Garden Planning

This year I have the following to plant out:

Requiring deep pots:

• Mange-tout (these will go in one of the four large pots and will grow up strings to a central pole) These went into the round bags the broad beans had last year
• Carrot (these have their own building-bag planter)
• Peas  (these will go in the round bags the broad beans had last year) These are getting the green bags and sharing with the potatoes
• Broad Bean (these will get the green bags the Mange-tout had last year) Changed my mind and gave these guys the willow planter so they had better air flow between plants
• Runner Beans (these will get one of the willow planters) might put some of these in with the carrots?
• French Beans (these will get the runner bean planter from last year)

Needing their own space:

• Tomatoes (these will get one of the willow planters)
• Courgette (these will start indoors and then take over from the peas/beans)
• Spaghetti Squash (will also take over from peas/beans)

Living indoors:

• Chilli 
• Aubergine 
• Peppers

These guys would all like a greenhouse to live in, as I don't have one they will inhabit the massive windowsill in my study.

Filling in the gaps:

• Beetroot 
• Cabbage
• Lettuce
• Radishes 
• Tatsoi 
• Pakchoi
• Basil 
• Broccolli 
• Spring Onions 
• Spinach 

These will live in the second raised bed at the bottom of the garden, which I have gridded out for square-foot gardening, and in any empty pots etc, they will also fill in around any slow growing plants so as to maximise garden productivity.  This is definitely something I didn't do well last year - I grew one thing in each place and when it was done the beds stood empty; I want to try and make better use of my space this year and keep the garden full of plants all year.

Flowers

• Aquilegia - will grow in smaller pots for decoration
• Marigold - will grow with the tomatoes
• Nasturtium - will grow in smaller pots for nibbling in salads etc
• Morning Glory - will grow around the runner beans and climbers
• Wild flowers - will grow in smaller pots to encourage bees, butterflies and other garden lovelies

Fruits (already in the garden)

• Raspberries (these will be moving into one of the willow planters)
• Strawberries (sparser pots will be moving into the raised bed at the bottom of the garden)
• Rhubarb (this has it's own grow-bag)
• Morello Cherry (this has one of the four large pots)

Year 3

March is that wonderful time of year when I begin to get out in the garden again and start plotting a years plantings. We made a trip to the garden centre today to pick up some essentials - nothing major, just some more seed compost, some (well rotted and garden ready) manure to freshen up the beds and some tomato seeds which I realised I somehow entirely forgot to buy before.

I've started out my first little seedlings over the last week and now my windowsill has a small collection of seed trays and mini-pots on it with Broad Beans, Mange Tout, Tatsoi, Pak Choi, Peppers & Aubergines germinating on it. I tried to be much more restrained with my plantings than last year (when I planted everything... oops) so we'll see how it goes.

I also spent a few hours in the garden today tidying everything up from it's overwintering. I dug some manure into my beds at the bottom of the garden, skipping the carrot bed as they dislike it, and planted out my first sowing of some of the hardier seeds - spinach, beetroot, radishes, carrots and spring onions have all be planted, again in small quantities!

Brilliant Birthdays - Part Three

Last Saturday Nicky and I had a joint birthday celebration at mum & dads with our respective other halfs and Liz and Nick, and enough Chinese take-out to feed an army.  It was a brilliant evening and Nick gave me a wonderful selection of seeds to plant out in my garden, with a hand-made storage box to keep the spares in, and a selection of useful extras to help me plant and tend them.

It even has little dividers to keep everything organised	The seeds from inside the box
Garden Goodies

Not only that but they also gave me a rather nice cheque to complete my seed selection with and buy some of the bulkier seeds such as peas and beans.  Rather fortunately we were planning to visit RHS Wisley on Sunday to see the butterflies so I stopped off in the shop on the way home and put that money to good use

My additional seed purchases

The butterflies were nice too!

Brilliant Birthdays - Part Two

Carrying on the birthday goodness, Nicky bought me a subscription to Kitchen Garden magazine.  I don't read many magazines but last year mum bought me a subscription to Good Food and I discovered that when the mag is about things I'm interested in (as opposed to celeb gossip etc) I actually quite enjoy reading them.  The first issue was consumed over a cup of tea and was excellent so I'm looking forward to reading the rest and getting some useful tips for my gardening (and some lovely free seeds to plant too :D)

Brilliant Birthdays - Part One

Now that the weather's cheering up again I'm starting to plan what I want to do in the garden this year and this has coincided rather neatly with my birthday! I asked mum & dad for a wormery and, despite thinking I'm a little mad, they bought me this little beauty - a Worm City Wormery

Which came with lots of useful accessories - a book on worm composting, a PH monitor, worm food and a quick-start guide and two more expansion trays (which sit between the tap and the roof and are rotated as the worms process the food waste into compost).  Also included was a sturdy kitchen caddy (which I forgot to photograph) to store food waste in before giving it to the worms.

And most importantly of all, lots of big, fat, wriggly worms!

First impressions are that it's smaller than I expected... but not small - the shot above shows one of the three trays after I emptied and entire bucket of coir into it (plus some worms!) so it holds a surprising amount of stuff.  At the moment it's in the kitchen so that the worms don't get too cold but eventually it will go outside.  I'm keeping them in for now mainly so that they'll get settled and start eating quicker - they slow down in the cold and I want them to get munching and breeding so that I'll have lots and lots of worms to make me compost for the summer.  I was slightly worried they might try to get out but so far not one seems to have made a bid for freedom so it looks like I won't have to rescue too many worms from the kitchen floor!

Just a quick update to show some of the produce that I'm getting from the garden at the moment; we're getting fresh veggies daily at the moment, and it's awesome!

The carrots are not quite traditionally shaped... apparently they forked a little but they are both huge and hugely tasty so I'm not overly bothered :D

The beans are equally massive - two or three of these monsters are more than enough for the two of us to eat for dinner; at the moment they're almost growing faster than we can eat them.

 And these fellows aren't edible but I thought they were quite pretty - for some reason one particular weed on the upper patio was absolutely covered in little stripy caterpillars, so I left it for them to enjoy!

Garden Update

This one's for you mum - I did my very best to take some pictures of the whole garden to give an idea of the layout but it didn't exactly work... hopefully a kind of mini-tour will help you explain to John what it looks like!

Whole Garden (April 11)

(July 11)

This is the best shot of the whole garden I could find... it's not particularly clear and there's a tree in the way but you're going to have to work with me here.  I'm standing on the balcony outside the back of the house - and we can see the top level of the terrace really nicely... yep, that's the slightly manky concrete bit with the tiny agapanthus by the stairs.  Look a little further and you can see the decking where the patio table and the strawberries live.  Peer through the tree on the left and you can just about see the shed sitting on it's paving-slab level and look even further, way down by the back fence where it's all washed out from the sun, and you can see the wood-chipped area where most of the plants live.

If we move down a level and stand on that lovely decking we can actually see a bit more of the garden.  On the left hand side we have the strawberry's (now fruited and putting out runners like there's no tomorrow) and up against the shed my valiant little raspberry canes (please ignore the half-built garden furniture... one day I promise I will reassemble it :s)

The plants around the front of the shed are all being very uninspiring at the moment so I'm not going to show you those; take my word for it that there is a cherry tree (from which all the cherries have now been eaten), two slowly dying sunflowers (which used to be beautiful and now look a bit tatty) and a rhubarb (which is hibernating).

Once we get behind the shed things start to get more interesting; first we come to the hippo bag full of delicious young carrots.  So far I have eaten just a single carrot and it amazed me how 'carrotty' it tasted... Rob failed at photographing my intended shot of triumphant-Sam-wielding-a-beautiful-leafy-carrot so that will have to wait until I want to eat another one.  If you have keen eyes you will also notice an invading tomato plant... I'm not entirely sure how it snuck in there but it seemed mean to uproot it after it had clearly made such an effort to find a nice home.

Moving further to the right we have the runner beans, which are making excellent use of the slightly beaten up TV unit.  I thought I'd killed them but I guess not because they have some beautiful flowers and if you make the picture bigger you can hopefully see the very first beans starting to appear.

If you were to continue around the corner and along the back fence you would currently see some very sorry looking broad beans and mange tout; they produced beautifully in their prime but, alas, they are now rather shrivelled and dead looking.

All is not lost however!  Stepping back a few paces into the middle of the wood-chipped area reveals my favourite bit of the garden at the moment.... my tomato forest :D  It is possibly hard to appreciate the magnificence from a photo but on the left there are no less than 9 beautiful tomato plants, each lovingly reared from seed and now crammed with a truly ridiculous number of tiny green tomatoes.

On the right are my courgettes which are getting back on track nicely after the pesky weather nearly killed them by forgetting it was summer.  I have two which are doing very well and another two which are struggling but will hopefully make it through.

Do you see the tomatoes?

The mighty courgette

And that's about it; I've skipped over a few lone pots here and there but I seem to have forgotten to photograph them and it's dark now!  Instead I will leave you with my latest addition - the slightly pathetic Aubergine.  This pot was left empty after it's courgette succumbed to the cold and it was a bit late to be planting new seeds so I popped to the garden centre to pick up a replacement.  It seems that 'grow your own' season is now over as far as the shops are concerned so there wasn't much choice - this little fellow was about the only thing that looked like it still had some life in it (well, the lettuce too but that's not really a proper plant) so we shall see how it gets on.