With a view to keeping the momentum up, here’s the second of my short ‘n’ sweet updates.  Today’s topic - Brassicas and Legumes - and it seems having a house full of seedlings is about to pay off.

The most exciting snippet of news in this update is that the early sowing of broad beans (started indoors March, planted out mid April), have flowered: another month or so and there will be some tasty beans to be had. My other early indoor sowing (peas and Borlotti beans) are also doing well. The peas have been outdoors for a couple of weeks and are slowing coming on up some netting, the Borlotti beans went out this morning to fill the gaps in the peas (they were nearly 2′ high already).  A second sowing of Broad beans (sown direct) are just appearing, and I’ll sow more beans indoors this weekend (Borlotti and Runner). A bit of successional sowing should hopefully avoid the August “bean glut” that is all too common.

On the Brassica front: my purple sprouting broccoli plants were planted out last week after a 10 days in the cold-frame and 2 months indoors - they’ve been fully netted against the resident pigeon population, and fleeced the last couple of nights to stop the frost. Cauliflowers have been in the cold-frame about a week and may get planted out this weekend if the weather looks fair.

And finally, a footnote for the humble Radish (for it is member of the Brassicaceae family) - once again it has finished first in the race to the dinner table - and super tasty it was too!

Not wanting to break with the established norm, my best intentions to blog regularly have fallen by the wayside. It seems I prefer to spend more of my time in the garden than writing about it, which is actually no bad thing.

In an attempt to overcome a backlog of things to write about, I’ll rattle off a few short updates over the next few days (sorry, no pretty pictures for the moment). So today, Roots and Onions.

The winter planted garlic is going well - lots of good growth reaching 18″ high, which should yield some nice fat bulbs come the summer. Likewise, my onion and shallot sets are all coming on nicely but I can’t say the same for the spring onions, which seem to be awfully slow to germinate this year. And finally for the Allium family, the ‘mini leeks’ I started indoors back in April have finally gone outside this last week.

News on the roots front is a little less dramatic: the first sowing of carrots and beetroot have all germinated and, protected by fleece, are coming along nicely.  My first sowing of parsnip have done nothing - I’ll give them another week before raking over and trying a second sowing now the soil is a little warmer.

Spring officially arrived with the vernal equinox on Saturday - thankfully the Weather was kept informed and I managed to spend most of the weekend in or around the garden. I’m a most impatient gardener and so I already have a few seeds germinating, but now Winter has officially passed, it’s high time I redoubled my efforts to give this years crops the best possible start.

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It’s perhaps more than a little ironic that I restart the blog in 2010 talking about the exact same subject as I started with in 2009 - planning out the plot. The beds I planned and dug out last year worked very well, and they gave more than enough produce in return for the effort required to clear the ground. Raised beds were on my “wish list” from last year, so I decided to bite the bullet and make my beds go vertical - and the best time would be right now, before I start filling them with seeds and young plants. Read the rest of this entry »

My grand plans for blogging about my gardening adventures failed spectacularly, falling foul of a work-home life in-balance during the Summer of 2009. So, with the best of intentions, I aim to try again in 2010: regular updates, at least every other week, and of course, plenty of photos. So, I guess the best place to start 2010 would be with a summary of 2009
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Hurrah! Temptation finally got the better of me this afternoon and I went ahead and lifted my first potato plants. I had a good idea that there would be some bounty to be found (I’ve been inserting a sneaky finger under the plants every now and then) - I picked the row of the smallest three plants (first to sprout, slowest to grow, which is a bit weird), inserted my fork and unearthed the buried treasure:

First ever potatoes from the plot

A plentiful harvest that are going to taste just great sautéed up with a little bit of garlic and rosemary.

All this after having spent most of the week worrying about my spuds. I’d spotted some small speckles on some of the leaves, and was slightly concerned I’d got the dreaded potato blight. I wasn’t entirely sure, especially as it hasn’t really spread nor affected the plants as much as I would have expected for blight. The plants I pulled today were not only the smallest but also the ones that seemed to have the most of this mystery leaf damage - the haul seems to suggest it may have been something other than blight - insect damage maybe?

And I know I promised the second half of the long overdue update - it’s coming, honestly!

Well, as a poet once implied, “the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry”:- the whole life-work balance has fallen out of kilter of late and blog posting had to be sidelined, though I’ve managed to sneak some time to be out in the garden, enjoying the late May sunshine, so I’ve got plenty of bits and pieces to write about.

The time spent chained to a computer hasn’t been a complete dead-loss - I managed to divert some of my energies into tweaking the website design to widen it slightly- an extra 15% on the width certainly makes a difference and should be easier on the eye for the reader.  So, on with gardening related news and an update on the old vegetable patch …

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It’s been a very wet week and nothing much has been happening down on the plot (other than lots and lots of growing), so I thought I would take the chance to write about what occupies the other 75% of the garden that isn’t my vegetable patch.

When we took over the garden, it was mainly grass (of mixed quality), with a couple of raised rockery beds jutting out along one side: the only evidence of life in the first bed was a few daffodil shoots and lots of dead growth from last year - but I suppose that was to be expected moving into a house around the very start of spring.  The second bed consisted of an 8 foot holly tree and weeds.  The final bed was home to one of the two apple trees, and a lot more weeds: plenty of tidying to be done and the chance to make our own mark on the garden.

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After knocking off the biggest item from my to-do list - namely clearing the rubble, I moved onto the second - getting my compost heap up and running.  I’d looked at the plastic bins that are subsidised via my council tax bill - but they aren’t that cheap nor that attractive - only a tad more so than the old faithful “bang together some pallets”  solution. Then I spotted something in the most unlikely of places - a compost bin on Amazon …

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The first thing on my to-do list that I mentioned last week was to clear away the mountain of rubble and stones that had accumulated over the last two months of clearing my growing beds. It was really beginning to become and eyesore: the heap was slowly collapsing and spreading out and weeds were even beginning to poke through - enough was enough it was time to get rid. Read the rest of this entry »