· Latvia
Building the new beds — May 2026
6 min read
This place belonged to my wife's grandfather. He built almost everything on it himself, slowly, over a long lifetime — the small house, the shed, the wood-frame coldframe that runs along the south wall, the bench by the pines, the fences. He's the reason there's anything here at all, and the reason this whole thing isn't a from-scratch project. We're taking it over now, in our free time, weekend by weekend, and the first quiet rule we made for ourselves was to try not to break anything he didn't have to.
The first proper weekend at the new place was the first weekend of April. Snow had finished a couple of weeks earlier. The ground was still cold and the pine forest behind the house was the colour pine forests are in early spring — black-green and damp. I drove up, parked, walked the perimeter, and stood for a long time looking at the empty plot.
The coldframe along the south wall — old window panes, a wooden sill, a hinged top — was one of the things he built. I went over the next weekend, dug it out, cleaned the glass, and put seedlings in straight away. Two weeks later, this is what they looked like:
It still amazes me that the spread between an empty bed and a tray of little green shoots is one week. I started a microgreen tray on a windowsill in 2019 and I still get that small flash of disbelief every time.
Before any planting, just clearing
If you've never inherited a piece of land that's been quietly looked after by one person for decades, you don't realise how much stuff a working garden accumulates. Rolls of old fencing leaned against a wall. A stack of weather-grey boards behind the shed. Three different versions of the same tool, because the older one never quite died. The first three weekends were mostly that — going through, sorting, deciding what stays and what gets pulled apart for firewood or hauled off.
In Latvian there's a verb for this kind of work — uzkopt — that doesn't translate cleanly into English. It's more than "cleaning"; it lands somewhere between putting in order and honouring. You can't plan a garden on top of a winter's worth of fallen branches and a layer of leaves nobody raked. So you don't. You spend the first month picking up after the seasons that came before you.
Most of it isn't photographable, which is partly why this section is short. But it's also the part of the work that mattered most this year, and the thing I underestimated by a factor of about three.
The plan for this year
I've never had a real plot before. Six years of indoor growing — windowsills, shelving, grow lights — and the longest stretch outdoors I've had was a balcony with two containers. So a lot of this spring is figuring out what works on actual ground, in the only sensible way to learn it: by doing one thing at a time and writing down what happened.
The plan for this year, in three lines:
- Three raised beds, painted black, on the sunny side of the clearing
- A coldframe for early seedlings (already there, just had to clean it out)
- A small compost area near the treeline, downwind from the house
That's it for year one. I have read enough first-year-garden disasters to know that "do less" is the right ambition.
The beds going in
I built the beds in two passes. The first one went in alone on a Sunday, just to see the proportions on site:
A week later the other two went up beside it. I left them empty for a couple of days to look at — proportion-checking, but also because I wanted to enjoy the moment before they became "the beds I'm responsible for":
They're bigger than they look in the photo. The bench is for sitting at the end of the day. The hammock is between two pines and I'm saying nothing more about it.
The unglamorous part
The soil came in two batches:
These are local — peat substrate for sowing, and an "Eco-Earth for seedlings" bag from a Latvian supplier. Both worked fine, and I think there's a useful comparison post in this for anyone in a similar climate zone trying to figure out what to buy. I'll write it next month once I've actually grown stuff in both.
Other things that happened in the same weekend:
- I moved a wheelbarrow load of soil from the old kitchen-garden corner — the dark stuff that had been composting under decades of garden waste. That's the dark mound below.
About the lawn
The other big question this year is the lawn. The grandfather kept it short and tidy with the same riding mower I'm now using:
The mower is in fine shape — needed a service and a fresh blade, nothing more. The little number-dial on the cutting-height adjuster is still the most satisfying interface in any piece of garden equipment.
The grass itself is harder to read. In the parts of the lawn we disturbed during clean-up — where the beds went in, where we moved soil, where I dragged piles of branches across the same stretch a dozen times — the grass is slow. Not dead. Just slow. It's mid-May and there are still patches where I can see more ground than green. From the parts we didn't touch, you'd never know the place changed hands.
My current theory is three things compounding:
- The soil under those patches got compacted from foot traffic and tool-dragging.
- The nights here are still cool well into May — single-digit Celsius — and cool-season grass at this latitude doesn't really get going until the soil itself warms up.
- A lawn that's been quietly maintained for forty years has settled into a steady state, and a sudden change to the soil around it isn't something it forgives quickly.
I'm not going to over-seed it now. The plan is patience and one careful overseed with a hardy cool-climate mix in late August, once the worst of the summer heat is past and there's still enough season left for new grass to root before the first frost. If the bare patches haven't filled in by then, I'll come back and write about what actually worked — because I don't fully trust my theory above, and I'd rather report what happened than what I planned for.
If you've gone through this yourself on inherited land, I'd genuinely like to know what worked for you — replies welcome by email.
What's in the beds
Nothing exciting yet. The first three weeks of May have been mostly:
- Peas (Dun pea variety, same seeds I've been using indoors for shoots)
- Radish (Daikon and a small French breakfast variety)
- Lettuce (a butterhead mix)
- Spinach (oversown deliberately — half of it will bolt and I'll learn how fast)
The radish will be the first thing I harvest, probably around the first week of June. I'll write that up too.
The point of all this
Six years of writing about gardening from indoors. Now it's actually outdoors. The pace will be different — fewer 2,000-word product reviews, more 600-word dated notes like this one. I'll keep doing the long-form how-to writing as well, but I want a place to keep the dated, specific, this-actually-happened side of the work.
If you've read this far: thank you. I'll see you next month.
— Karlis
