Growing garden and shitting cats

My wife is terrible at being a restraining influence. Not only did she let me know that she'd never tried rhubarb before:

She also insisted, insisted I tell you, that I buy a gooseberry bush:

I believe her exact turn of phrase was, "You can if you want to." That villain!

And then compounded it by letting me cook her an experimental recipe with aubergine and deeming it "quite nice"!

I can't take any responsibility for this, really I can't. She's practically forced me.

In news which isn't about my rapidly expanding garden portfolio, I've finished setting up the nets for the brassica and we're now just awaiting the seedlings being large enough to transplant outside. I don't think it'll happen this weekend, as the weather's still filthy, but I'll work on gradually acclimating them to outside weather across the next fortnight and plant them out on the weekend of the 5th.

Pest control's becoming a big thing at the moment - I'm now set up to keep the caterpillars away from my brassica, but the new challenge is trying to persuade next door's cats that my nicely dug beds are not their new toilet, in particular my bed of onion sets which don't take kindly being dug up, shat upon and then reburied upside down. So far they've ignored pepper and citrus, were entirely unbothered by lion dung, and were gently amused by the motion detecting robot that was supposed to scare them away with ultrasonics. The only thing that's made even the slightest bit of difference is a commercial product Catapult which a) costs a bit, b) requires reapplication with the slightest bit of rain, c) is a sod to apply as it's a squirty bottle that just coats me if the wind catches it, which leads us onto d) it smells so terrible that it drives me out of the garden, let alone the cats.

Plan B is to cover the bed in netting, but that'll be a pain in the arse cause it's an awkward shape and me and netting don't get on at the best of times. It generally ends up with a tangled mess that sort of covers the bed, detaches in the wind within 5 minutes and trips me up the next time I go down that end of the garden. When I finally get around to reattaching the netting, I get it so firmly secured that I then can't move it in order to get to the crops myself. There's a reason I've gone for expensive prefab cages for the square beds!

Anyone got any suggestions for deterring cats? Please, no suggestions involving shotguns - I'm close enough to the edge that I might consider them.

PJW

Free strawberries

Since I've already had one person respond to my throwaway line that I might donate my omnivorous strawberries to good homes, I thought I'd open it up to people who might not have seen it.

Not pictured - the trail of destruction left behind them

I've got three of these going spare, so if anyone else near Bath wants a boisterous strawberry plant (and is willing to not sue for emotional or physical trauma related to said plant), comment here or on Facebook.

PJW

Strawberry fields forever

When I was writing my last post about the vertical garden, I went to link to the post about my rescuing of the strawberry patch and was kinda disconcerted when I couldn't find it. As it turns out, I didn't get round to writing it, having been distracted by seedlings (which incidentally, are now thriving).

So, here we are - my strawberry patch as it was:

It's... not my finest work.

The problem occurred when I tried to move the strawberries from one end of the garden to another. There was a small strawberry bed in existence when we originally bought the house and, while it was very nice and grew strawberries very well, it had the major disadvantage of being well-known to every ant colony within a mile. As soon as a fruit started ripening, the little buggers were there, lifting it away. A bit of research told me this was a common problem when you had strawberries in the same bed for 4-5 years and that once the ants found where it was, you were better off just killing the bed, and moving your strawberries to a different part of the garden.

Killing the bed proved problematic in itself - I tried every herbicide known to man, dug over the ground dozens of times and still found strawberries trying to grow from everywhere. They grew out of the gravel, they grew across into the next bed, they grew behind the compost heap, they formed an unholy alliance with a raspberry cane and started growing out of that plant - I even found one growing out of a brick. Not growing from dirt that's on a brick mind, literally embedded into the brick itself. I pulled it out and the brick crumbled to dust.

Eventually, after a dosage of herbicide just short of Agent Orange, the damn things died and I left the bed fallow for a year before growing green manure on it and adding a tonne of new compost for it's new incarnation as a brassica bed this year.

Having such a setback made me decide to build a new strawberry bed. Not just a new one, but a better one. A perfect one. I would build a perfect new bed and I would even get some straw to act as mulch and keep the slugs and pests away. So I built the bed, bought the strawberries, laid the straw that I got from a local pet shop...

Yep, that's exactly what it looks like.

Fun fact - pet shop straw is cheaper than horticultural grade straw, but that's because it's only short-term stuff. It's either bedding which'll be changed or food which'll be eaten, so there's no need to worry about what'll happen if you leave it for a while, cause no-one does. Certainly, they don't worry about making sure it's seedless, cause what kind of idiot would use it in a situation where it would sprout and create new straw?

 Who's got two thumbs and just learned a valuable life lesson about false economy? This guy!

So yes, I started growing straw in my strawberry patch and it grew as fast as I could remove it. Unfortunately for the strawberries, towards the end of the season I became a father and rescuing them from the straw invasion became less of a priority. The bed went to rack and ruin and the strawberries, remembering that they once used to be wild creatures that roamed free, decided to strike out for new homes.

The bed was surrounded by concrete, but that didn't stop them. Strawberry runners tried growing into of the fence, in a water trough, in the netting, in a pile of fallen leaves. They tried forming an alliance with next door's blackberry bramble, but were betrayed when that started growing down into their bed and actually succeded in kicking out some of the straw. They tried growing down into the outside drain, which could've ended very badly for all concerned, and I suspect that some of them made it through into my horticulturally-challenged next door neighbour's garden. When they eat through the foundations of his house and declare the independent state of Strawbtopia, I plan on denying all and moving house.

The morass of desperate runners surrounding a bed of sickly looking straw and a rather smug blackberry bramble sat in the corner of my garden for a good few months, always just at the bottom of my to-do list. Every weekend I would announce that I was going to clear out the strawberry bed and every weekend evening I'd come in having found a dozen other chores that needed doing first.

Finally, I knuckled down and spent half a day weeding and clearing out everything that wasn't a strawberry and quite a lot that was. I ended up rescuing about ten small strawberry plants from various places where they'd found a foothold and repotting them for later. Some have made it into the vertical garden as mention and I'll find a use for the others somewhere. Maybe I'll give them away on the blog - virulent strawberry plants, free to a home that doesn't mind accepting them as their unquestioned overlords. No responsibility accepted for any destruction of property and children devoured by our strawberry masters.

PJW

Growing up

Working in a relatively limited growing area, I've been interested in the idea of vertical gardening for a while. The idea is to have plants that grow up, rather than along, and use walls and shelving to create several tiers. Most of the really interesting ideas have been either out of my budget or impractical for my garden due to limited angles of sunlight, however a friend linked me to one that I thought was worth a try, mostly because I had all the raw materials to hand.

So far, I can thoroughly recommend it for people who want to play along at home. All you need is a drainpipe on a wall that doesn't point north, some compost and a lot of plastic bottles.

Did I mention my Diet Coke addiction? Plastic bottles were never going to be the limiting factor.

What you need to do:

• Cut the base off all but two of the bottles and wash them out thoroughly. Remove the labels and throw away all but two of the caps.
• Select one bottle to be the bottom of the tower and screw one of the caps on tightly. Take a small, sharp knife and stab two holes on opposite sides, just above where the bottle curves into the neck. These are drainage holes to make sure it doesn't get water-logged.
• Fill your newly created bottom bottle with compost. Make sure to pack it tightly or the whole thing will go slightly wobbly later. Place it at the bottom of your drainpipe, facing as close to south as you can get it. I put mine in a pot full of compost for extra stability.
• Take a second bottle and wedge it, neck first, into the bottom one. Fill with compost. Repeat until you have only the two uncut bottles left.








• Once you've reached your last two bottles, cut them both in half. Drill/bore with a knife a very small hole in the top of the last remaining cap and screw it to one of the bottles. Put the capped bottle inside the other and wedge it in as hard as it can go. You should have something which looks like this:
  
  


• This is the reservoir. Shove it into the top bottle of compost and then fill it with water. The water should drain through the little hole in the cap, dripping through the clear air created by jamming the two bottle halves together and feed into the compost.
  
  
  
• Strap this tower of bottles to the drainpipe to prevent it from falling over and then start making planting holes.






• The original guide recommends herbs and lettuce, but that's boring. So while I am doing some lettuce and some mint and oregano (thyme and rosemary have their own pots, while parsley is in the spinach patch, keeping the slugs away (in theory)), the top half is now filled with strawberry plants rescued from the runners that tried to escape my straw and weed-ridden bed last year.
  
  

Overall, I'm very pleased with the results. There are several major advantages to growing lettuces and strawberries like this, not least of which is that a lateral bed containing this many plants would be at least 1m² of garden space instead of 1 coke-bottle's-width in a space that wouldn't've been used anyway.

It'll also lift the fruit and leaves away from marauding slugs and woodlice and the top-down watering makes it phenomenally easy to keep the soil moist and add liquid fertiliser when needed. Granted, the plants at the top will get first dibs on the nutrients, but that's why the strawberries are at the top and the less hungry lettuces and indestructible mint are at the bottom. My only concern is that I may have tried to squeeze in too many strawberry plants and they may be too squashed up to produce much. I guess time will tell.

PJW

Good use of time

I took today off work as holiday in order to relax and destress. Life has been busy of late and I thought a nice peaceful day of not doing very much would be just what was needed to recover a little bit of energy.

Today, I:

• Bought 450l (£24 worth) of garden compost
• Built a vertical garden and planted herbs and strawberries in it
• Bought and planted a cherry tree
• Bought and planted a rhubarb crown
• Replanted a loganberry bush
• Planted 30 early seed potatoes
• Planted some jerusalem artichokes
• Rearranged things so I could grow beetroot and then planted them
• Dug in the rest of the green manure on the brassica beds and then put a new layer of compost on top
• Realised that I'd used 450l (£24 worth) of garden compost in one day
• Covered all the earth round the fruit bushes in bark chips
• Planted another seed tray full of vegetables
• Squeezed said seed tray under the sun lamp and built some extra reflectors
• Lay down and may not ever rise again.

So yes, nice, quiet, relaxing, peaceful day of not doing very much. Granted, I now feel quite good about how the garden's progressing. While the sun's still going down at 6pm, it's well-nigh impossible to accomplish anything after a day at work and my weekends are busy for the next fortnight, so I was a little bit worried about the pile of jobs that might've stacked up in the meantime.

I was going to write about the vertical garden today, but I'm so knackered that I think that will have to wait for another day. Early to bed and hope to survive the rest of the working week.

PJW

Magical growing things

I love the first seedlings of the season. It's always amazing to me that any of my seeds come up at all; it still seems like magic to put a little ball into dirt and have that turn into a real live growing thing.

The carrots have developed a distinct sideways slant after having been kicked out from the sweet spot under the light by my new treasures. Sod them - they can grow or not, whatever. I've got cabbages on the go now!

Hopefully not how I'll treat my daughter if we ever make her a sibling.

That's like a real plant now. And it's not dead from lack of light. Go improvised sunlamp!

I now have all four cabbage seedlings growing, which is annoying cause the plan only called for two from this batch; I only planted four on the expectation that they wouldn't all come up. On the down side, only one of the six cauliflowers is showing its head and neither of the lettuces. This could be just a quirk of the seeds and the others will be up in a couple of days. It could also be that those seed packets are compromised and I need to get some more. Hard to tell and if I leave it too long then I won't be able to harvest for May, which will apparently be when I'll be eating nothing but cabbage.

I'll be planting the next batch of seeds tomorrow anyway and hopefully I'll get some more cauliflower from this batch.

PJW