Picture posting is enabled for all :)
Welcome to A4A Chris... the last one is ragwort. Has yellow flowers and often yellow and black striped caterpillars from the Cinnibar moth(red).. it's poisonous to animals ( and probably humans if they were daft enough to eat it!!) :)
Hello ChrisBro - yes clay'y is a word - well on my site it is any way!Prepare a bed at a time and try to get something in as soon as poss. Endless digging isn't fun!
Wouldn't rotovate. If you do, you'll have a huge job trying to pick out thousands of shredded roots and inevitably you'll miss thousands so will end up picking them out twice or more. If you don't rotovate, you'll have a huge job digging out the roots but at least they'll be relatively intact and you'll get the majority out first time. Rotovating will make it look better quicker (and may indeed be fun, although how I'm not sure ???) but it's a false economy. Dig over a small bed and get it planted up. Then dig another........ and another...........
Hello thanks for your reply and advice, I did think that myself but thought I might get away with it because of building raised beds with nice new fertile soil, I realise in time some of these roots that I will inevitably miss will make their way to the surface but didnt thin it would be too much like hard work controlling them as they appear?What do you think?I am a newbie to all of this and only know the very basics so please excuse me if I am barking up the wrong tree lolthanksChris
Thats one heck of a huge plot to have raised beds on. Do you know the price of planks and topsoil these days???My dog!!! You are very quickly going to go broke. lolI would suggest perhaps you could have a few raised beds for salads, melons, strawberries, the more delicate stuff, but spuds, cabbage etc plant in the ground.In fact planting spuds over half that ground would save you time and money as they tend to smother weeds, break up the ground etc.One good thing about clay soil is that clay holds on to more nutrients so the ground is probably very fertile.Oh and last but not least, welcome to the forum. ;D
Chris on one of my plots I had to have raised beds because of invasive tree roots meant I couldnt dig and yes I laid the beds straight over grass. I didnt dig the grass out beforehand and in 3 years only a few bits of couch has made its way to the surface and these are easily dealt with.I layered the raised beds with;cardboard (good thick stuff)newspaper (many, many layers)horse muck (good 6-9 inches of it)straw (again a good 6-9 inches)then topsoil (to the top of the box)This saved me a lot of money by filling up the beds and acting as a cover for the ground to smother the weeds.Soak each layer as you are adding it and you can then plant straight away.
Good luck if you can actually get scaff boards at a reaonable price. :) Damaged scaff boards cant be sold cos of the good old Health and safety regs >:(I think you dont quite have the right idea about what blight is so Ive included the Blightwatch link for you. Blight isnt in the soil. http://www.blightwatch.co.uk/content/bw-Home.aspWell in 3 years I havent had a massive invasion of couch grass in my raised beds and couch usually tends to hang on in there so I think Im clear of most of it.Chris I couldnt get scaff boards at a good price where I live so I used doors cut in half length ways, begged borrowed and skip dived for old wardrobes etc so my raised bes are usually about 2 ft high. Saves me a lot of bending ;)
Heya ChrisBro, and welcome to the forum.Your photos made me shudder. Here is my house plot in Denmark just less than 3 years ago:And here it is this morning.....As the pavement artist says "All My Own Work". I have very heavy clay gound, and you can imagine what it is like after a digger has compacted it.I have dug 12 veggie beds, not all are in the photo. 9 of them I dug two spades deep by hand, incorporating tons of seaweed. The results are ( think) outstanding. When I got to the last 3 beds I couldn't face any more hand digging, and so I borrowed a rotovator..............and now I wished I hadn't. Rotovators just don't go as deep as a spade, and as someone points out, they chop up roots and spread them!Anyway ChrisBro...........YOU ARE NOT ALONE! Go for it, and good luck.
Very nicely done Bjerreby ;DChris if you are planning regimented rasied beds then several posters (where's the doc when you need him? ;) have web sites you need to see, regimented to almost to the point of OCD. But he has some great ideas ;D