Guilty Weekend

Had a headache-filled weekend last weekend, so just did some gentle jobs in the garden, and not at the lotty, and felt guilty about it.

I cleared the strawberry bed, it was chock full of plants and had numerous mouldy strawbs in there - we aren't eating them so we decided we could make better use of the space and uproot them, refresh the ground and plant something else. So I pulled all the plants out and fed the dry and dusty ground with chicken poo and some of Mr Nunn's Quality Moo Poo, the last bag of it. Gave it all a good mix and a lot of water (some of those dry moo pats are rock hard!) and covered it with weed suppressant to keep the cats off while it settles. We may have to add some topsoil or something to the mix as the old compost in there is very dry and dusty.

I also planted out a courgette in to its bed, and added plenty of blue slug killer, so far so good.

The braaasicas are ready to plant at the lotty, unfortunately I wasn't up to it health-wise this weekend. We are going to struggle to find the space we need at the lotty for all the plants we have, which was the reason for clearing the strawb bed at home. We should gain some space at home as we harvest from the beetroot bed, they are just about ready for cropping, nice and small and sweet hopefully. We think there will still be some seedlings that have to be composted, even with all the extra bed space. Ah well, we'll just plant the strongest ones.

Oh I also pruned a couple of small branches off the apple tree so now the laundry whirligig can whirl again! The joys of a small garden, we can fill the available space with plants and trees but we still need somewhere to dry the washing.

After work on Monday evening hubby and I popped to the lotty, and planted out 8 savoy cabbage seedlings (fingers crossed, they look very gangly), we also planted a couple of courgette plants, giving them a handful of Mr Nunn's Quality Quarter Horse Apples at the bottom of the hole, and a good watering in. We still have some more courgette plants left over so we may plant another one or two at the lotty. Yes, we know we will probably end up with loads of courgettes but we can give them to friends, and the joy is in the growing, as well as the eating, and we don't like composting perfectly healthy seedlings!

From then to now

We have achieved so much in such a short space of time, it is astonishing when I think about it. The lotty was empty except for weeds when I sprayed with glyphosate on Good Friday this year, and we now have an almost full plot and an almost full garden at home. All we are waiting on now are the courgette plants to mature a bit, and the braaasicas that are still in the greenhouse.

The growth on the plot has been tremendous, the two pumpkins are spreading and we've spotted two female flowers with little yellow blobs behind them, fabulous. There may be more, but two is great! The runners and french beans are growing away nicely, but the cannellini and italian yardlongs aren't looking too great, hopefully they will pick up. The two other squashes (Winter and Butternut) we planted last week are looking settled and are beginning to produce flowers, and the tomato plants have fledgeling tomatoes on them and lots of flowers, yay!

We are already planning ahead for next year's plot, and have started a free trial of some garden design software, it seems ok, it is probably quite useful once we become accustomed to it and all its little foibles. Using the software it seems that we could fit a lot more on the plot than we currently do. And I thought we squashed stuff in already. Ww will have to see what we think come next year. We have already decided to put some permanent paths in, and begin an asparagus bed, we will tidy up the raspberries and the blackcurrant and put some supports in for them, and that will give the plot some more definite structure.

Oh and we ordered some more seeds from the vegetableseeds.net website :-) They sent me the missing Ailsa Craig onions from my first order, and a free packet of Tosca onion as a gift, nice :-) Good customer service.

We need to find a way of organising our seeds, we have lots, and it is becoming difficult to find the ones we want. A simple card index system should do it. They are all in used Jacobs cracker tubs, so all I need is a few A4 dividers and cut them to size.

At the moment we are thinking about getting a polytunnel for the back garden. The garden isn't very big but it would mean that the productive space would be concentrated in one area, and we would hopefully get more produce and earlier. Still working out the logistics of it really, it would mean some cutting back (or even cutting out) of some of the established trees and shrubs, and moving the beds about, but we'd planned on moving the beds around at the end of the season anyway. 




So that's it for now, I'll keep you all updated when more things happen.

Blessed Rain!

After a couple of weeks of fabulous sunshine we have had a change in the weather and it started raining Friday night, rained on and off for most of the day, then on Saturday we had a downpour! It's Glastonbury's fault of course. The rain is welcome, as it means we don't have to go to the lotty and water, just let nature do her thing. We'll have to pop over and check for weeds, as the rain encourages them out of the ground of course! The rain has also refilled the water butts at home, as they had become rather depleted recently, I have been using this water for the garden, rather than tap water.

We've ordered some seeds from a new-to-us website, www.vegetableseeds.net, they have a sale on at the moment so ordered some seed varieties that we haven't had before, gotta be worth a try - a different broad bean to our usual Bunyards Exhibition (Aquadulce), some onion seeds (Ailsa Craig although the wrong onions were delivered, I got White Lisbon's instead - emailed the company and they are sending the correct ones immediately, which is great customer service I think), some more beetroot Chioggia (the pink and white stripey one) and a couple of climbing french bean varieties that we haven't tried before, Hunter and Cobra (sound like Gladiators to me!)

We also got some veg seeds free with a gardening magazine, so we'll give them a try too, spinach beet, and sorrel, and some more cauli and turnips and a few others. Got nowhere to put them at the moment of course, both the lotty and the garden are planted, or spaces spoken for. We'll have another look round the website to see if there is anything else we want, asparagus seeds perhaps, or other brassicas. We quite fancy having a go at kohl rabi, but to be honest what puts me off is not knowing how to cook it, I haven't a clue.

I did a bit of tidying in the garden at the weekend, and cropped as many of the ripe redcurrants as I could, they are all washed now and in the freezer, I managed to get almost 1.75 kilos.

 I also tidied up the strawb bed a bit, and discovered lots of rotten strawbs, so as we aren't eating them we think we will just scrap the whole lot of them and refresh the bed for something we will eat. I swapped some of the bed netting covers around, and thngs look a bit better now. I also sowed a load more petit pois in the pea bed, as not many of them had come through. And I potted on the courgette plants, hopefully they will be able to go in at the weekend.

I also filled several 2 litre size milk cartons with sharp sand, as we use these as weights to hold down the netting on the lotty - I suspect we will have to do something similar at home, its not an elegant solution but it works.

Hubby sprayed all the invasive and overgrown ivy in the back garden yesterday morning, with the Vitax's SBK Bushwood killer, it's not a quick solution but hopefully it will be effective.

Cold Frame

We have wanted to build a Cold Frame for some time, we've had some timber for ages, along with a couple of pieces of plastic sheeting (from a fellow freecycler). Hubby has now used it to construct the cold frame for down the lotty - it hasn't been assembled yet, so we can transport it more easily, but it's all cut and ready to go, when we can find some space for it. It'll be better at the lotty as there is a little more space for it than in the back garden. He'll probably use the offcuts to make something else, a seat or something maybe, as it's good sturdy wood.

Need to take some pics of progress at the lotty and at home.

We have cropped a small handful of beans already, some deep purple french and some speckled french, they look amazing, but the plants aren't very large. I got confused with what I'd sown (didn't label them very well, lesson for the future, always label yer seedlings) so I think there are some dwarf frenchs at the lotty mixed in with the climbing runners, and some climbing frenches too hopefully. I also think I have a climbing bean in the dwarf bean bed at home, as its sending out tendrils... staked it and will see what happens. I am keeping my fingers crossed with the cannellini beans, the info says they grow easily, but our plants look a bit feeble to be honest. Still, we'll give them a try.

We have planted the Italian yard-long beans (I always thought they were footlong, but yard-long, crikey!) It's all an experiment, we'd rather have a go at growing things you can't get so easily in the shops, than grow stuff which is mega cheap in the shops, makes dinnertime a little more interesting :-)

And the two squashes (1 winter and 1 butternut) are looking healthy, with good roots, and sturdy leaves, they went in the ground at the lotty a couple of days ago. The courgettes need to do a bit more growing before they go in the ground, I'm just hoping that I haven't left it too late this year. So we should be able to put our final plants in at home and on the lotty in the next few days. Well, I say final, that's not counting all the braassicas that are growing in the greenhouse, ready for over winter.

Hubby and I recently reread all our 2010 posts, we have come a long way since then, for instance the hornbeam trees in the back garden are now a sturdy hedge, needs cutting back a bit, but it is under control, unlike the massive trees we had a few years ago. We also have less garden grass as we have filled a lot more of the back garden with raised beds. And the little pear tree that was dwarfed by the hornbeams is now growing happily and producing fruit. Also, we have given up on the idea of trying to grow tomatoes in containers, and this year they have gone in the ground instead.

We have further plans for re-designing the arrangement of the beds in the back garden; and removing the ivy from the back fence that has gone mental; and pruning the various fruiting trees as they have also gone mental. But those will be jobs for the autumn.

At the moment in our back garden we have 3 1x1 metre raised beds and 4 2x1 metre raised beds, and 1 small greenhouse (6ft x 4ft). The strawbs all migrated from one bed to another, and are happily fruiting away. I need to crop the redcurrants, and I will probably do like I did last year and freeze them as I go along, then make redcurrant jelly to go with winter meals.

The plan is to move the greenhouse from the back fence (where it is disappearing under shedloads of ivy) and rotate it through 90 degrees onto the side fence, where it will get a lot more sun, and will enable us to tackle the ivy. We tried using glyphosate but that didn't cut the mustard, so we are going to try a super strong weedkiller like Vitax's SBK Bushwood killer and see if that does the trick... the ivy was planted many many years ago when the garden was new but like everything else in the garden it has gone nuts this year and is now a problem. If the weedkiller doesn't sort it then we will just have to physically rip it out. There is a lot of it.

Feeling in need of a Lotty fix

We go down there after work and water the plants and potter about, and check the progress of the plants and seeds, but now there are no structures to make or big jobs to do we both feel a little lost!

We would love to find a reasonably priced little tool shed for the lotty, to store our scruffy chairs and keep a few tools in, but unless we can find a suitable second hand one the cost will be too prohibitive. Neither of us are particularly handy at woodwork so we'd struggle to make something, but we may have to give it a go. Anything like this that appears on Freecycle disappears at hyperspeed! I'm sure something will turn up at some stage though, things usually do...

We'd been after a cheap hose reel to make coping with the hosepipe a lot easier, and sure enough, they eventually had one in Aldi for a tenner (instead of multiples of tens of pounds for a branded one.) It has been a smashing purchase, despite being somewhat fiddly to assemble - makes watering so much simpler - connect it to the tap using a short piece of hose and roll it out to the length needed, water, then roll it back up again, bob's your uncle, so simple.

In the meantime, everything is trundling along nicely, growing steadily, and looking good. We planted some leeks (Musselburgh) and sowed some Golden (yellow) beets and pink & white stripey beets on the plot at the weekend, we also planted out the Cannelini beans, but to be honest they are looking a little sickly at the moment, fingers crossed they pick up. The Italian footlong bean plants are looking ok, if a little small, I may need to pot them on before they go in the ground.

The courgette plants are coming on a treat, they will be able to go in the ground soon too, although I sowed more than we'll need, as per usual, so have passed some on to friends. Them and the two squashes we have ready and waiting will mean the plot is finally almost filled, except for the brassica seedlings we have in the greenhouse.

Oh and all the tomato plants are showing signs of flowering :-)

Getting things ship shape

We both had a week off work recently week, so we 'set to' down at the lotty. The weather was kind most of the time, and we got loads done.


We'd already dug a bed, and tilled it and planted in it, as mentioned in our previous posting; and the spuds from 2 years ago were growing away like mad, so they had to go. Basically there was a huge section that we hadn't dug over last year and we wanted to do it all, to uncompact the ground and make it usable again.


So we dug, and turned, and added manure, and dug some more, and tilled, and dug and dug and dug! But now the vast majority of the plot, all the current growing area, is dug over and tilled, and fed with horse, cow and chicken poo. We'd like to sort out the work area at the fence end of the plot, but we sprayed all the nettles and other weeds there, so need to wait for those to die down before tackling that section.


The problem we have is the clay soil, which after a day of sunshine turns into rocks - and we struggle to break it down into a fine tilth. Thankfully there is a water supply on site, a little addition of water makes the clay easier to break down, but too much turns it into a sticky muddy mess... Hopefully a few years of good horse muck and compost will help to improve the condition of the soil.


During our week off we also made some structures, to cover the brassicas - we bought red cabbages and cauli plants from Dundry, and planted them under debris netting to keep the Peskys off them, and we have sown winter cabbages and swedes and cauli in the greenhouse, and have made structures for them out of debris netting and blue water pipes cut to size.


After all our work the lotty is totally up to scratch, and the structures are in place ready for the plants that aren't ready yet. Feeling very satisfied.


I'd lost my little courgette plant to the slugs in the back garden so chitted some more seeds in the airing cupboard, I now have 8 healthy plants and space for 3... will see if anyone in work wants any. If not they will go into the compost bin. As long as I'm not too late... Hopefully things will catch up after our late start.


Chitting is a method I'd not used before, but I will definitely try it again, as it means I am only sowing live seeds. Take a sealable plastic tub (like takeaway tubs) and place some kitchen roll in the bottom, dampen it, place your seeds on there (bigger seeds are better, courgettes, beans, sweetcorn, etc) and seal tightly. Place your little parcel in a warm place (I use the airing cupboard) for a few days - after about 4 or 5 days you should have lovely chitted seeds with roots sprouting. Simply carefully sow them in compost and after a few days the seeds should be showing signs of life above the surface.


Oh and the peas and broad beans we sowed at the beginning of our holiday are appearing above ground :-) Happy days.

We're Baaaaaack

Oh crikey, I hadn't realised it had been such a long time since I posted last, I guess life got in the way and I just got out of the habit of posting.

2013 was a bumper year for us, we got our local parish council (half) plot, and turned it from a weedy dry neglected chunk into a productive plot in a comparatively short time. We grew sweetcorn, toms, runners and french beans, broad beans, beets, peas, and found garlic and spuds left over from the previous plotholder.

We ate it all and enjoyed it immensely. Our plot is on the sunny side of the site, the soil is fertile, if prone to weeds, and the views across the open fields are stunning. We are very lucky to have such a super plot, for the grand total of £15.00 a year rent.

We ate a tremendous amount of home grown veg and fruit last year, and I made jams, jellies and chutneys, and tomato sauces for the freezer. My favourite is my seedless raspberry jam, which was so easy to make it was almost scary! (It probably helps if you know a bit about jam making before you start though.)

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Seedless Raspberry Jam

Pick the raspberries through the season as they ripen and freeze them as you go along.
Once you have enough (at the end of the season probably) defrost them all in a big bowl.
They will collapse and go squishy and juicy when they defrost.
This is the messy bit.  Push the raw raspberries through a sieve into a large measuring jug bit by bit, until you have all the juice and pulp in the jug and a pile of dryish seeds. Discard the seeds.
You make the jam in the same way as a jelly, i.e. a pint of juice to a pound of sugar.

Raspberries aren't as high in pectin as brambles, so you may want to add some lemon juice, or some cooking apple peel & lemon peel tied up in a muslin bag to the mix to increase the pectin. Or you could use sugar with added pectin but I've never used this so have no idea whether it would work.
Bung the raspberry juicy pulp and the sugar (and the muslin bag of cooking apple peel/lemon peel if used) in a big pan and cook it until it gets to the setting stage.
Pot into sterilised jars, pop the lids on and allow to cool before labelling.
The resultant jam is a little sharp and utterly delicious.

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Then the winter came with all its rain, rain, rain, and our clay soil got compacted and neglected by us. We both work full time and when the weekends came the weather was usually unpleasant. So when we finally got some half decent weather this spring we got down there, watered the weeds with a double concentrate of glyphosate, and gradually got the plot back into shape.

And this weekend just gone I finally cleared the remaining dead weeds, we finished digging over the big first bed, tilled it, fed it with horse poo (from a good friend in work), got the runner bean frame up and finally planted!

So far we have - runners and french beans (couple of varieties) with pretty marigolds along the edge, sweetcorn (mainstay variety, same as last year, from Dundry Nurseries, a local independent near to Staverton Airport) and a couple of pumpkin plants that were spares off a chap in work. We've grown courgettes before but not pumpkins so that should be interesting.

We've also still got raspberries, a rhubarb crown, and a wee blackcurrant.

In the greenhouse and in the back garden we have some tomato plants ready to go to the lotty, and we have broad bean seeds to go in, and a few other bits and bobs.

The spuds we didn't manage to dig up last year are sprouting, but as they've been in the ground for a few years now we'll probably just dig them up and compost them.

It felt so good to finally get some plants in the ground. In the back garden we have a couple of fruit trees (apple and pear), a fecund redcurrant (seems to have gone mad this year!), a feeble rhubarb crown, and herbs, beets, carrots, strawberries, toms, dwarf french beans and a courgette. We have an empty bed where we'll probably sow peas although we haven't decided yet.

We feel very behind, other plotholders seem to be well ahead, and some plots are planted with military precision! Ours is a mess by comparison, but as far as I'm concerned we aren't growing for show we are growing to eat. There are some other messy plots on our site, and lots of neat and tidy ones, but we aren't fussed about neat and tidy - as long as we keep on top of the weeds and our plants grow that'll do us grand. And we will catch up, we did it last year, and we'll do it again.