Clearing the Brambles

The sunshine finally got the better of me - I couldn't wait any longer - the garden was calling me and seemed just soooooo much better than plodding through piles of admin.

The veggie patch is a bit of a mess. I cleared the old salad bed, removed the remains of sweetcorn, runner beans etc, then made a start on tidying up the soft fruit bed along the fence.

Over the last year, the entire soft fruit bed became overgrown with brambles and covered in leaves. I just wasn't well enough last year to control it all. So I spent a couple of hours yesterday cutting out the brambles and sweeping the leaves clear. I found using a normal pair of pliers was the easiest way of pulling the thorny brambles out.

The bed is covered in weed sheeting to control weeds. This has been a major help in keeping it all under control. Dirt had blown all over the sheeting and I'd used a few piles of soil on top to help hold the sheeting down. Some brambles and soft fruit had taken root in this soil, so I've cut them out and pulled them up.

Some raspberry canes have reached 8ft tall. These are canes that grew last year and will carry fruit this year. There are now about 16 loganberry branches from the one plant. Some branches reach out about 15ft. I have fixed wires to one fence panel, but will have to fix them to the adjoining panels too.

I did have about 20 strawberry plants in the bed, planted through the weed sheeting. At least 12 still survive. I've found the 3 gooseberry bushes among the brambles and have cleared them again.

A couple of loganberry branches spread out into the veggie beds and took root. I've pulled these up and will plant them into pots of compost and see if they take. If so, I know people who would love loganberry plants. I've had gooseberry bushes do the same in the past, but when I tried planting the rootings into pots, they just died off. Fingers crossed for better luck with the loganberries!

I still have more clearing to do and of course, it's time to sow more seeds. The weather's warming up, got to get cracking!

The loganberries:

The raspberries with strawberries in front and loganberry runners behind:

The sun is shining!

After a couple of really dismal months of cold, rain and snow, the sun is shining!

I'm very tempted to get down the garden and make a start. Sadly, tons of work to do today and probably tomorrow too. Even worse, the weather is due to turn cold again by the end of the week.

But it's the first sign of spring, so won't be waiting too much longer!

Carrots

I've sown two window boxes of carrots. These are currently outside on the patio but will be moved down to the veggie patch soon.

Early Nantes is an early variety, suitable for sowing in February. There seem to be several varieties of Early Nantes, each with a number - I think these are either 2 or 5, but can't remember. I must look up what the difference is between those numbers.

I have other varieties such as Purple Haze, which is purple, and Autumn King, which is a later variety. I still have these in window boxes on the veggie patch.

I've sown the carrots in window boxes full of fresh compost. The soil in my veggie patch is quite stoney, so not very suitable for carrots. Carrots I sowed in the veggie patch last year were very twisted and not very good. Carrots I sowed on the allotment last year didn't grow very well and were overtaken by weeds. The window boxes seem like the best idea!

I sowed 8 window boxes of carrots last year too. I've only emptied two window boxes so far, and the carrots were a good size and fairly straight. The carrots seem to have stored well over the winter by being left in the compost.

Using window boxes has other advantages - they fill space between other veggies on the patch and the boxes hold down the weed sheeting. It just all makes sense to me!

Books say not to use fresh compost for carrots as it makes them fork. I haven't seen that problem so far. The compost I'm using is just cheap multi-purpose compost, so nothing special.

I'll empty the other window boxes whenever I need carrots - the sooner they're empty, the sooner I can sow some more, so it looks like i could be eating a lot of carrots over the next couple of months!

Last year:

This year, showing 2 freshly sown tubs and a few of last year's tubs with the dead greenery - I've pulled a few carrots out to show they're fine:

Leeks

Leeks should be easy to grow. They can be planted out in the potato bed as soon as the potatoes are dug up, so the ground gets used twice. They can be picked through the winter and can be used in soups etc.

Last year I sowed them in seed trays but they didn't grow very well. I saw a TV programme where they grew leeks and transplanted them - the leeks were about pencil thickness and the roots were quite long and tangled. Maybe they need longer / deeper roots to grow to pencil thickness and maybe starting them in seed tray cells didn't let them grow long enough roots??

This year I've sowed loads of seeds into a 5 inch pot - hopefully the deeper pot will help them grow better. I'll need to sow a lot more later but need to work out how many I'll have room for.

Tomatoes and Peppers

Last year was dismal for both tomatoes and peppers.

The pepper plants grew and flowered, but I was lucky to get a few peppers from several plants. I gave pepper plants to friends and they had 2-4 peppers from each plant. I had no chillis from about 8 chilli plants.

Some were grown in the greenhouse, some outside. The greenhouse ones grew faster and matured earlier, but only gave me one pepper. This year I have a few more varieties and have bought sweet pepper seeds to compare with the saved seeds I've been using from supermarket peppers.

I did get some tomatoes though. Some varieties did better than others, but I was too ill to make a proper note of which ones did best and tasted best. This year I'm repeating experiments.

The one tomato that I know did very badly 3 years running is Roma VF. It's a plum tomato, but the fruits it gave me were very small, and not many of them. This year I've replaced that with another plum variety just called Italian.

I do know Moneymaker and Gardners Delight grew well though. I've grown them over the last couple of years and not had any problem.

I will do better with pinching out tomatoes this year. I did ok with it last year, but when I got ill, the plants did get a bit neglected.

Another problem I found was that of shallow roots. The tomatoes and peppers were in large pots last year and I used a drip feeder in the greenhouse. I'm guessing the drip feeders wet the top of the soil so the roots just didn't grow down into the pot. I'll experiment with drip feeding some tomatoes and normal watering of others.