Returning to the Tunnel House

This year I thought I'd try to repeat and build on the success of last year's vege garden.  I did want to include the tunnel house.  It was something we've discussed over and over.  Ideas, disagreements and all sorts of plans have been made and discarded. I decided to just do what I wanted, sometimes, it's better to ask forgiveness rather than permission.

I cut open the back of the tunnel house, partly to make it a natural extension of the vege garden and because I couldn't be bothered walking around to the door through all the long grass.  I know myself well enough to know that it's something that I'd avoid doing and everything I tried to do in there would fail because I don't like slogging my way around to the door.  To be fair, the tunnel house is a bit broken anyway.  The nasty wind storm a few years ago blew the plastic sheet off the netting, weather has taken some of the plastic sheeting off the roof.  The roof support structure was badly made and needs some work. And there were two plum trees growing in there.  There is also the family of blackbirds that return every year to nest in a hole in the wall where a speaker used to be.

A few years ago, I put some chooks in there.  They were some end of lays and injured birds from the egg farm I worked in.  It was a good, gentle place to get them used to being out of a cage and learning how to free range.  Until a family of ferrets visited.

The soil in there had originally been a mix of a bought bio-blend, pig manure and our crappy sour grey soil.  After the chooks, it was a strange pale brown, with sawdust and rat droppings.  A while back, Dad thought he'd help us out sieving the soil.  Until I looked at the stones he was sieving out with his bare hands and pointed out that it was at least half rat poo.  The stones that were in there originally were similar size.

I spent many hours weeding the end where I'd cut the door then sieving the soil to put into the tyres.  I put the stones around to form a path and hopefully keep the weeds down.

I planted as I filled the tyres.  Cucumbers, rock melon, tomatoes, capsicums and chillies.  

I've spent so much time in there, the garden hasn't gotten much attention and is still mostly a jungle of waist high grass and thistle.  The down side to doing so much work on the soil is that the weeds grow very well too when not constantly being removed.

Even half done, the tunnel house has been a triumph so far.  I've grown the best green cucumbers I've ever tasted, my tomatoes are starting to ripen and I've grown the biggest capsicums I've ever managed. They're still green, my research says that if I want sweet red ones, I need to wait until they turn red on the plant before I pick them.

I live in the hope that I'll keep working on the garden around the tunnel house and gradually get it back.