they're coming
01:16up quite easily.
01:26So that's one of them here, and I'll just bring you down and show you the soil.
01:33So it's quite compacted as you can see, and there's a lot of stones in it, and it's just
01:40real clay soil.
01:45And what I want to do is keep some of it, but just get the grass and the roots of the
01:49grass out, so then I can mix in the topsoil and compost, and get things on the ground.
01:59So to do that, just do a cross pattern, so just to remove as much of it as possible.
02:14I'm noticing some worms on here, which is a good sign.
02:25This is clay soil, but it's not quite as compacted as the rest of the garden is.
02:34It's really spongy over there, and it's just not, nothing grows on it.
02:38So by mixing in some topsoil and some compost, that should improve it.
02:49It may take a few years before you notice a real difference, but with these sods, I'm
02:55Now I'm going to reuse them, and create a kind of a mound to grow flowers on.
03:09So that's how I've been doing it here, just in bit by bit.
03:16So as you can see here now, what I've done is I've just dumped the compost and topsoil
03:23that was on the old pots out, and I've also added on a pile of leaves.
03:28These are strawberry leaves, and all different leaves actually.
03:32Some of the hydrangea heads, seed heads and branches that fell off over the winter, they're
03:38all dried crackly, but they'll provide great organic matter for the soil.
03:43Those are worms here, so they'll digest it and bring it down deep into the soil too,
03:47which is great, and that over time will break up the compacted clay too.
03:53So it's good stuff, and what I'm adding on as well is just some new compost here.
03:58I got this in Springvale Yard and Centre in Springtown, and it's in dairy, and it's really
04:05really good stuff.
04:06Really good stuff for growing everything from seeds right through transplanting, and a wee
04:13bag of topsoil.
04:14That's why I've only got these two left, and I want to put plenty of good quality stuff
04:21under the garden, so we'll leave this wee last bit for another day.
04:28So it's coming along in a way, and I'll just get digging now.
06:14So that's it, now we're ready for planting, and we have a lot of plants to get under the
06:37garden.
06:38This is why we're here, I'll show you what's inside the greenhouses.
06:45This is some pansies, all my greenhouses were battered by the wind, you can see there, that
06:50one's lost it's cover, the book was ripped apart, so I had to just end up taking it off,
06:59and then just weed money.
07:01Greenhouses are very fine, I think we'd buy more of them that size rather than this size.
07:07This one doesn't seem to be battered by the wind at all, but down here, some lusianthus,
07:11which are near impossible to grow, and I don't think I'm going to have them either, beyond
07:18my skills.
07:19And then some more love in the mist, which I probably should get out now, put them in
07:23the ground, and some perennial, whatchamacallsit, scabiosa, these are a butterfly blue one,
07:36the stick is probably going about now too, actually.
07:39More snapdragons at the back, young calendula, another honesty, and some echinacea, and under
07:48that, I can do without opening all the sticks, it's so ripped, it's just a handling, but
07:55it serves it's purpose grand here, I have a pincushion scabiosa here too as well, and
08:02these are polybuttons, native to Australia, big yellow round heads, like a allium of some
08:10sort, but they're perennial so they should come back every year, and I'm trying to grow
08:15more perennials this year.
08:18Here we have, this is some rosemary, which smells amazing, oh it's so nice, and that
08:30has just been out here all winter, it's been in the wee small greenhouse, worked fine,
08:35there's a couple of them that have survived, some of them were killed by the cold weather,
08:39and well, because I forgot to water them actually, I should say, that's probably the main reason.
08:45Here's a wee strawberry that came off a runner from the molly pot, and some more
08:53oriental poppies, and some more snapdragons, and
09:00planties, so many small seedlings look the same, a bit confused, and of course I'm going
09:06far too many things, some more honesty here, and pots this time, these are calendula that
09:12were in this pot, I should have actually had it under the bed, maybe I'll do that for the
09:17next bed, but they are coming back as well.
09:23So I'll get them under the ground somewhere, and there's some lavender in the pot, okay,
09:31here just more of the same, some prunes, and some strawflowers actually too.
09:40I tried cold stratifying some roses, and I have a few seedlings up, they're tiny at the
09:45moment, they take forever to grow, but we'll see how they get on. That is everything as of
09:52first week of March.
09:55And moving on, we have, here we have some calendula actually coming back as well,
10:02which is quite nice.
10:07I'll do these before they open, and here we have actually a bit of colour
10:11in the garden, which these are wallflowers that I sowed last year, and absolutely hardy,
10:19more bulletproof mats, same as the sweet wiggum, no fuss, need no special treatment. I grew them
10:26all from seed in doors and trays, and then just plopped them outside, did nothing with them,
10:33and then planted them in the ground, and they've done great over the winter,
10:38and they've been flowered since, the first one flowered before Christmas,
10:42which I didn't think you'd have any flowers at that time of year, but lovely colours on them,
10:49like these, this was a mixed bag of colours, so this one's here, the rusty orange dappled one,
10:58and then these bright yellow ones, there's more of the bag, but luckily they're going to be darker,
11:03they haven't opened yet, and here we have some crocuses, which I don't think I remember
11:07planting, so they may have been on the ground and just disturbed when I worked the soil last year,
11:15a lot of dandelions on here as well, really trying to get at the roots of them,
11:20and then these, beside the crocus, is lavender, the one up there,
11:26I didn't plant it last year, and then loads of canterbury bells on here,
11:31there's loads of weeds as well, these things, we don't even know what they are,
11:35maybe white flowers on them, I need to get a proper weeding session started soon,
11:42it's the most boring job, but got it out, and then these are really interesting,
11:50these are the silver pennies, and probably the thing I'm most excited about growing this year,
11:56apart from a few vegetables, but I'll just take you down to their level,
12:00you can see them starting to mount now, see that one up behind too,
12:06these are about a year old, and what they do is they will send up big stalks with wee purple
12:16flowers on them, and then those flowers will create the dusk seed heads, that people always
12:21used to grow years ago, in the 80s I remember them, but not many people grow them today,
12:28and a couple of smaller ones of those too, and these are the canterbury bells, which
12:33have been on the ground all winter too, doing fine, a couple of lupins popping up on there as well,
12:39so all the work from last summer and autumn should pay off this spring,
12:43just to get the hardy ones that will go from underground going, some daffodils here,
12:51a few years ago, and up the back more lupins coming up, which I forgot I planted,
13:02cut down all the sweet pea and hollyhock, the big stalks, a lot of them around here,
13:10just use this ground cover, what I will do with them is chop them up, I have more over there,
13:16I'm just going to chop them up and just throw them back in, it's an organic sort of fertilizer,
13:24some sprouts here left over, this needs badly weeded, I see grass growing in different parts,
13:32but I've got plenty more going on, there's some sprouts and there's swiss chard there,
13:39overwintered fine too, I think there's some rosemary in here too that didn't survive,
13:46but I've got some on pots anyway, I'll just go up to the new patch now,
13:54so in here I've already planted some of the canterbury bells as well, these ones were in
13:59the greenhouse when we pots over the winter, did fine, they actually look a lot healthier,
14:05but those ones in the other patch will have better developed roots because they've been
14:09underground, that's probably what they've used all their energy for, and then amongst them there's
14:18love and a must, these are all very young seedlings so whether they make it or not,
14:22we'll wait and see, there's some normal sized cornflowers and oriental poppies,
14:29up at the back there, they grow quite tall so I'm hoping they'll come out on an oracle angel that
14:36survived here, and that's a that's some kind of poppy there, I think that's an oriental poppy
14:45that's come back, they are perennial like so I was expecting a few of them to come back,
14:51but that's the only one I see there, and I suppose it depends on climate too,
14:55but that's everything that's grown in this patch here.