More preparations and first sowings

The best news of the week is that the indoor carrots are not only surviving, but thriving.

Live! LIIIIIIVVVE!!!

All the sprouts are now pointing straight up, as opposed to desperately lunging sideways towards the window for sunlight. That suggests that the sunshine lamp is performing as planned, which means two successful experiments in one. Plus, the possibility of tasty early carrots, which is kinda the aim of the game.

Buoyed by the fact that the rain and wind have eased off somewhat and so we're unlikely to need to gather up two of every animal in the near future, I've spent most of the weekend preparing for the new growing season.

The garden is structured around four main 1.25m² growing beds, which will be used for brassica (broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, etc) this year which need a lot of nitrogen for the leafy growth. I could have just piled a tonne of artificial fertiliser on, but I found out about green manure last winter and thought I'd give it a go. Green manure is a winter-growing crop that covers the ground, suppresses weeds and takes nitrogen out of the air and fixes it in the ground for the next year. Once winter is done, you chop it down, dig it into the ground and it provides the nutrients for the next year's crop.

Bit cruel when you think about it - a crop that you raise for the sole purpose of killing it and mutilating its body.

Incidentally, if anyone is going to be doing any gardening that involves weeding amongst plants or features, I can thoroughly recommend acquiring a Dutch Hoe. One of my father's mottos when it comes to DIY is that it's always best to take the time to get the right tool for the job, instead of trying to bodge it with the almost-right tool, as you'll just end up having to get the right tool later after wasting a load of time. The same appears true in gardening. Weeding those field beans would've taken me a half hour with a trowel, yet took three minutes with a hoe.

In terms of things to put in those beds, the first seeds of the season have been sown and are sitting atop the boiler. First up are early cauliflowers and cabbage, which should in theory be ready for May, when the no-buying-of-vegetables-for-a-calendar-year challenge* begins.

 I bought special plant labels this year. They're made of slate and you write on them with a wax pen that will only come off with white spirit. The idea is that they're impervious to water, which makes them perfect for being outside. Not quite so good for the idiot who doesn't have any white spirit in the house and requires three attempts to draw the diagram on. Thank god I was only doing one.

I had a couple of spaces in the seed tray which I've filled with lettuce for my next project - vertical gardening.

PJW

*Needs a better name.

Sometimes, I'm not that bright

My last post featured two things - indoor carrots that were struggling from lack of sunlight and couldn't go outside because of the bad weather, and the new sunlight lamp that I'd built to help my seedlings along.

Somehow, I didn't connect these two together until today.

In case anyone's interested in what leggy, undersunlighted seedlings look like, here's the carrots today. Hopefully they'll recover, while also providing a valuable test case to see if the sunlight lamp actually works.

Up == Light, right? Right?

I genuinely can't believe that I didn't realise this before.

PJW

The end of the world in fire and water

The first bit of news is that I have indoor carrots growing!

Need a magnifying glass? I swear they're there.

This is wonderful, as I'd given up on them and gives me the possibility that I may be able to harvest them at the start of April. However, this very much depends on the weather - the half of the experiment that was outside in the plastic greenhouse died a death due to the wind physically removing the greenhouse and tipping the pot over, so I think putting anything this small and fragile outside is asking for trouble while the UK weather forecast still reads "Götterdämmerung."

On the flip side, the plan had been only to keep them inside until they started sprouting, as they don't get much sunlight where they are. I think I'll make a decision after the weekend - given that the wind has managed to rip a wooden post out of a wall and bean me across the head with it; I'd like it to calm down before I put any of my new-grown treasures out in it.

Of course, the current weather also means that all of the preparation work that I spent last month doing for the vegetable garden is in danger of travelling to Oz and setting up a benevolent dictatorship there. The brassica net cages are wired very firmly onto walls, the bottom 6" is buried in the soil and there are bamboo canes acting as struts for all the corners. So far, only one of the four is still standing. I'm hoping the wires have broken, rather than the nets themselves.

I have managed to do one exciting bit of preparation indoors, which is the new seed trays for growing my vegetable seedlings, complete with a sunlight lamp.

Not pictured - the windpocalypse outside

 

Last year, I got a bit overexcited with the idea of planting seeds and started around this time of the year. I revelled in the little green sprouts, and made all sorts of detailed plans about when I was going to put them outside and then was well and truly scuppered by the fact that snow lasted all the way through March.

A valuable note about seedlings on windowsills - they're not very tolerant of not getting much light. A seedling's very simple idea of the world is up = light, light = up. Therefore, if I haven't enough light, then I need more up. There's no use explaining to them that up won't help and that light is hidden behind the horrible slate grey clouds and that they're already on the best windowsill in the house for what little light there is. I'd woken them up and they were going to keep growing till they had enough light dammit.

I ended up having to put the gangly poor things out of their misery when they reached 4 inches long and relied mostly on shop-bought seedlings that year.

This year, I'm hoping to cheat with technology. Indoor lighting normally does nothing for plants, as the light that they give off is a) too weak and b) the wrong colour, being tilted more towards the reds and yellows of the spectrum. This bulb gives 4300 lumen in the same light spectrum as the sun, which involves more blue light which is the one that plants photosynthesise from. In theory, in close proximity to the seedlings, it should be enough to help them alongside the sunlight from the window.

Building the lamp itself was a challenge - I started with a cheap clip-on socket for £2.99 and came up with the plan of clipping it to the window catch. This worked fine until the bulb arrived - it's about as long as my forearm and quite heavy. It wouldn't physically fit into the socket until I cut some of the plastic away and then when it did, it wasn't keen on staying horizontal without support.

One jury-rigged bracket from scrap wood later...

The reflector frame is made out of a wire coathanger, a cardboard box, tin foil, some gardening wire and prayer. There is no adjusting of it - it took me three hours and a great number of swear words to get it into place, and another hour after that to put it back together after I "just move this slightly"ed and the whole thing fell apart. It works though - the light is reflected back down with enough force that you don't want to look directly at it when it's on.

No doubt it will encourage my seedlings to grow beautifully, right up until the point it comes loose and crushes them like the hand of a temperamental deity.

The first seeds are sown next weekend - early cauliflower and cabbage. Looking forward to growing again.

PJW

What's happened in January

January's been mostly a garden month of very hard work and nothing much interesting. Apart from the vegetable garden, we also have the "pretty" garden, which has gone through a major redesign from a ricketty, falling down fence, overgrown hedge and weed filled beds to this:

Lots of digging, lots of hefting of heavy stones, almost an entire day up a ladder trimming the hedge gets me the reward of an extra foot all the way around the garden and the place looking like a bomb's hit it. I'm reliably informed by my parents, who helped the transformation, that the hedge will green up and the grass will grow back. I don't tend to know much about non-food gardening, so I'll take their word for it.

In the interesting garden, the experiment with the early carrots appears to've been an utter failure. Not even a sniff of a seedling, which is a shame. I'll keep the pots wrapped up for a bit longer in case they suddenly sprout forth when the weather turns, but I'm not holding out much hope.

I have received most of my seed potatoes through the post and they're now out chitting so they'll grow quicker when they're planted in March.

 

First Earlies, Early Maincrops and Maincrops - my Second Earlies are still in the post. Think I might have enough seed potatoes?! The pot on the far right hand side is the indoor carrots, resolutely not sprouting for the camera.

Next year is going to be much more interesting, as I plan to still be harvesting at this point. Spinach, kale, brussel sprouts and leeks will be available with luck, as well as living off the stores of potatoes and jerusalem artichokes. It's the dream that keeps me going.

Oh, and that diagram of the garden that I drew, with all the carefully planned beds, pots and growing areas? Already out of date. The garden has expanded to fill the available (and unavailable) space again, with a new 1m x 1m bed planned for more green beans (and to allow room for crop rotation next year) and three extra potato bags (there was a special offer). Wife is tolerating the further expansion, as long as it doesn't encroach into the pretty garden. I guess one could make a case that the borders of the pretty garden aren't that well defined and I could probably fit another bed into a corner where she'd barely even notice it...

The plans for next month - more digging, first growing of seedlings for cabbage and cauliflower and the planting of jerusalem artichoke tubers.

PJW