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!
Saturday, 3 March 2012
Tuesday, 28 February 2012
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.
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
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| 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)
Sunday, 26 February 2012
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
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!
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!
Sunday, 7 August 2011
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 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.
Wednesday, 27 July 2011
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!
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.
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.
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| Whole Garden (April 11) | (July 11) |
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.
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.
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| Do you see the tomatoes? |
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| The mighty courgette |
Saturday, 11 June 2011
Update
The garden is in full swing now; not many updates recently because of the dreaded revision monster but I've had a stash of photos waiting to be posted so here they are:
The cherry tree is the surprise star at the moment; I was expecting to wait many years before it gave me any fruits but I think at the moment it actually has more cherries than leaves! They may be cooking cherries but I still haven't been able to resist nibbling a few and whilst they're a little tart they're also totally delicious :D
It may not be the prettiest garden on earth but there is definitely something deeply satisfying about looking out over all of this and knowing that I nursed all of these plants from the tiniest little seedlings right up to the big, green monsters that are thriving today (except the weeds... those managed to tend themselves ;p)
The cherry tree is the surprise star at the moment; I was expecting to wait many years before it gave me any fruits but I think at the moment it actually has more cherries than leaves! They may be cooking cherries but I still haven't been able to resist nibbling a few and whilst they're a little tart they're also totally delicious :D
The strawberries are in full swing at the moment; nearly all ripened now and oh so delicious; so many more fruits than I had last year and the flavour is just divine
It doesn't get much better than this !
On the healthier side of things I've definitely decided that growing lettuces is much, much easier when you buy baby ones from B&Q! I haven't had much luck with either sowing direct in the garden or raising seeds inside and transplanting but my £1.69 selection pack from B&Q is thriving and delivering wonderful side-salads for dinner; they're all cut and come again varieties so I can just keep snipping bits off and then they grow me more... perfect!
And finally my tomato forest is rapidly getting denser; I'm beginning to think that I may have been a tad optimistic with my spacings but on the plus side the tomatoes seem to have developed some really sturdy stems so I'm hoping that they'll be better able to bear the weight of their fruits than last years batch were.
It may not be the prettiest garden on earth but there is definitely something deeply satisfying about looking out over all of this and knowing that I nursed all of these plants from the tiniest little seedlings right up to the big, green monsters that are thriving today (except the weeds... those managed to tend themselves ;p)
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