Professional Gardening Services in Peckham

Before a vegetable bed goes into an inner London back garden it is worth knowing what the ground was doing a century ago. Much of SE15 was built over quickly, gardens were levelled with whatever came to hand, and a spade's depth frequently turns up coal ash, clinker, brick rubble and the remains of a demolished outbuilding. None of that makes growing food impossible, but it does decide whether crops go into the existing soil or into something brought in on top of it.

Made ground and what grows safely in it

Where the soil is visibly full of ash and rubble, the sensible approach is to treat it as a foundation rather than as a growing medium. Fruit bushes and top fruit root deeply and take little from the surface layer, so they are the least troublesome things to plant directly. Leafy salads and root crops sit in the top thirty centimetres, which is exactly where historic residues concentrate, so those go into imported topsoil. Washing produce properly matters more than most soil anxieties.

Building a bed that lasts more than three winters

Raised beds want a minimum of thirty centimetres of depth for most crops and closer to forty-five for carrots and parsnips. Untreated softwood rots in four or five years in contact with damp London soil; scaffold boards last longer but not indefinitely, and the sides need bracing at the midpoint or they bow outward under the weight of wet soil. A bed wider than about one and a quarter metres cannot be reached across, which means it gets walked on and compacted within a season.

Mapping the sun in a terraced plot

Back gardens hemmed by houses on three sides get far less direct light than their owners assume. Observing where the sun actually falls at three points through a day in June is worth more than any planting plan. Fruiting crops such as tomatoes, courgettes, beans and squash need the sunniest position available; leaf crops, chard, kale and most herbs tolerate half a day. A bed sited in the wrong place produces thin, drawn plants that never crop, regardless of feeding.

Water is the variable that decides the harvest

Raised beds dry out considerably faster than open ground, and an inconsistent supply causes more crop failure here than pests do. Tomatoes split, courgettes abort and lettuce bolts when watering swings between drought and flood. A thick mulch after rain, watering at the base in the evening rather than over the foliage at midday, and a water butt on every available downpipe evens it out. Seep hose laid under the mulch does the job with a fraction of the effort.

Keeping fertility going in a small space

Repeating the same crop in the same bed builds up soil-borne problems, so beds are rotated in a simple three or four year cycle, moving roots, brassicas, legumes and everything else along one place each season. Compost made on site returns what the crops take out, though a small garden rarely generates enough and will need bought-in material as well. Green manures sown into an empty autumn bed protect the surface over winter and are dug in shallowly in spring.

Competition for the crop

Slugs and snails do most of the damage in a damp London summer, and the practical defences are physical: clearing daytime shelter, watering in the morning rather than at dusk, and protecting seedlings for their first fortnight. Pigeons strip brassicas and need netting held clear of the leaves. Rats attracted to a poorly managed compost heap or to fallen fruit are a different order of problem and pass to fully insured bed bug treatment in Peckham rather than being deterred by netting.

What a kitchen garden visit covers

Ongoing work is charged by the length of the visit, since the tasks change completely from March to October, and bed construction is quoted as a job including materials and the removal of whatever is being replaced. Spoil and old timber from a rebuild leave in a vehicle where the volume warrants it, in the same way as professional van and driver hire in Nunhead. Adjacent streets with identical plot depths are covered by experienced weeding and tidy-ups in Nunhead, hard surfaces around the beds by our nearby specialists, and the year's rhythm by how it works.