Almost a year of vegetable gardening in Onrus

At the beginning of October 2024, I started working on my vegetable garden. We went big and built raised beds to house (hopefully) healthy and organic vegetables for the future.

I love gardening, but I've had a bit of a love/ hate relationship with my attempted vegetable gardens in the past. Aphids, snails and slugs always get the best of me and to be very honest, I am a little scared of them. They gross me out! I'm slowly trying to move past this and to find ways to avoid encounters with these little devils. 

The inspiration behind this post is the fact that my entire salad for last night's dinner came from our garden. Ok not 100% all of it (I got cucumber and feta from Woolies), but this was a big first for me!

Carrots, sugar snaps, radish, lettuce, spring onion and beetroot :) 

This particular garden has had its challenges especially when it comes to keeping it clean. We have big overhead trees which makes a terrible mess and (I believe) which is also the cause of a ton of little weeds popping up all over the show. The good news is that in spite of the trees, the garden gets enough sun and shade to thrive. For some reason, my dogs also know to stay out of the raised beds. Around the beds are another story, but it's the dogs' home as much as it's ours.

Here is what the garden looked like when we first started, almost one year ago:

Still look pretty neat :) We had a few tons of potting soil and compost delivered, but before that I tried my own thing in attempting to fill some of the beds to minimise the amount of the soil that we needed to get. 

We placed large tiles all around the create some sort of a pathway and I planted creeping thyme and origanum to try and create a fragrant space or border to ultimately keep pests at bay. Now, I'm not so sure if this is working and it's actually become rather messy.

I've tried to keep a diary on everything I've done in the garden to establish some sort of timeline and growing pattern, but as with writing blog posts - turns out I'm not so good at keeping the diary updated. 

Now it is time to do the final preparations to get ready for Spring! 

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