Over winter I have a few objectives for my garden that will hopefully see me start off on the right path. I’ll lay these out below and go into some detail on each.

Set up an area for composting.
Clear out the building waste from the garden.
Create a rough layout for how the garden should look.
Set up a water butt to collect water from the shed roof.
Set up some raised beds.
Set up a greenhouse.

Setting up a composting area.

I have now ticked off this one on the list. One of my main considerations here was making sure I did not spend any money on setting this up. Therefore I wanted to use all leftover or waste timber to create a compost bin. This means the look of the bin is going to be very rough and ready and to be honest this is exactly how I want it to look. I love the idea of having the garden look as though it’s been cobbled together with whatever was lying around… mainly because that’s exactly what it’s going to be.

Another consideration I had was Irish weather. Given how much rain we get here, I think it’s important to have a cover on the bin. From what I understand I don’t want excessive moisture in the compost and I believe there should naturally be enough moisture from fruit and veg peelings that will go into the bin. I’ll keep an eye on this though and may remove the cover if I feel it’s needed.

Here’s my cobbled-together compost bin made out of whatever leftover timber I had lying around:

I’m very aware this is no work of art but It’s functional and it cost me nothing so I’m happy.

Clearing out the building waste

My progress has slowed with the bad snow and frost that hit us early in January. I planned to hire a skip in the first week of January but we have some work left to do out in the front driveway that I want get finished before ordering a skip as everything can all go in together then. Skips aren’t cheap! Hopefully when the weather improves a little I’ll get moving on this.

In the meantime, the section of my garden that I have planned for growing is mostly cleared already so I can get started on the other elements.

How should my new garden look?

I’ve decided to split the garden into 3 sections.

Lawn area. This will just be a nice, clean lawn area.
Growing area. This is where I’ll have my raised beds and greenhouse.
Compost/storage/maintenance. This is an area for water storage, composting, equipment storage and the shed etc.

Here is a VERY rough outline of what I have in mind:

How can I collect rainwater?

Well, I live in Ireland so the rain part won’t be an issue! I already have guttering setup on the shed so I plan to get a water butt on each side of the shed and direct water from the downpipe into each. This part will require a bit of an investment. I’d like to get a fairly sturdy and fairly large water butt and these aren’t cheap. Something like the below from Woodies would be perfect but €70 feels like a lot to spend to collect water.

https://www.woodies.ie/210-litre-water-butt-set-1081504?objectId=30662&queryId=8c77bdb66d54deb357e8aa29d0609938&indexName=prod_default_products

I’ll try to find something similar for cheaper. That said, I am trying to create a vegetable garden from nothing so some investment is going to be needed!

Raised Beds

This part should be easy. I have set up one bed already with some 7 x 2 timbers that were pulled out of the old house. These were originally floor joists and are the same timber I used to build the compost bin.

The bed is 4ft by 8ft and I have weighed down a layer of cardboard to hopefully keep any weeds from growing through. The plan is to fill that area with 3 more beds of equal size. I hope to do that over the coming weeks.

In terms of actually filling the beds, I don’t have much topsoil to fill these so again I think another purchase will be needed here! To fill 4 beds this size could become expensive if I just buy individual bags from the garden centre so I will probably look into getting a tonne bag delivered.

Do I need a greenhouse to grow veg in Ireland?

Yep! Obviously, this doesn’t apply to all vegetables but we eat a lot of tomatoes, peppers, and chilis and from everything I’ve read, these will grow much better and will have a much longer growing season if grown in a greenhouse as they thrive in a higher temperature. I also think the greenhouse will be useful for starting seedlings before planting them out in the beds and exposing them to the weather.

I’m clearly no expert but this is all based on reading the likes of Charles Dowding and learning from YouTubers who grow in a similar climate to myself.

I’ve mentioned cost a few times already and this is one area I know I will need to spend. However, I’m contemplating building the greenhouse myself to cut costs. This way I can also build it to my exact requirements and spec and build a much more sturdy greenhouse than what I’m seeing for sale in local garden centres.

So that’s it. That’s how I plan to start my garden. I’m sure as I get into it, some of the above plans may change or be abandoned completely but I guess we’ll see how it goes. Hopefully the next post I make will show some real progress.

#1 - How do I start a new garden?