Creating a Therapeutic Kitchen Garden: Week 0 Vlog

Gardening is my therapy and the source of much joy, time spent in the fresh air with your hands in the earth can do wonders for the soul. I can’t promise that it can completely heal a broken heart (mine is still hanging in there with some pretty big cracks), but it has certainly helped me through a pretty tough 2020 and helped me to find something to focus on in the midst of grief.

In April 2020 my mum died suddenly and unexpectedly. This happened during the first UK lockdown and overnight I found myself living back in the Derbyshire in my mums house, grieving and trying to find some purpose each day. One thing that helped was to get outside and work on the garden.

There was a neglected piece of land behind the garage that I decided would be the perfect spot to create a kitchen garden, so without any real plan, I started hacking away at the nettles that were running rampant across this spot. At some point during this process, my husband suggested that perhaps we should leave our city life in Edinburgh behind and move to this place I once called home; a place where I had the opportunity to create a garden of my own and a home alongside family. A new life plan quickly started to take shape. We are still in transition between Derbyshire and Edinburgh, but for now we find ourselves in Derbyshire for the foreseeable future and ready to create a kitchen garden.

I worked to prepare the area last summer, thinking I could get a garden going immediately. After several attempts to clear the nettles, I resorted to hacking them down to ground level and then covering over with weed suppressing fabric and leaving well alone for at least 6 months. We were hoping to be back in Scotland for the Autumn, so it seemed sensible to do this preparation and make plans for starting the garden properly in 2021. I managed to grow some salad and calendula in planters and had time to dream about what I really want from this garden.

The plan was always to use a no-dig style approach, so as not to disturb the soil and leave the root structure of the nettles in place. After 6 months under cover I’m hoping the membrane has done it’s job and supressed any new growth. Once any covers are up, i’ll add cardboard as a mulch and layer over with compost leaving the existing soil undisturbed. If you want to understand more about why I’m taking this approach, rather than digging down and turning the soil, I would direct you to Charles Dowding’s YouTube channel, all about the no-dig approach. There is also an excellent documentary called Kiss The Ground (I viewed on Netflix), it focuses on regenerative agriculture practices and why it might be better to not disturb your soil.

This brief footage is from 2nd January 2021, which I’m going to call 'Week 0', with the intention of creating a garden vlog of some sort for each week of the year to document the journey. I’ve also posted a 2nd short film showing the work we did to prepare the ground back in April/June 2020.