Vegmonkey and the Mrs.

The Japanese onions i planted ages ago are all starting to come good.  The tops have flopped over and yellowed, and most of the bulbs have swelled. I was in doubt a while ago as to whether or not to bother with these, but i suppose that nothing needs the ground until now, so it seems worthwhile.

The ones above are the ones which began to have seed heads growing on them (bizarrely a few are no bigger than the sets we planted!), we’ve harvested about another 10 or so since them which were a lot bigger, and had the beginnings of a papery coating.  The only problem with the Senshyu variety is they don’t keep long.

As the maincrop onions are getting near edible too, it seems we will have onions right up until Christmas, which is nice

Have just watched gardeners’ world and feel compelled to write a post. I read somewhere recently that Joe Swift was ridiculed, for his use of a rotavator to clear his plot.  Rotavating the weeds in means he will have a real problem with weeds in the near future and for much longer. I am having my first problems with bindweed this year, and am currently looking at the best way to rid the plot of weeds without having to resort to spraying.

It also annoyed me a little that he had all that earth ‘delivered’ right to his plot…i found it a lot harder than that lugging it through the house and certainly didn’t have as much help. It feels a little like Berryfields has been re-located to an allotment site in North London!

Finally on this topic, isn’t the whole point of raised beds that they can be accessed from ALL SIDES! Joe’s are triangular and diamond shaped and are huge. Having raised beds makes absolutely no sense at all if they are going to be trampled all over and the soil compacted (by his children in the show).

I watch Gardeners’ World for exemplar practice, and usually really enjoy the parts about growing food. Carol and Monty (having a rest!) never disappoint.  Monty’s own garden shows that….the perfect example.

In my own garden the ‘Spring Leaves’ above have been planted out and are growing well. The snails love them but the plants are growing slowly. I’ll post on them again when we start eating them, which should be within a couple of weeks…

There are sooooooooo many blogs out in cyber-growing-land!

There are a lot in America, most infact, and the majority i have seen are either ‘flower growing’ gardening blogs or ‘general’ garden blogs with a little fruit and veg thrown in.

I suppose this makes sense, America is a big country, which in turn means lots of gardens.

But i want to read fruit and veg growing blogs.

I know blotanical is useful for finding blogs, but i really do have no desire to grow anything that will not ‘produce’ for me, (just a personal preference) and the website doesn’t allow a specific search for this.

So the purpose of this post is to highlight decent fruit and veg growing blogs in the U.K.  Simple as that. (There are lots of fabulous non-U.K. based blogs in my sidebar…but that’s a post for another day!)

Fork In Hell - An neat little allotment blog based near us, in Gloucester.

Fresh as a daisy - They describe their site as a ‘Veggie Garden Experience,’ which is alright by me.

Growing our own - Another Gloucester allotment, focused on fruit and veg growing.

Manor Stables Veg Plot - A much larger project…and still mostly focused on veg!

Nomegrown - A large plot and a back garden in St Albans.

The smallest smallholding - I’d love this much space and chickens!

Souper Allotment - Adventures getting started with an allotment.

I’m sure there are more that are equally as super, but these are the ones i read regularly. I’d love to hear of any others that i might like, but it’s where to find them! The best place i think is other people’s blogrolls… perhaps we need an award system similar to Mouse & Trowel for veg blogs! Any takers?

Being a primary school teacher means i get more extended holidays than most people. This enables me to spend lots of time out in the garden during the main planting time of Easter, but also to get on top of things during the Winter season. The last day or so has been spent looking at the successes, failures and ‘missing parts!’ of last year’s veg planting plan and doing lots of scribbling and crossing out to improve it.

The main changes are:

1. The plot will be a lot fuller (i forgot to plant many ‘leaves’ this year and hardly any winter veg that grew.)

2. There will be no flowers growing in the beds (they will have their own pots…somewhere as they seemed to take over, particularly the sunflowers, as the beneficial insects are only good if there is space to grow!)

3. Potatoes will be added into the rotation (i’ve decided that First Earlies can go in before the leeks need the space.)

4. The colours have been changed to make the plan easier to read.

I have included the ‘winter veg planner’ below. Click it or print to make it easier to read. This is the best quality i could get it before it became too large for the page! Things like tomatoes, sweetcorn, lettuces etc and herbs will all be grown in pots, hanging baskets or in the beds where there is space (!?). I will add a section for these later next week. I know a few people have been following some parts of the plan. I hope that things have worked, and would love to hear about any successes, failures, questions or recommendations!

I know the plan may look a bit ‘much’ but i know that this way, we are more likely, via the 4 year rotation, to have less diseases in each veg family, to know exactly what and where we can grow and to grow plants in an order so that the previous years plants prepare the soil for the next years!

 Happy planning!

The worst pest in our garden is slugs. Without question. But that wasn’t always the case. In fact, up until 2 weekends ago, the worst pets was cats (i do like them when they aren’t pooing, we used to have two little men ourselves). I had plans to build huge cane frames to go over the beds, to cover them in enviromesh and to remove them when we were home. The purpose of this was going to be to keep the cat off the beds.

Every morning, after my cup of tea and toast i have a wander out back, only to usually find a new piece of dirt turned over and a pile of crusty turd.

Two weeks ago i bought a sonic cat scarer. It has a very high frequency that we can’t hear, but the cats can. When they walk across in front of it, it sets the alarm off, and the cats run away. I make sure i turn it off when i’m outside so not to waste the battery but every now and again i leave it on. I know i wouldn’t want to go to the loo in a garden with a shrill siren ringing in my ears!

The result is that we are able to keep the beds completely uncovered! No expensive covers and no poo!

(There was one mess last week, but i’ve found that if i move the ‘machine’ every couple of days it confuses the little blighters!)

It did cost £30 and i will need to replace the battery every now and again but that is a small price to pay for seedlings that are actually allowed to grow!

I’ve read lots on forums and in magazines and think this actually works!

 Now, to work on those slugs…more nematodes  think!

The Early Purple Sprouting Broccoli we planted back in March is still growing, somehow surviving a battering from the wind and an invasion of cabbage white butterflies - it should by rights, be dead. However, it will hopefully produce spears around February time. Considering our small space though, it’s a lot of nothing over a long period of time.  So this is the plan for next year

Summer Purple - Sow March to April.  Harvest June to October (this is very early!)

Rudolph (sometimes spelt Rudolf) - Sow March - May. Harvest Nov to Feb

Cardinal - Sow April to May. Harvest March - April

This way we can have an early variety for eating June onwards, and a maincrop that can be grown in a large pot and transplanted in late August time, and can grow into the space previously occupied by the first plant. The third variety (Cardinal) will be planted out in the next bed, Legumes, as by the time the broccoli needs the space, all of the beans, peas and sweetcorn will be coming to an end, which it means we can have broccoli all the way from June to April….and not pay those extortionate supermarket prices. That’s 10 months a year!

During the summer, we will have to cover the brassica bed with either a large frame covered in enviromesh or fleece this year to protect it a little better.

What happened to the rain? We were predicted loads, but not much came. This gave me the chance to finish off a few little jobs that needed doing. The greenhouse (i use the term loosely) is now finished. The old shelving unit, free from www.freecycle.net is now nailed to the wall to enable it to stay in place over winter, and i have attached sheet plastic to protect the overwintering chilli plants and the last of the spring onions, which are slowly battling on.

I have planted some ‘Valdor’ lettuce, which is only suitable for Autumn planting, in there too, in the hope that it will give us some leaves for summer.

The greenhouse is stapled at the top and pinned at the sides and bottom to enable winter access for me but keep the frost out. I’ve done this in two sections so that i don’t get loads of horrid flappy plastic around me when i go to fetch some veg.

We also popped down to Dundry Nurseries ( http://www.dundrynurseries.co.uk/ ) on the way to the supermarket, and ended up buying a variety of seed and winter bulbs…and this is before all the seed catalogues have arrived!

We have harvested all our onions. 37 from a space no bigger than 120cm long by 45cm wide, using sets from Wilkinsons! Now that shows how easy it is to grow onions if nothing else does. I have hung them by their necks in the shed from a makeshift drying rack consisting of an old underbed shoe rack, dismantled and attached to the shed roof and walls with garden twine and nails.

Maybe next year we will tie them correctly in plaits…for now they look happy enough. When the necks start to go papery and the onions develop more of a coating, i’ll take them down and put them on top of the drying rack, for use throughout the winter.

To keep the space busy, i’ve emptied the remaining hundreds of Amsterdam Forcing carrot seeds into the space where the onions came from and covered it with a cloche. I don’t think we’ll have to do much thinning as the slugs generally do that for us. Maybe it’s time for another load of nematodes!

3 of the last 5 weeks have been spent digging out nearly 10 tonnes of rubble, earth, bricks etc. from the back garden between the house and the veg garden. The wall that separates the veg beds from the rest of the garden  is 4 bricks high, and not bad for a first attempt if i do say so myself! It needs a good clean though, to get the excess mortar off. The block paving  is a mixture of blue bricks (for the table and chairs to go on) and red bricks (for the path) - all reclaimed. They have been laid on a bed of sand and the edge bricks have been concreted in - after the pic was taken to keep the whole thing in place.

All the landscaping has taken my attention slightly off the garden, which incidentally is producing an abundance of carrots, runners, the odd early parsnips, courgettes, parsley, little cherry toms and big onions! I think tomorrow will involve some planting…before i have to go back to work on Monday, and the summer disappears…

Albeit, a little browner (redder!) than a couple of weeks ago, after 2 weeks in the Dominican Republic on honeymoon. I must say we have both missed being out in the garden, but you can’t have it all!

In the garden, not as much has happened as we would have hoped. The sunflowers are the big story… 3 having reached 13ft and collapsing, without even flowering. A few lessons learnt from that, as even though the 5 or so that are left look good, they have leeched all the goodness out of the cucurbit bed, leaving us with only a couple of decent sized round courgettes and one standard one. That also means the pumpkin and squash plants have done pretty much nothing either!

The runner beans, carrots, spring onions, bulb onions, tomatoes and ’krakatoa’ chillies have all grown great guns and are providing us with a plentiful harvest. Sadly, the slugs have been enjoying our holiday too, although not to hugely devastating effect.

All winter veg (parsnips, leeks, early purple sprouting broccoli) are still growing well, although the turnip and swede seeds i planted about a month ago are taking a while to develop. Darned English weather!

Lots of tidying up to do tomorrow…