The first raised bed in the video is empty. Not fallow, not resting — empty in the way a bed is empty an hour before you sow it. I cut the Matador spinach to the ground on the 31st of July, then decided to do the garden tour. Immediately after finishing the video, I weeded, topped the bed with a bag of soil, and put in ‘Géant d’Hiver’. So the tour opens on a rectangle of scruffy dirt, and if you didn’t know better you’d think I’d given up on it.

That’s the thing about filming a garden. You don’t get a portrait, you get a snapshot. This is what was there as I was walking down the paths, and it stopped being true within the hour. Still, I wanted to share what I’ve been up to this year and this is the most comprehensive version, filmed at the height of the season before everything topples into complete chaos.

This video is the third of a series. There’s a June 2023 tour and a June 2024 tour if you want to watch the same ground get steadily more crowded.

---

What’s actually in there

Forty beds in three rows. I work the middle and north rows at the same time — walking down the path looking left and right across both — so the video doesn’t go in this order, but this is easier to read. Roughly a third of what I sowed never came up, and I’ve left the failures in, because the empty patches are visible on camera anyway.

South row

• S1 — Spinach. ‘Matador’ cut down on the 31st, ‘Géant d’Hiver’ sown straight after filming. Bare on camera.
• S2 — Nine Mephisto wasabi in LECA, with five clivias and a Bletilla striata standing on top. Shaded by the willow, which is the point.
• S3 — The hodgepodge bed: climbing nasturtium, dill ‘Como’, two surviving kohlrabi, feral lettuces, ramsons, four Taunton Dean kale, and an Egyptian walking onion with its first topset head this year.
• S4 — Hardneck garlic and path strawberries. Unchanged for years, and it likes being that way.
• S5 — Red Russian kale and Cavolo Nero, both mostly lost to flea beetle. ‘Zlata’ radish flowering for seed. Backfilled with onion sets and strawberries.
• S6 — Orache ‘Harres Maelde’ and ‘Burpee’s Golden’ beetroot, sown as a bolt-resistant spinach substitute. It is bolting.
• S7 — Peas: half the jar saved from 2023, resown in June with ‘Kelvedon Wonder’, climbing sunchokes left standing as supports.
• S8 — The other half of the jar, also resown with ‘Kleine Rheinländerin’.
• S9 — Onion sets, dwarf sweet pea ‘Bijou mix’, and nasturtium ‘Dwarf bushy mix’ working as flea beetle decoys.
• S10 — Malabar spinach, green stem and red, with calendula. Not spinach at all, and a real zone push.
• S11 — Amaranth ‘Red Army’, ‘Passion’ and ‘Green Giant’, planted as a red-to-green gradient across the bed.
• S12 — Broccoli raab. The choy sum and lemon balm both failed; welsh onions and strawberries went into the gap.
• S13 — Tatsoi and calendula ‘Pink Surprise’. The pak choi bolted and came out on the 29th, so this is tatsoi only on camera.
• S14 — Bean bed at the arch: ‘Sunset’ runners, ‘Stokkievitsboon’, ‘Coco Nain Blanc’, ‘Sylvia F1’ soybeans and Athens gigantes on the cage. ‘Processor’ and ‘Red Swan’ never came up.

Middle row

Ten of these twelve beds are perennial or overwintering, five of them asparagus, which looks deliberate and isn’t. They went where there was space.

• M1 — Dahlias ‘Impression Famoso’, ‘Arabian Night’, ‘Sunlady’ and ‘Fascination’, with calendula ‘Cantaloupe’ seeded between.
• M2 — Dahlias ‘Joyful Investment’, ‘Diana’s Memory’ and ‘Café au Lait Royal’, plus a bargain-rack cosmos and the little creamsicle dahlia filling two gaps.
• M3 — ‘Café au Lait Royal’ and the original ‘Café au Lait’ side by side, mixed gladioli, and a marguerite daisy in the middle.
• M4 — All ‘Colomba’ potatoes. The same variety is growing in bags on the south slope, so this is the bed half of an accidental trial.
• M5 — Chives ‘Biggy’ and a sulking whitecurrant that were already here, plus school-sale chives and ‘Sturon’ sets.
• M6 — Seven ‘Erasmus’ asparagus crowns and rescue strawberries.
• M7 — The established asparagus bed, with baby leaf salad scattered over the top and now heading among the ferns.
• M8 — Seven ‘Fruhlim’ crowns and strawberries. This is the early variety.
• M9 — Thyme, lemon thyme and strawberries that were already standing when I weeded it, with onion sets planted around them.
• M10 — Seven ‘Erasmus’ and the one leftover ‘Fruhlim’, which makes this the only bed with early and late in the same soil.
• M11 — Eight ‘Fruhlim’. Thirty crowns across four beds, and with M7 that makes five asparagus beds on the property.
• M12 — Two arches and a stick ladder: ‘Blauhilde’ on the west, ‘Gordonia’ on the east, ‘Sunset’ runners at the base of both arches.

North row

• N1 — Chard ‘Bright Lights’, golden beet ‘Burpee’s Golden’, and self-seeded borage that lay through the whole fallow year and came up anyway.
• N2 — Golden beet ‘Yellow Cylindrical’, the whole bed, and more volunteer borage.
• N3 — Leek ‘Winter Giant 3’, thick enough to need thinning. The onion ‘Rosé d’Armorique’ sown beside it never germinated.
• N4 — ‘Hamund’ onions from seed. ‘Walla Walla’ and ‘Senshyu Yellow’ failed, so ‘Korona’ strawberries and ‘Sturon’ sets took the rest.
• N5 — Carrot ‘Rote Riesen 2’, and visibly the densest stand in the row.
• N6 — Carrot ‘Berlikumer 2’, sown six days earlier and germinated spotty, with broad bean ‘Ratio’ filling the gaps.
• N7 and N8 — Broad beans ‘Bison’, ‘Super Aquadulce’ and ‘Eleonora’, germinated and then eaten by birds at sprout stage. Three plants survived and are still standing. Strawberries and onion sets around them.
• N9, N10 and N11 — Jerusalem artichokes: five varieties out of one pack, with no record of which went into which bed. Sortable at harvest, not before. These are also where the pea supports in S7 and S8 came from.
• N12 — Sweetcorn ‘Damaun’ and a generic, ‘Delinel’ bush beans, and volunteer tayberries I’m keeping.
• N13 — Sweetcorn with ‘Stokkievitsboon’ climbing it and ‘Delinel’ down the middle.
• N14 — The problem bed. Three rounds of planting to fill it: ‘Sunset’ runners at the arch, then ‘Gordonia’ and ‘Dalmatin’, then Athens gigantes in the last gap.

The three arch beds are S14, M12 and N14 — two arches spanning the rows, which is why all three are full of beans reaching for something.

---

Everything else the camera walked past

These get pointed at rather than toured, which is a polite way of saying I ran out of arm.

The south slope, three tiers against the house: eight tomatoes on a Florida weave at the top, twenty potato bags on the middle tier, and seven cucurbits at the bottom — two courgettes, two Hokkaido, two Butternut, and a watermelon that did not set and knows what it did. Sharing the slope, all of it from the previous owner: monkshood, daylilies, lilies, bergenia, iris, Anemone sylvestris, a lilac volunteer, peonies ‘Karl Rosenfeld’ and ‘Sarah Bernhardt’, rose ‘Sweet Parfum’, and mixed narcissus.

The berry rows. South row: mixed currant cuttings in all four colors, four young bushes, golden raspberry ‘Fallgold’, blackberry ‘Sonja’, tayberry ‘Buckingham’. North row: two old green gooseberries from the previous owner, about fifty wild raspberry canes moved out of the west bed, three youngish redcurrants. Bookending it all, the tyrni — ‘Terhi’ and Korpi, the male hauled off a coastal rock. The middle row doesn’t exist yet, but its stock does: nine jostaberry cuttings bulking up in pots and some confused blueberries hiding in the flower field.

The end caps are summer parking for the indoor plants, arranged along a light gradient — nine at the south row’s east end, eight at the middle, four at the north. The mint barrel lives out here too.

The cottage garden, north bed: north-facing, in the house’s shadow all day, and the shade is structural — it can’t be pruned away, so everything in there is a shade plant by design. The dwarf spruces and the blue-eyed Mary came with the house and effectively wrote the planting brief. Added since: hostas, dicentras, heuchera, foxgloves, primula, delphinium, and a batch of Triumph tulips that were a complete write-off because I planted them before I understood the shade. Newly edged at the end of July.

The west bed and the northwest corner: winter-hardy asters, godetia, lavender, ranunculus, freesia, strawflower, two balloon flowers, and pink phlox that genuinely belonged to the previous owner. Round the corner: a blue mophead hydrangea evicted from a terrace pot and left to sort itself out against the foundation, aster ‘Rudolf Goethe’, shasta daisy ‘Alaska’, drumstick allium.

---

The thin sections up there aren’t oversights. Some of those areas want a slower walk and a steadier hand than a seven-minute lap allows, so we’ll see if I manage to get to them this year or next.

Anyway: forty beds, one take, one of them empty. Ask me again in a fortnight and half of this will be wrong.

---

* For the really long view, The Evolution of a Vegetable Garden is a time-lapse of this same ground from 2012 to 2023 — worth a look if you want to see how the patch got here. That probably needs an updated version too.