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Sunday 30 May 2010
New Arrivals
These are the beans John, from my mum's office, gave to my dad to grow in his garden and which dad gave to me 'cos he didn't have room for them! A welcome addition to my little vegetable collection these guys are inhabiting the tower pots which we brought with us from the old house. I've given them a fresh lot of compost to grow into and some nice tall canes to grow up - hopefully I can train them up the fence when they get bigger as I think they're going to outgrow their canes fairly rapidly if dad's are anything to go by!
We Have Strawberries!
The neighbours flowers seem jealous... these little ones have crept under the fence to come and join us and, if I am not mistaken, they might be additional strawberries for us!
Tuesday 25 May 2010
Fruity Update
Nothing much to say about these guys - just happily getting along and growing bigger by the day:
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| It has one more leaf than it used to! |
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| Also much more leafy |
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| Look at all those flower buds |
Herbs
Tomato Update
First a look at the outdoor tomatoes - I didn't think that these guys had done very well but looking at the photo from a few weeks ago they seem to have pretty much doubled in size so maybe I was being pessimistic:
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| As first planted |
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| Look - almost as tall as a water bottle! |
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| What a monster! |
New Arrivals
We went back to Rob's parents last weekend and Angela very kindly gave me some new plants for my garden. It was her patio-garden which made me realise that vegetables really didn't need a flower bed to grow and her amazingly well stocked greenhouse puts my humble collection to shame! She gave me two lovely hanging baskets with tumbing tomatoes in (and the brackets to hang them!) so now I shall have lots of wonderful varieties of tomatoes come summer. She also gave me some potato tubers to grow - I'd been tempted to buy some of these myself but when it came to laying down money for plants I was swayed by the sweeter fruits and rather neglected the staples! I shall use a spare growbag for these and plant them when I have a free evening.
My final gift was an Agapanthus (awesome name for a plant!) in a lovely big pot which will add some prettiness to my fairly functional garden! It is a plant split off from one in their garden and given it's own pot so it's lovely and bushy already and is sitting opposite my herbs.
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| I'm assuming these will eventually grow downwards! |
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| Agapanthus,agapanthus, agapanthus.. never stops being an awesome word! |
Monday 24 May 2010
Signs Of Life
I think that the lovely warm weather over the weekend has tempted my GroBox vegetables to venture out into the light. I have been studiously watering it for 3 weeks now and was a little uncertain if I was treating it right - with the baby plants it's easy to see if they've got enough water or not but the bare earth doesn't really give such a good idea! I've settled for drenching it thoroughly and it looks like it's been working because today I saw two little tiny green stems poking out of the surface. I had to double check to make sure they were actually growing and hadn't just fallen into the bag but they are real *grins*. Now to wait just a couple more weeks and I can start trying to guess what they are!
Monday 3 May 2010
Introducing Jake
For anyone who hasn't had the pleasure of making Jake's acquaintence personally he's the biggest softie in the world and absolutely loves to be the centre of attention - it's very difficult to step outside the back door without being greeted by a polite but insistant bundle of fur in need of a cuddle. He also happens to belong to our neighbours but forutnately they seem to have no problem with us adopting him for the duration of the summer!
Planting - Herbs
In truth this is a re-planting; my herb planter has seen better days but is still holding together so I decided to replant it with 'proper' herbs (ones that didn't come from tesco!) and see if I could actually persuade them to live long enough to be useful this year. I've moved it off the convenient, but shady, balcony and given it a spot in the sun so hopefully it should do better there. The un-killable mint and suprisingly resilient chives were allowed to remain in residence (although the mint was rather mecilessly pruned) and I asked Rob to pick some useful cooking herbs (Oregano, Parsley, Thyme and Basil) and added some Rosemary to the mix because I grew to love the smell of it when it grew outside the front door of our old house.
They're were a lot more upright before I watered them....
Planting - Garden in a Box
"The Grobox: A Garden in a Box" leapt of the shelf and into my trolley as we toured Lakeland in Windemere during our recent trip to the lakes. A cunningly simple solution to the problem of growing things... the instructions state that you simply need to bury the box and water occasionally so I did:
Edit: Looking at the picture above I was having trouble seeing how the plants would be able to survive that close together and after reading the grobox website I think I will follow their modified instructions and fold the lid underneath the box - this should make it much easier for me to seperate out the seedlings when they grow bigger and move some of them into my spare grow bag so they aren't stiffling each other.
Grobox prior to burying
The box promises an entire vegetable gardens worth of goodies so in about 6 weeks time I should see things start to poke their little heads through those holes!Edit: Looking at the picture above I was having trouble seeing how the plants would be able to survive that close together and after reading the grobox website I think I will follow their modified instructions and fold the lid underneath the box - this should make it much easier for me to seperate out the seedlings when they grow bigger and move some of them into my spare grow bag so they aren't stiffling each other.
Planting - Tomatoes
And for the last of my baby plants that most traditional of british vegetables the humble tomato. Well, maybe not traditional but when I think of growing things to eat the tomato is what comes to mind - most summers at home were accompanied by a bag of tomatoes by the side door basking in the sunlight and narrowly avoiding being crushed by errant car doors, shopping bags and trampling feet.
I may have jumped the gun slightly on my tomatoes though as whilst I checked how to plant them it wasn't until after they were all tucked into their little grow bag that I remembered to check when to plant them. All of the plants I bought were happy to be planted in the spring but it seems that these little fellas would probably have prefered to be kept inside a little longer. I think it will be more disruptive to them to try and lug their growbag up several flights of stairs into the kitchen than it will to leave them where they are so they will have to do their best to survive outside.
I have gone with an organic cherry tomato cultivar "Gardeners Delight" which is an outdoor variety which can be grown as a bush or on trusses. I've given my little plants some stakes to hang onto and popped 3 into the grow bag and 3 in various other plant pots. Tomatoes seem to be where my planning failed :( I managed to buy 6 plants but only a grow bag big enough for 3 of them. On the plus side the potted plants are more portable so I have brought one inside to the kitchen to be lovingly cared for just in case the garden ones don't make it. As a side note I won't be at all suprised if I manage to kill the one indoors and have the outdoor ones do just fine on their own!
The ever so stylish plastic bottles are phase 1 of my cunning anti-frost measures. The internet tells me that if I surround my baby plants with a wall of water this will absorb heat during the day and then slowly release it overnight. Given the insanely cheap price that tesco sells water for (12p a bottle!) I shall be constructing a water bottle fence around my little ones as soon as I get back from the shops tomorow. In the meantime I've filled 3 empties from the recycling with warm water which I hope will be enough to keep them safe tonight! Hopefully this will keep them toasty-warm until the end of May at which point all the neighbours will be looking jealously at my beautifully established tomato plants and wishing they had my green fingers.... alternatively I will sneak out in the dead of night to replace my poor wilted darlings with shiny new plants and so hide my shame at killing my first ever tomatoes!
I may have jumped the gun slightly on my tomatoes though as whilst I checked how to plant them it wasn't until after they were all tucked into their little grow bag that I remembered to check when to plant them. All of the plants I bought were happy to be planted in the spring but it seems that these little fellas would probably have prefered to be kept inside a little longer. I think it will be more disruptive to them to try and lug their growbag up several flights of stairs into the kitchen than it will to leave them where they are so they will have to do their best to survive outside.
I have gone with an organic cherry tomato cultivar "Gardeners Delight" which is an outdoor variety which can be grown as a bush or on trusses. I've given my little plants some stakes to hang onto and popped 3 into the grow bag and 3 in various other plant pots. Tomatoes seem to be where my planning failed :( I managed to buy 6 plants but only a grow bag big enough for 3 of them. On the plus side the potted plants are more portable so I have brought one inside to the kitchen to be lovingly cared for just in case the garden ones don't make it. As a side note I won't be at all suprised if I manage to kill the one indoors and have the outdoor ones do just fine on their own!
Planting - Strawberries
Strawberries were the first plant I decided on whey I started thinking about what to grow; they're one of those luxuries that I can very rarely justify buying at the supermarket 'cos they cost so much and never fail to disappoint! I rember the beauties that we used to bring home from (okay, eat at) the pick-your-own-fruit farms when we were little and would just love to recapture that flavour.
For my foray into strawberry growing I have chosen a selection of different strawberry plants housed in this very stylish planter from Lakeland. It has handy side drainage to prevent me waterlogging the plants and lots of little pockets on the side for them to poke out of. The pockets could possibly use being a little larger but with a little help from my scissors the baby strawberries nestled comfortably into their new home.
My crop will consist of:
- Honeoey: Early Season -"Fine bright red, firm fruit with superb flavour. Heavy-cropping plants with easily picked fruit. Good for dessert and freezing."
- Hapil: Mid Season- "Very large orange-red, conical fruit with delicious flavour. Vigorous, heavy-cropping, lush plants"
- Cambridge Favourite: Mid Season - "Medium-large, pale pink/red conical fruit with good flavour. Vigorous heavy-cropping, disease resistant plants. Good for jam making"
- Rhapsody: Late Season - "Large, glossy red fruit with flesh that is juicy, firm and flavoursome"
Planting - Blueberries
My blueberry bush was my most lavish purchase of the day but is also the most long-lived. I stole one of the pots from the sadly deceased Fuschia that Angela gave us last year and replaced the soil with the ericaceous (lime-hating i.e. acidic) compost which Blueberries apparently like to live in.
Blueberries appear to be quite hardy little plants and shouldn't mind the British weather so I've high hopes for this one, as an added bonus the leaves apparently turn a rather lovely shade in the autum/winter so I may move it up to the balcony later in the year.
This is a "Patriot" cultivar of the High Bush variety of Blueberry, assuming it survives the summer I may try and get it a friend for next year (of a different cultivar but same type) which should ensure better harvests. Cultivar by the way is a portmanteau of cultivated-variety!
Blueberries appear to be quite hardy little plants and shouldn't mind the British weather so I've high hopes for this one, as an added bonus the leaves apparently turn a rather lovely shade in the autum/winter so I may move it up to the balcony later in the year.
This is a "Patriot" cultivar of the High Bush variety of Blueberry, assuming it survives the summer I may try and get it a friend for next year (of a different cultivar but same type) which should ensure better harvests. Cultivar by the way is a portmanteau of cultivated-variety!
Planting - Rhubarb
These posts are basically going to be an aide memoir so I can remember what I did and why so that when my little plants live or die I will know what (not) to do next time!
I absolutely love Rhubarb so it was a no-brainer that this would be one of my starting plants. The garden centre was selling pots of Champagne Red so I am growing "A superb variety with deep red foliage, mid season fruiting with good flavour."
The internet tells me that I must give it lots of sun, be careful not to disturb its roots and be prepared for it to grow really rather big so I've given it my largest grow bag all to itself. It also seems best to leave it be for a year or so before I start thinking about harvesting it so I shall settle for glancing admiringly in its direction for now and do my very best to resist the urge to pull it to pieces and turn it into jam and crumble.
I absolutely love Rhubarb so it was a no-brainer that this would be one of my starting plants. The garden centre was selling pots of Champagne Red so I am growing "A superb variety with deep red foliage, mid season fruiting with good flavour."
The internet tells me that I must give it lots of sun, be careful not to disturb its roots and be prepared for it to grow really rather big so I've given it my largest grow bag all to itself. It also seems best to leave it be for a year or so before I start thinking about harvesting it so I shall settle for glancing admiringly in its direction for now and do my very best to resist the urge to pull it to pieces and turn it into jam and crumble.
Planting - The Gear
For once I decided to get everything ready before I started doing stuff so I collected all the essential tools for getting my little garden started:
To run through the above:
To run through the above:
- Grow Bags x 5: 2 Strawberry planters, 3 vegetable planters of varying dimensions
- Multipurpose Compost: 3 bags 75 litres each
- Ericaceous Compost: 1 bag 60 litres
- Tomato Grow Bag: 1
- Watering Can
- Potting Trowel, Gardening Gloves, Scissors, String, Beverages and a Camera
- Plants: 1 Blueberry bush, 10 Strawberry plants, 6 Tomato Plants, 5 herbs
- Garden Vegetable Grow Box
- Plant Food (for later!)
It Begins
Well, in truth the garden preparation continues but the blog begins. The planning started last year but was interrupted by an untimely house move and the preparation began a couple of weeks ago with a trip to Lakeland in Windemere but today we went on a shopping spree at Haskins to pick up the actual plants for my new vegetable garden. I say vegetable garden, in truth it's probably more of a fruit garden but either way - it's my garden!
I used to quite like gardening and had a little patch in my parents garden when I lived at home, if you ask mum and dad they would probably dispute my interest in this 'garden' as I never put much time into it but in my rose-tinted memories I had a lovely little gardening hobby! My garden was populated with the seeds you get free from magazines which were scattered willy-nilly over barely dug soil but against the odds it was usually full of rambling flowering plants and somehow withstood my tender 'care'.
Since leaving home my gardening efforts have been somewhat understated. In my first student house we had a garden but it was mainly a place to sit drunkenly around an open fire and aside from tidying up and caring for the few hardy plants that had survived the previous occupants I never added my own plants as I knew it was only temporary and they would be left behind when we moved on.
Our second house was somewhat lacking in garden. It had a tiny courtyard out back which was permanently in the shade and barely large enough for 2 chairs. We tried a herb pot but it never got enough sun to survive so again I was left to care for the plants which came with the house. There was a beautiful climbing rose in the front garden and my first 'fruit' plant - a massive Quince tree in the back garden. We checked with the landlord and he was happy for us to treat it as our own so for 2 years the kitchen was filled with the wonderful aromas of Quince Jam and Jelly and all our friends received pots of the heavenly stuff at Christmas.
Finally we come to our current house which has a massive garden and a very practical landlord. Gardens are regrettably unlikely to survive tenants it seems (both of ours I'm pleased to say were left in a far better state than we found them) and so our current landlord solved the problem by paving/decking/woodchipping the entire thing. The only thing growing in my garden when we moved in was a tree around which the concrete of the upper-tier had been poured! I aim to rectify this :D
The garden should be just about perfect for growing things in - it get a nice amount of sunlight but has shaded areas under the decking and it is big enough to take just about as many pots as I can cram into it!
For starters I have picked up Strawberries, Rhubard, Blueberries and Tomatoes in small-plant form and a rather clever looking all-year-round vegetable garden box. This afternoon the planting will begin and I figured it would be a good idea to keep a record of how things go so that I will be able to do even better next year!
Finally, before I sign off a small tribute to the sole survivor of my tender ministrations over the past 5 years: my unkillable cactus! This little beauty was a gift from mum & dad my first christmas away from home and has somehow survived my care and is still going strong. It has survived month upon month without watering only to revive again when I finally remember it languishing behind a curtain on the windowsill and it always comes back to give me beautiful pink flowers year after year.
I used to quite like gardening and had a little patch in my parents garden when I lived at home, if you ask mum and dad they would probably dispute my interest in this 'garden' as I never put much time into it but in my rose-tinted memories I had a lovely little gardening hobby! My garden was populated with the seeds you get free from magazines which were scattered willy-nilly over barely dug soil but against the odds it was usually full of rambling flowering plants and somehow withstood my tender 'care'.
Since leaving home my gardening efforts have been somewhat understated. In my first student house we had a garden but it was mainly a place to sit drunkenly around an open fire and aside from tidying up and caring for the few hardy plants that had survived the previous occupants I never added my own plants as I knew it was only temporary and they would be left behind when we moved on.
Our second house was somewhat lacking in garden. It had a tiny courtyard out back which was permanently in the shade and barely large enough for 2 chairs. We tried a herb pot but it never got enough sun to survive so again I was left to care for the plants which came with the house. There was a beautiful climbing rose in the front garden and my first 'fruit' plant - a massive Quince tree in the back garden. We checked with the landlord and he was happy for us to treat it as our own so for 2 years the kitchen was filled with the wonderful aromas of Quince Jam and Jelly and all our friends received pots of the heavenly stuff at Christmas.
Finally we come to our current house which has a massive garden and a very practical landlord. Gardens are regrettably unlikely to survive tenants it seems (both of ours I'm pleased to say were left in a far better state than we found them) and so our current landlord solved the problem by paving/decking/woodchipping the entire thing. The only thing growing in my garden when we moved in was a tree around which the concrete of the upper-tier had been poured! I aim to rectify this :D
The garden should be just about perfect for growing things in - it get a nice amount of sunlight but has shaded areas under the decking and it is big enough to take just about as many pots as I can cram into it!
For starters I have picked up Strawberries, Rhubard, Blueberries and Tomatoes in small-plant form and a rather clever looking all-year-round vegetable garden box. This afternoon the planting will begin and I figured it would be a good idea to keep a record of how things go so that I will be able to do even better next year!
Finally, before I sign off a small tribute to the sole survivor of my tender ministrations over the past 5 years: my unkillable cactus! This little beauty was a gift from mum & dad my first christmas away from home and has somehow survived my care and is still going strong. It has survived month upon month without watering only to revive again when I finally remember it languishing behind a curtain on the windowsill and it always comes back to give me beautiful pink flowers year after year.
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