Planting Out the Salad Bed

Now that we have some sunshine at last, I've managed to plant out the salads bed, although strictly speaking, there isn't much "salad" stuff in there.

First 2 bean wigwams

We planted out the mangetout and the first of the runners and french beans a couple of weeks ago, but then had endless rain. The mice scoffed most of my bean seeds, so we picked up some french bean seedlings from B&Q. We set up another 2 wigwams and planted the new beans, with iceberg lettuce inside the wigwams.








I dug over and levelled the rest of the bed and planted out the sweetcorn, courgettes, marrows, pumpkins, butternut squash and an outdoor cucumber. I'm going with the 3 sisters methods to maximise use of space, so it's a bit of a tight squeeze. Sweetcorn is in a block, each plant about 15in apart. In the middle of each 4 sweetcorn is a squash, cucumber or similar. When the sweetcorn is big enough I'll sow more french or runner beans up each sweetcorn, although maybe only on the ones we can reach easily.

Planting Plan

The planting plan is shown in the image. Not all the plants are in yet - some of the sweetcorn isn't big enough and one of the cucumbers is too small.

The pumpkin, marrow and butternut squash are in the middle where we can simple leave them. We need to reach the courgettes and cucumbers, so they're in the more reachable spaces.

More Sweetcorn Woes

I've had more problems with sweetcorn, but also found out some useful information about mixing varities.

Sweetcorn Problems
I sowed sweetcorn 5 times, but the mice ate the first two batches of seeds. I covered the next 3 sowings to protect them from mice, but the weather was cold and wet for several weeks, so germination was poor.

3 weeks ago I had 8 sweetcorn in the greenhouse. Then we had a bit of a heatwave and some were scorched. And then we went back to the cold wet weather again.

We were in B&Q 2 weeks ago and found a pack of sweetcorn, 4-5" high, looking really healthy - there were actually 16 in the pack. At £1.98 for the pack, it just seemed like the only way I was going to get any decent sweetcorn this year, so I got them.

As the weather turned cold and wet, I left them on the kitchen windowsill. 7 of them started wilting. I'm not sure what the cause is, but guessing the cold weather is part of it - the kitchen windowsill probably gets very cold.

I put them in the airing cupboard for a couple of days in the hope that they'd recover in the warmth, but no luck, they died. I've now left the pack outside on the garden table.

I now have:
2 Sweet Bounty (from T&M)
6 Swift (from T&M)
9 Extra Sweet (from Verve / B&Q)

Mixing Varieties
I've always known we shouldn't mix varieties of sweetcorn, but as I've never had problems before, I hadn't looked into it further. Essentially, some varities need to be separated from the pollens of other varieties. I'm not entirely sure what happens if they're not separated - it could be that they don't pollinate properly, or they could pollinate and taste bad.

It turns out that there are different "types" of sweetcorn: Standard, Supersweet, Sugary Extender and Synergistic. Each named variety is of one of these 4 types. Mixing types is not good, but we might be able to mix varieties within each type.

Sweet Bounty and Swift are both supersweet types. I couldn't find any information about the Extra Sweet ones. As other varities with similar "extra sweet" names are supersweet types, I've decided to take a chance and plant them all together.

There are ways to grow the types together and isolate them from the pollen of other sweetcorn by wrapping the cobs in bags or plastic bottles, but I'm not going to mess about!

More Space

Before digging out

It's close to 19 years since I moved here and I finally got round to partially digging out the other side of the stepped beds.

There are 3 tiers with "retaining walls". The top tier uses log roll as the retaining wall. The middle tier uses a brick wall, the bottom tier uses large stones. It probably looked really good back in the day, but these days it's awful.

Half of the log roll on the top tier has rotted and collapsed. The rest isn't far behind. Parts of the brick wall on the middle tier have collapsed and the rest is leaning over. The stone on the bottom tier is fine. All 3 tiers were full of very large and deep rooted weeds and brambles and had some very large lumps of concrete on them, probably from old fence post supports.

After digging and sheeting

A friend came over to help clear the beds so we could use them at last. We removed all the large lumps of concrete and dug out bramble roots that had stumps over 8" thick. The worst of the weeds have gone, but they'll all come back eventually.

After about 4 hours, we'd cleared as much as we could, so levelled the beds as best we could and sheeted over the whole lot. We then moved all the sacks of potatoes onto the new beds. It's nice to have that bit of extra space. We should be able to move more pots and troughs around this weekend.

We'll need to do a lot more work on these beds. Digging out to build new retaining walls will be a lot of hard work. Might give it a go over the winter.