NEW PLOT!

A couple of months ago, I had the good news that I had a new plot!

It's a full size plot - 4 large beds that had been dug over and hardly used for a couple of years - looks in pretty good condition - could have been a lot worse! Sadly no shed ...

Left Side

Right Side

There's a path on the left, another down the middle, another on the right. The front bed (1) is sheeted over with plastic. Then there are a few raspberry canes and another bed (3), uncovered, quite a lot of dandelions in there.

Beyond that is a huge clump of rhubarb that desperately needs dividing. Beyond that is enough space for another bed. The old shed used to be down there.




On the right is another uncovered bed (2) with a few shallow weeds. Beyond that is a bed (4) covered in blue plastic and then space for another bed beyond that.

The remains of the old shed are on the plot. It burnt down a while ago. I'm using the pieces to cover parts of the plot until I can clear, dig and plant them.

While it all looks 'ok', there's a lot of work to do .....


I started with some carpet - very handy for keeping the weeds down. A local carpet fitter had a car load, just enough to cover the front right bed. I got a huge room size carpet which covered part of the bottom end of the plot. While collecting these, I cracked a rib. I sowed hundreds of seeds at home - anything and everything.

I pulled back the blue sheeting and dug over bed 3 on the plot and planted loads of spuds. Due to time and cracked rib, it was only a quick dig, no earthing up. I dug over about 1/4 of bed 3, dug out loads of dandelions, sowed a few rows of carrots.

Sadly, seed sowing at home was a total disaster. Very little sprouted. Brassicas cooked on hot days. Sweetcorn and beans were eaten by mice or slugs. Salads disappeared. With re-sowings, I got enough to fill an 8x8 bed at home, nothing for the plot. Leeks in buckets have done ok so far, ready for transplanting to the plot.

With nothing to plant on the plot and the cracked rib, I didn't go to the plot much. It was covered anyway, just hoped that mother nature would rain and shine on the spuds and carrots. I sowed some cauliflower and PSB for autumn / winter - these are nearly ready for planting.

As leeks are ready now, I've been to the plot again this week. Not too bad - some of those long straggly weeds over the carpets, some brambles and nettles at the bottom, so grass coming through holes in plastic sheeting etc. A couple of hours later I'd cleared quite a lot of it, moved some carpets around. Bed 2 (the front right above) is now uncovered and almost ready for the leeks - just needs a quick hoe and pop some holes in.

The spuds on the plot have mostly died back. Carrots were a no-show. I thinks it's just been too hot and dry for them all. Since the wettest winter on record, it's been quite dry.

In fact, right now, it's a heatwave, temperatures of 30C+ forecast for tomorrow and not far off that torday. I'm heading to the plot soon to hoe and pop some holes in for the leeks. I'll pop down in the morning to plant out .....

And I'll try and keep this blog updated more often ....

Planting Out Broad Beans

We've had a bit of sunshine over the last couple of months, but it's been pretty cold - barely above freezing. This week we finally had a warm and sunny day so I took the opportunity to plant out the broad beans.

Broad beans planted out

I sowed 45 Aquadulce Claudia a few months ago. 31 of them had sprouted and were planted out in 2 pairs of rows.  They stayed in the seed trays in an unheated greenhouse all winter. They look pretty good!

They are in the bed that had the potatoes last year - I did plant some leeks here very late and they didn't grow any bigger than blades of grass, so I've pulled them up.

The veggie patch is looking generally ok. Fairly tidy, no major weed problems. The leeks are still small but looking good. We'll dig them up later this month.

The rhubarb is looking good. The big rhubarb has about 8 stalks coming up and the small one nearby is just starting to shoot. Three more small crowns behind the greenhouse have sprouted too - I thought they had all died last year, but it must have been just the cold, wet weather.

I had a quick tidy up in the greenhouse too and sorted out all the seed trays and cell modules. The peas I sowed a few months ago are now about 3in high. The first brassicas I sowed a couple of weeks ago have sprouted.

My seed potatoes are chitting. The onion sets are ready to go in the ground. I need to get a move on! I'll crack on with sowing more seeds this week.

First Sowings 2013

We had another sunny spell this afternoon, so squelched down the garden to sow some seeds in the greenhouse. As usual, seeds are sown in cell modules in seed trays.

4 Tomato Gardeners Delight
4 Tomato Belle
4 Tomato Sungold
4 Tomato Alicante
8 Sweet Pepper

8 Broccoli Summer Purple
8 Cauliflower All Year Round
8 Lettuce Winter Gem

10 Leeks Autumn Mammoth in a Morrisons bucket

I only had 10 leek seeds out of that pack of 150 seeds. The missus must have sown about 140 seeds into 2 large pots last year - that would have left them very crowded and not able to thicken up. The extra spacing this year should help.

I have a long plastic tunnel cloche - it was a bargain in the garden centre clearance last autumn. I'll probably set that up for the brassicas once I've cleared a bit of ground and tidied up.

Next job on the list is to sort the rest of the seeds so that I can so more soon!

What's Growing, What's Not

I've had a quick trip to the veggie patch - some good news, some not so good.

The peas from Grow Your Own magazine have sprouted. All of them! Yep, a whole 14 seeds in one packet. 

Peas, free from Grow Your Own magazine

As there were so few of them, I sowed them in a 10in pot. As the mice scoffed all my peas, sweetcorn and beans last year, I covered the pot with a propagator lid to try and keep the mice out. It seems to have worked.

Using a propagator lid meant that I had to keep the pot in the greenhouse for the winter, otherwise the lid would have just blown off outdoors.





Propagator lids also worked with the broad beans. We have 31 of them and another one sprouting.

Aquadulce Claudia

I had actually sown 45 of them, so this isn't a bad result. I'll get them planted out soon.

Onion sets in seed trays

There were actually 4 seed trays of onions. They've sprouted, but gone a bit soft. I have no idea if they'll survive or not, but might as well try, nothing to lose except a bit of time.











What hasn't worked so well is the garlic - all the elephant garlic planted outside in tubs have been pulled up and the green shoots have been eaten. I had also planted 2 large tubs of ordinary garlic and left them in the greenhouse. There were probably 15-20 cloves planted. Only 3 have survived - the rest have been pulled up - there are bits of roots left that show where the cloves were. I'll plant some more. I don't know if we'll get enough cold nights for it to split, but if all we end up with is rounds, that's fine - it's still usable!

Leeks are "ok". The big ones are about half an inch thick. The small ones are still like blades of grass. This is the first time I've grown leeks beyond the "blade of grass" stage. I sowed them too thickly in pots so they were too crowded to thicken up, and planted them out far too late to grow to full size. But I'm happy to have leeks and we'll use them.

I've also learnt a good lesson about growing leeks and potatoes. This year I'll grow early spuds in the ground so that I dig them up in summer and plant the leeks out earlier. I'll also sow the leeks thinner so they have room to thicken up.

And the first rhubarb is sprouting. Won't be long till we get our first rhubarb crumble this year!

Sunshine at last!

Last year was a bit of a washout - the wettest year on record. The rain rarely stopped for long enough to let the ground dry out enough to work. It was gloomy most of the time, colder than normal - veggies didn't grow very well.

When it stopped raining, it was like "commando gardening" - get as much done as possible before the heavens opened up again. I planted out loads of brassicas for the winter - pigeons stripped the whole lot within days before I had a chance to set up frames and netting. Cauliflowers rotted. Demoralised, I kind of gave up.

However, I did sow a few more things in the greenhouse for overwintering - I had every intention of planting out, sowing more, but the weather was just depressing and I couldn't be bothered. The last time I went to the greenhouse was early December.

For the last week we've had sub-zero temperatures and thick snow - overnight it warmed up, rained, the snow melted away and we now have bright sunshine, so I'm off to the veggie patch and greenhouse to find out what's survived.

From memory, we should have:
4 elephant garlic in large tubs outside the greenhouse
1 sack of new potatoes in the greenhouse - they were meant for Christmas, but weren't doing very well so left them longer
3 seed trays of winter onion sets - the aim was to plant them out late October, but it didn't happen
1 tub of peas - these were the handful of seeds (about 13?) that came free with Grow Your Own magazine last year
24 broad beans (Aquadulce Claudia) - I did want to plant them out late last year, but no chance of that
80-100 small leeks planted out
various broccoli / kale (probably all just skeletal after the pigeons fed themselves)

I'm also going to sow a few seeds today. The sooner I start, the better. I've missed the growing .....

Squashed

It's the end for all the courgettes and squash plants. Powdery mildew won.

I think they might have been planted out quite late and it's been an extremely wet and cold year. We did get quite a good crop from the normal courgettes and a few Lebanese courgettes too.

Nothing whatsoever from the marrows, butternut squash and other courgette varieties.

We have one tiny pumpkin, just 3in big, which was growing at the end of 18ft of pumpkin plant. Somehow I couldn't see it turning orange in time for halloween, especially as the main part of the plant was dying.

Better luck next year! We like the courgettes so will definitely grow them next year. We probably won't bother with pumpkin or some of other things we planted - maybe one butternut squash, but we'll see.

Leeks

About a week ago, I dug over a bed and planted out some leeks. I planted the Musselburgh that I'd put in troughs about 5 weeks earlier. They'd grown well in the troughs, thickening up nicely. These ones didn't have the roots trimmed for transplanting into the pots or into the ground.

I planted something like 80 leeks approx 6in apart. They've taken well, growing strongly. It might be too late in the year to get full-sized leeks, but hopefully they'll do well enough for a decent crop. I might thin them by pulling alternate leeks as required, but we'll see how they come along.

The Bandit leeks are still in the tomato pots, doing well. These are the ones that were trimmed. It's far too wet to dig up the spuds yet so no chance of planting them out any time soon.

The Autumn Giant and others still in the original pots will probably end up in the compost bin if the weather carries on like this ....

Winter Onions

Just a note - 100 each of Electric (Red) and Senshyu (White) onions started in seed trays of compost about a week ago.The first ones have started sprouting.

We've had torrential rain so no chance of digging over the onion bed for more planting out yet.

Mushroom Hunting

It's a bit late, but was a great day out! Shame about the rain - we all got soaked through to the skin.

We went on a fungi foraging course run by Andy Overall http://www.fungitobewith.org/
There were about 20 of us in the group. After a quick chat, we all went off into the woods. We picked anything we found and took them back to Andy for identification. He was great - explaining the characteristics of each mushroom and how to positively identify it. We kept him very busy!

We found loads of Ochre Brittlegill (Russula Ochreleuka) and Orange Birch Bolete, as well as various other smaller mushrooms. Many were a bit raggedy, past their best, but we found enough to bring home for dinner. They were lovely cooked in a creamy garlic sauce.

We feel confident that we can go back into the woods and identify some of them again - some good and some bad. We feel confident that we can feed ourselves without poisoning ourselves, so it's all good!

Foraging

We enjoy making wines and jams, so any fruit we can find for free is a bonus. Friends normally give me bags of apples and plums, or they pick tubs of blackberries for me. This year, it seems I'm the only one with apples, and nobody has plums or blackberries.

We've taken a couple of trips out to the countryside recently. After driving about 30 miles on one trip, we finally found one blackberry patch that gave us 2lbs of blackberries, and another place where we picked 3lbs of cherry plums. It was too early for the blackberries, hence only 2lbs. We couldn't get to the rest of the cherry plums as they were deep inside a hedgerow.

One of the small spots on our street has been stripped bare - the brambles are all gone. The house owners preferred everyone to see their bare fence than the brambles that were hanging over. Never mind!

My huge elderberry tree is completely bare. Not a sign of any elderberries at all. And very little we can find out in the wild.

On the plus side, we found some sloes and we've picked 2.5lbs so far. We'll need 3lbs for sloe wine and more for sloe gin, so the more we can get, the better.

I've found rosehips dotted all over the place, so hoping to get loads of these soon.

Me and the missus are out on a mushroom hunting course on Sunday, looking forward to it!

Harvest Festival!

Been busy over the last month - the mother-in-law was ill, so I haven't had time to post on here. This is a quick update.

Beans
We've been able to pick and eat beans straight from the veggie patch, and we have 2 or 3 dinners worth of beans frozen for later. At this time of year I would have expected to have 2 or 3 carrier bags full of beans in the freezer. Mice eating the seeds followed by poor weather and then losing my seeds put paid to that. Hoping next year will be better.

Parsnips

Stunted parsnips

They looked great on the surface, but they're all stunted at about 2 inches. Some people have theorised that it's because I started them in cell modules and planted them out. I'm going to try the toilet roll middles next year.

Brassicas
All very slow and late this year. Caterpillars shredded a lot of leaves, but ordinary bug spray got rid of them Must use the spray more often.

We've had broccoli with two dinners now. I was hoping to have a few bags of broccoli in the freezer by now, but it wasn't to be. It'll be a few weeks before any more is ready.

Our first cauliflowers are hearting. One white (All Year Round) and two Romanesco. We're still several weeks away from anything worth picking.

The kale in pots is very small. I've started feeding with Miracle Grow. This is my first year of growing brassicas in pots, so feeding wasn't something I'd thought about before.

Squash / Courgettes
We've had loads of courgettes, some up to 2ft long. Yes, I know we should pick them smaller, but they grow so quickly and with the shortage of other veg, we thought we might as well let them grow bigger. We now have a couple of bags of lightly fried courgette slices in the freezer. They're great for bulking up stews and things.

We know we've had a couple of Lebanese courgettes as they are a different colour and shape to the other courgettes (Green Bush).

We had nothing from the butternut squash, the outdoor cucumbers, the marrow or the pumpkin. We want to be as self-sufficient in veg as possible, so we might skip marrow and pumpkin next year. A butternut squash would be nice to have though, and hopefully we'll get a cucumber next year.

Leeks
Transplanting them into pots seems to have worked well. They're thickening up nicely. Still 3 more pots of them that I haven't had a chance to transplant yet.

I'll be digging over another bed for them to plant them out properly over the next week or two.

Onions, Garlic & Shallots
We've pulled most of these up now. They're all smaller than normal, probably due to the poor weather this year, but still good to have them. I doubt we'll have enough to last through the winter, but some is better than none. I'll keep some winter onions growing in the greenhouse so we get them as early as possible next year.

Potatoes
We've scoffed the two sacks of Desiree. We still have 8 sacks of Charlottes to get through, plus the potato bed of King Edwards and Desiree to dig up. Lesson for next year - more maincrop, fewer salad spuds!

Blackberries

We want to become self-sufficient in fruit and veg and wine. Blackberries are great for jams, crumbles and wine. I'm currently using the last jar of apple and blackberry jam from last year.

We can make jams and wines from various fruits, but they're not all easy to get hold of. We had just one plum on our plum tree this year and the roadside plum trees don't have many plums either. That means only 2 gallons of plum wine and no plum jam. Fortunately, brambles grow everywhere, so we should be able to get loads of blackberries.

I've set myself a target of 20 gallons of blackberry wine, 10 jars of apple and blackberry jam, and a handful of blackberries to throw in apple crumbles. I'll need something ridiculous like 75-100lbs of blackberries.


We picked just over 3lbs of blackberries from the mother-in-law's garden at the weekend. They're now in a bucket, slowly turning into wine. That's a good start!

My son came out blackberry picking with me this morning. We went to the usual spot on the common, only to find virtually nothing. It looks like the brambles had been cut down early this year. Lots of nettles growing where the blackberries were. I normally visit there once a year and pick several pounds of blackberries, but today we got just a handful. We walked over a mile on the common and still managed only about 5oz.

Fortunately we found two small spots on our street where the brambles had grown over the fence, so managed another half a pound from each place. I've now frozen them all.

Ho hum ....

Transplanting Leeks

We started our leeks in medium sized pots - about 6-8in pots. Just a pot full of compost, sprinkle the seeds, hope for the best. Each pot is now packed with baby leeks, so we're very happy.

The leeks will go in the potato bed once I've dug up the potatoes, but the potato foliage has only just started to die off. That means I won't be planting out for a good few weeks yet. The pots are far too crowded for the leeks to thicken up.

After pulling up some carrots, I had two deep troughs empty. We have a lot of large 12in pots spare now that we've destroyed the blighted tomato plants. I've decided to temporarily transplant the leeks into these pots and troughs. This will give them room to grow properly for a couple of months and then I can transplant some to their final positions in the ground. 

I've seen some people trimming the roots and top-growth on their leeks, but I've also seen others not trimming. I've definitely seen a video on YouTube of Monty Don planting out without trimming and pretty sure I've seen a video of him trimming the leeks too.

I spent a while reading up on whether to trim the roots or not, and the pros and cons of trimming or not. It seems that that only reason to trim the roots is to make planting easier - as we're dropping them in to holes, a bundle of roots just gets in the way. However, if the hole is big enough, it should be easy to twist the leeks as we lower them into the hole, thereby twisting the roots.

I decided that as our leeks are still very small, I would prefer not to trim the roots. If roots are trimmed, the leeks (as with all aliums) will grow new roots. Trimming the roots might slow down growth as it's putting more energy into growing new roots than in to growing the leek. This shouldn't normally be a problem, but we've had really poor weather this year, so the leeks are a lot smaller than they normally would be at this time of year.

I separated the Musselburgh leeks and planted them into the deep troughs. I made holes about 3in deep just using my finger - there's no point making the holes any bigger at this time. I planted out 90 leeks in total. They were a bit fiddly with the roots there.

The Bandit leeks are being transplanted into the 12in tomato pots, 9 per pot. I've decided to trim the roots on some, and not on others. Apparently if we trim the roots, we should also trim the leaves back, so I've done that too. 63 done so far, plenty more to do later.

The Autumn Giant leeks are looking good, but I haven't touched them yet. Probably a job for this evening ....

Cherry Plums

We have a large conifer hedge dividing our driveway from next door's driveway. I've always known about the big red plum tree at the front of the drive - it only produces a few plums per year.

Yellow plums in my front garden

But while trimming the connifer hedge, I found another variety of plum. They were green, now turning a lovely shade of yellow. Most seem to be heart shaped.

The photo doesn't really show the true colour - they are a brighter yellow in real life.

Not sure what variety they are, but I'm sure they'll make a nice crumble sometime in the winter. As with any other plums, they'll be picked, stoned and frozen, ready for when we want to eat them.


Next month I will have lived here for 19 years. I can't believe I've never spotted these before!

Sloe Hunting

I love the whole foraging thing - free food! Or even better, free wine! Unfortunately I'm not very clued up yet. I can spot a few basics like plums, elderberries, blackberries and so on, but not much more. I probably walk past loads of free food every day without realising it.

Sloes turning blue in August

I finally found some sloes. I had to do a lot of research to find out what sloes looked like, how big they would be, the likely places to find them etc. I had to send photos to other people to get confirmation, and finally, I have it.

I know other people will be eyeing them up, so I'll keep watch on them for a while. Hopefully we can pick them before everyone else does. Naturally I won't reveal the location - it's my little secret!

Sloes are apparently best after a frost - the frost sweetens them up. We'll pick them before the first frosts and freeze them - the freezer should do the same thing as a frost. Once we have them, we'll be making loads of wine and sloe gin.

Potatoes

We've done fairly well with the spuds this year. We haven't had to buy any for a couple of months now.The yield per sack is fairly low though - I'm sure we could get twice as many per sack in a good year.

The Charlottes are nice. We had Swift were good, We had another variety that I forgot the name of, which is a real shame, because they were very very nice.

Charlottes left, Desiree right

I've emptied the first sack of Desiree potatoes. They're a nice red colour, not as big as I'd hoped for, but easily enough for a dinner. They'll make a nice change from the Charlottes we're still working our way through.

We have another 9 sacks of Charlottes to empty. That should be enough for about 25 dinners. Might be better next year if we grow more maincrops in sacks rather than salad potatoes - the bigger the crop, the better!

The greenery in all the sacks has died off. The greenery on the King Edwards and Desiree that were planted in the ground has started to die back. I'll be leaving these potatoes in the ground for a few more weeks yet. When I dig them up, I'll plant leeks out straight away - the leeks are slowly thickening up.

I'm going to get some seed potatoes today so that we can have new potatoes for Christmas.

A Sad Day

Lovely weather, so spent most of the day in the garden catching some rays in between work in the veggie patch.

The tomatoes were looking very sorry for themselves. The cold wet weather meant very few tomatoes growing and all 59 outdoor tomato plants had blight. The handful of tomatoes growing were tiny and some were rotting. Some plants had no tomatoes at all.

Meanwhile, we had 46 brassicas (broccoli and kale) in small pots, desperately needing to move into bigger pots.So we took the difficult decision to abandon all hope of outdoor tomatoes this year and use the buckets for the brassicas.

I picked all the tomatoes and they're now in trays. They're almost all green, apart from a couple of Sungold that are turning yellow. We have to leave the tomatoes in the trays for a week or so to see if they start rotting from blight. If they don't, we can make green tomato chutney.

All the tomato plants are now bagged up for the council to take in their green waste collection.

At least the buckets are going back to productive use now!

Winter Brassicas

Brassicas are quite big and take up a lot of space, so we can't plant many in the veggie patch. Even with all year round growing and harvesting, there isn't anywhere near enough space in the veggie patch to keep us fed with brassicas.

The simple solution is to use all the tomato pots and buckets in the summer, and for winter brassicas in the winter. We'll use the compost from the potato sacks and tomato buckets for the winter brassicas.

So last week I sowed another 4 trays of brassicas:
24 Cauliflower (All Year Round)
12 Cabbage Kilaton
12 Kale (Black Tuscany)
12 Early Purple Sprouting Broccoli (Rudolph)
12 Late Purple Sprouting Broccoli
8 Cabbage (Durham Early)
8 Cabbage (?)
8 Cabbage (?)

The Black Tuscany Kale is winter hardy so can live outside without a problem. It produces large black leaves that can be used like cabbage. The leaves are "cut and come again", so we can pick what we need when we need it. We can also pick, chop, blanche and freeze leaves if we get enough.

There are 4 varieties of cabbage, all of which can live outside, and should mature at different times. With some luck, we should have cabbage throughout the winter. But my luck says that they'll all come at the same time ....

The AYR cauliflower is probably best either in the greenhouse or a coldframe / cloche. I have a greenhouse heater and I'm planning to run that throughout the winter. However, there is only so much we can keep in the greenhouse, so we won't get many cauliflowers in there. I'll have to look for some clear plastic sheeting to build a cloche.

There are two varieties of PSB which should give us PSB from December through to May.

Chillies and Peppers

This is another crop failure this year. We sowed dozens of seeds, loads of varieties, but it looks like the weather ruined any chance of a crop this year. The biggest chillies and peppers are about 6in tall, still quite thin, and no sign of any flowers.

We currently have 5 sweet pepper seedlings, the biggest of which is about 2in tall. We have about 15 other chillies and peppers, the tallest of which is about 6in tall, thin, and no signs of any flowers or peppers.

We'll overwinter these indoors in the back room. With some luck, they'll produce a nice early crop next year.

Tomato Blight

It looks like almost all of our tomatoes have blight, and we haven't had a single tomato yet. Very disappointing.

The one tomato plant that's safe at the moment is the Shirley, which is in the greenhouse. There are plenty of good looking tomatoes on it, so hopefully we'll have some tomatoes from it soon.

The other 59 tomato plants are all outside. We've stripped all the damaged leaves and sprayed with Bordeaux Mixture, but it's probably too late. At best, we'll slow the blight down and we might get a few tomatoes, but as there aren't many tomatoes yet, it's not looking good. There are hundreds of flowers, dozens of tomatoes, nothing anywhere near ripe - the poor weather this year meant everything is very late.

But got to think positive: this year's weather has been the worst on record - next year is unlikely to be this bad, so we should do a lot better.