Getting a bit too busy around here!

I know I was planning to get things ready for around the middle of May (last frosts around here), but it's all started to get a bit too busy!

Last week, I managed to plant my:

• Tomatoes (Gardeners' delight and Roma)
• Aubergine (micro patio type)
• Sugar snap peas
• French beans (purple teepee and Speedy)

And I'm currently 'hardening off' my chili peppers and some more lettuce and spinach. I'll have some photos of everything coming soon.

My mini-greenhouse was bulging under the weight of that lot, but a one week staggered hardening off process managed to get things out the door (so to speak) quite quickly.

If you're interested, my hardening off process is as follows:

1. start off for about 3 or 4 days with a couple of hours a day (I get mine out at lunchtime, and put them back in after dinner).
2. for the rest of the week, I leave them out all day, but put them away at night.
3. for the next week, leave them out all day and night. Makes for a fortnightly process.
4. if you want to run 2 weeks in parallel, you can start a new routine after point 2.

Three bags of potatoes please

Having had limited success with growing potatoes last year inside my raised veg patch, but with more success with growing spuds in pots, I decided to order some potato sacks to grow my potatoes in this year. I got as pack of three nice Gro-sacks from Marshalls Seeds.

They also sent me 15 Swift seed potatoes too. These were chitted from February and planted out in mid March. I followed the instructions on the pack, so placed about 10cms of compost in the bottom of the bag. I then put 5 tubers in each bag, and covered this to about half way up the bag in more compost.

I copied a tip that I got from Alys from Gardeners' World with regard to growing in pots, and that was to supplement the compost with shredded paper. This helps, as the bags are quite large, and require a lot of compost!

The growth so far has been amazing. I've had to fill the bags up with compost twice now, and the plants are already growing outside of the bags. Hope we don't get a late frost, or I'm going to be in trouble?

I've since moved the sacks into their final growing position, which is quite close to the house. I'm using the bags almost as a hedge to hide a wall next to my patio. I think the effect is quite appealing.

I'm now on my second bag of compost for these sacks, so have spent £10 on compost, plus there was also quite a lot of my own home made compost. This has amounted to quite an investment in terms of compost, so I hope the reward (harvest) is enough to make this worth trying again next year?

Horray, my Internet's back, but where's all my time gone?

It seems the fix to my Internet problem was easy: I had to buy a new router from TalkTalk (one that they could support), and this has seemed to be more reliable than the other two (that I got off eBay). Seems routers aren't as comptible to ISP's as you might think?

Anyway, I have blog postings ready to come on here, but as of Thursday night, we have a rather early addition to the family, which wasn't due for another month. So doubt I'll be having much time for blogging for the next couple of months :-(

But Lauren is a delight all the same. She was 6lb 0.5oz when born, and doing well so far. I'll try to finish up some half done postings soon, but will need the camera back, and that's in the hospital at the moment!

Cheers.

Where's my Internet gone?

Hi guys,

sorry for not posting anything for ages, but I'm having a huge problem with my Internet at home. Seems my ISP wants nothing to do with helping me, so I'm stuck on my own! Well, I could pay them £1 a minute for support (or whatever rip-off charge it is), but that just isn't right!

I have posts in the pipeline, so will try to get them here as soon as I can

Enjoy the spring, I certainly am.

A special visitor

Seems the winter must have been pretty bad this year, as we were visited by a female Fieldfare. They are usually found in Scotland, but if the winter is bad, will move south into England. Well how bad must it have been this year then, for it to have moved all the way into Oxfordshire? Quite a rare find by all accounts.

We see her now again in the neighbour's apple tree. She's yet to come into our garden, but we're hoping the neighbourhood blackbird will encourage her in?

New year. Now what?

So I've had my square foot garden for one year now. So how was it, and what have I learnt?

My main problem was environmental and one that seems will bother me forever: Cats! Seems they just love the fluffy soil I've filled my raised bed with, so I will need to use my netting more often than I'd hoped for. It's not so pretty having your bed covered in netting, especially when the bed is so visible from the house.

One other problem I think I've found is that the claim from Mel Bartholomew, that you don't need to fertilise your bed, as a single scoop of homemade compost is sufficient. I've found this to be inaccurate, as my first half season was more successful than this full season. This might be due to weather, but I suspect it's a fertiliser problem? So next year, as well as adding a handful of my own compost, I'll also supplement this with some fertiliser (growmore?)

And one other thing I've learnt is that when you're gowing things inside a bed 6 foot by 4 foot, it's best not to try to grow big plants. Unfortunately, this has proved quite tricky. For example, I've grown parsnips this year. I grew carrots the year before, and I discovered that a carrot produces a small fluffy 'top' of leaves. But a parsnip (or mine, at least) produces a huge amount of leaves above ground. This caused me problems, as I'd squeezed the parsnips in around other smaller plants, and they just grew too bif and caused shade for everythig else!

These would seem to be things you need to learn, as the seed catalogues give no indication as to how tall a vegetable plant grows to. They do for ornamentals (flowers), but not for veg. very strange, and quite important for people growing with space in mind. I guess I should Google these plants a bit more next year?

So what's my plan for next year?

Well, in accordance with my self imposed crop rotation, I'm due for a season of legumes (peas and beans). However, crop rotation is slightly less important in square foot gardening, as I actually drow a mix of other types within my main type. So although this year was mostly roots, I also grew some legumes and brassicas also. Because of this, I'm going to be growing:

• Spring Cabbage (already in place)
• Jerusalem Artichoke (although might actually be replaced with cucumbers, due to space limitations)
• Peas
• Sugar Snap
• Garlic
• Tomatoes (feeling brave here, as have lost my past two crops due to blight!)
• Aubergine (?)
• Spinach
• French Beans
• Lettuce
• Salad Leaves
• Chilli Pepper (Jalapeno)
• Onion
• Leek (for 2010)

So I might also replace the Aubegine with some more French Beans. We do like our beans, so this might be a good idea.

There's not much going on at the moment, other than to keep an eye on the fleece sheet on top of my bed, as it keeps getting blown around! But once seens start to get sown, and things get planted, I'll be sure to keep you all up to date.

I'm back!!!!

Hello all,

sorry that I haven't been around for ages, been a little bit too busy at work, so haven't had any time left to do any gardening, let alone blog about it!

But I had a chance a couple of days ago to see my 'plot', and saw that my parsnip's were looking a bit big. So thought I'd have a quick poke around, and see what the roots were feeling like. Felt the first one I came across, and was a bit shocked by what my fingers were telling me. It felt as though the root was about 10cm's+ in diameter. I thought this couldn't be right, so decided to pull it up to have a look.

And I found this!

It was about a foot long (with a twist in the middle), and really chunky at the top. The picture has a standard size mug used for reference! Now, it's clearly too big, and the wrong shape, for roasting. So I didn't know what to do with. Ran a quick search on google for "parsnip recipe", and found this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/database/honeyroastedparsnips_5334.shtml.

Took a while to cut the parsnip up into roastable sized chunks, but once done, the recipe was quite easy to follow, and this was the end result:

The recipe made four bowls full of a delicious sweet soup, with a lovely honey taste. We had two bowls for lunch today (and we both loved it, which was quite a surprise from my wife, who doesn't even like parsnip!). The other servings have gone in the freezer for another day.