Internet fame and other setbacks

I was at a wedding party the other night and someone, in the middle of normal conversation, made a reference to "Fuck carrots, eh?" It confused the fuck out of me; I was under the impression that only a couple of friends read this, possibly out of pity (and my wife, of course, who's contractually obligated).

It turns out that it's more popular than I thought. At a party mostly full of people who I know and like, but don't get to see very often, no less than 6 people came up to me specifically to say how much they enjoyed reading about my vegetable garden online. Not entirely sure what I'm supposed to do with an audience. Hi guys - I'll try to keep doing whatever it is that makes you read this and not do the other things.

This time of the year is where the garden work switches, from sowing and cultivating seedlings, to planting things out and letting them grow and spread. I now have most of my major summer/autumn vegetables planted out in the ground and thriving.

Brussels sprouts 

Broccoli 

Experimental tomato bed and oca 

A plethora of beans - French, runner and broad from left to right. 

More oca, more French beans, some mange tout and a nasturtium

I have also planted out my leeks for the winter. If you remember last year, I learned a valuable lesson about leeks - despite being a leafy plant, the actual eatey-bit needs to be buried underground. Those who plant their leeks on the surface get lots of inedible green leaves and not very much in the way of an edible white stalk. I'm actually following the instructions and planting them in deep holes this time, so that they can be buried as they grow taller to elongate the stalk.

Thinking of things which need to be buried, I'm attempting something new with my potatoes this year, which may or may not work. In order to get the best harvest of maincrop potatoes, you're supposed to "earth-up", which basically means burying the leaves in dirt to encourage the plant to produce more potatoes higher up the stem. With the quantities of potatoes that I grow, this requires a lot of expensive dirt and a lot of backbreaking effort to apply it.

STRAW!

I did some research on the interwebs and found a lot of people claiming success with growing potatoes in straw. The idea is that the straw blocks out the light as well as dirt, fooling the plant into thinking it's underground. It's quicker, cheaper and requires a fuck of a lot less effort to apply. Plus, it has the added advantage of being easy to lift away and compost once harvesting's begun. No more digging for potatoes; now I just have to lift away the straw et voila.

At least, therein lies the theory. I'm willing to give it a go because it'll save me so much work, but I'm not convinced that it will block out the light well enough to not affect the harvest. Plus I've got trust issues with straw due to previous bad experiences. This time, I bought the straw from a local farm shop instead of pet straw, which brought its own issues. A bag was £2 and a bale was £3. I'd be a fool not to buy a bale, right?

Turns out that bales are very good value for money, as they are very heavily compressed and contain a lot of straw. The tied bale just about fit in the boot of my estate car. I put it in my shed and then cut the pieces of string that were holding it together so I could get some out. And then it just about fit in the shed. I used as much of it as I could, but I still have this much left:

Let's hope I don't need anything towards the back of that shed for another year or so.

Not a clue what I'm going to do with it.

The other disaster recently was not self-inflicted, but was instead the actions of the bloody winds that will not stop whistling about. My beautiful vertical gardening strawberry planters survived everything that nature could throw at them. Unfortunately, the fence that they were hanging from did not.

 Before

 After

After repairs. I was too upset to take a photo of what they looked like when I found them.

Thankfully, they all appear to have survived their faceplant to the concrete and I've managed to replant all of the ones that were thrown free. Whether they'll produce anything this year or be too traumatised is in the balance. I've also got my nifty vertical gardening planters, that are supposed to lift the strawberries into the sunlight and away from slugs and other pests, sitting on the ground, which is far from ideal. At some point, I'll look at finding somewhere else to hang them, but at present I just don't want to risk them going for a burton again.

Still, to end on a cheerful note, here's a picture of the vegetable garden in all its glory, lovingly stitched together from several different photographs.

PJW

Pint into a quart pot

The first lesson I learned when I started gardening was that there were many things that wanted to eat my vegetables more than I did and were nowhere near as picky about waiting until things were ripe as I was. It wasn't possible in the slightest to "share" - everything I grew would be stripped down to the bones or riddled with slimy holes long before it was in any edible state.

I also learned that it was well nigh impossible to "encourage" them away in a back garden environment. Home-made remedies like garlic or chilli infusion sprays were completely ineffective, commercial pest killers or repellents were completely ineffective and awful for the environment, and companion plants achieved fuck all, while taking up space not doing anything.

The only answer appears to be physically walling away the plants with netting to stop the pests from getting in and, as I've mentioned before, netting and I do not get along, mostly because netting is waiting until I let my guard down so it can try to break my neck again. So I've had to invest in a series of specialist pop-up Brassica Cages in order to survive my own garden.

Now, overall, the cages have been phenomenal. They spring open like a pop-up tent and keep their shape perfectly, without the need for my usual wonderful constructions of bamboo, netting, wire and hope.

For those who didn't missed the tale of the vegetable orphanage the first time around, I'll spoil the ending for you - it was less than perfectly successful.

Plus, they have zipped doors, which means that I can't pull my usual trick of perfectly securing insect protection around a plant before realising that I need to get to something underneath it.

There are only two major down-sides to them. The first is that they struggle in high winds, which, being on top of a hill, we have a *lot*. They have to tied down 15 ways from Sunday and require so many stakes for support that I'm actually giving serious consideration to growing a bamboo plant, just so I don't have to keep handing over money to the garden centre.

This arrangement fell apart, two days after this photo was taken, in a light breeze. Because I built it.

The other downside is that they cost a bomb. I justified it to myself originally on the basis that I grew all my brassica and leafy things in four beds that were exactly the same size. So while buying four nets would cost a lot of money, it was an investment and I would never have to buy any more, unless of course I decided to strip out all of my strawberries and take the opportunity to rotate some of the brassica away from the 1.25m2 beds to let the soil recover. And what are the odds of me deciding to do that?

Pretty high, as it turns out. You'd think I'd remember I was a phenomenal idiot, wouldn't you?

So, I was left with a 1.25m2 brassica cage to fit on a 1m x 2m vegetable bed. "Shouldn't be a problem!" I thought. "I'll just split the vegetable bed in half and make it into two 1x1m beds and then the cage can cover one of those. 1m is less than 1.25m, so it'll be fine!"

So far, so hoopy, until I came to actually trying to accomplish this and realised that the whole point of the cage is that it fits snugly without gaps, so that no butterflies can get in. This includes at the bottom, because butterflies are tenacious little buggers and aren't against going to ground level to get into somewhere. It also turns out that 25cm is quite a big gap to make just disappear.

Still, I went to my task with abandon and proceeded to try and make a quart pot fit snugly around a pint, using only heaps of gardening wire, ground staples, imagination, hope and a lot of swear words.

Nailed it

The snapping noise as I tied part of the net to itself and forced it into position was all part of the plan. I'm sure it'll be fine - it's probably designed to taper down from full size at the top to 4/5th size at the bottom and the fact that one of the straight bits now hangs limply at right-angles is a feature, not a bug.

It's also completely self supporting, apart from the stakes on every corner and 15 bits of gardening wire attaching it to the chain link fence behind. I did try using only 14 ties to the fence, but it attempted to break free and go back to 1.25m2 wide instead of squeezed into just 1m. There used to be a nascent chard plant on the left hand side before that. Now it's tied to the fence in 15 places and I'm digging out the chard seeds again.

Notice also the pots down at the bottom - they're actually vital structural components. They're pinning the bottom of the net to the wooden frame of the bed and, in the case of the one on the left, it's pinning the net to itself to take up some of the slack. To demonstrate the complete success of my genius design, I thought I'd take some pictures from the side view:

Go home brassica cage, you're drunk.

Oh for f... Anyone got the number of the local taxi?!

In the interests of not having the next breath of wind contort my broccoli plants into an integral part of an Escher-esque abomination of nets, sprung wire, leaves and chain link, I have now decided to buy a new brassica cage of the correct size. Hopefully I haven't unalterably buggered my £44 cage in an effort to avoid spending £29.

In other news, check out our pear tree!

The dandelions are also a feature.

Quite apart from being very pretty, that is a significant amount more blossom than last year. I hope that this is the year we finally get edible pears. Sure, we did eat the ones that grew last year, but that was more out of a sense of duty than out of any belief that they were actually fit for human consumption.

PJW

Further adventures in vertical gardening

Another thing I've been doing over the last week or two is trying to resurrect my vertical garden that I made out of a tower of coke bottles. Last year was mostly a failure - the strawberries died very quickly, the coriander died slowly, the mint had a brief flourish and died and the lettuce was a roaring success, hampered only by the fact that I don't eat much lettuce.

I came back to it a fortnight ago to find that the death throes of the plants had sucked all the water and goodness out of the soil and left it a desert.

This may be a redundant question, but has anyone ever tried to water soil that has utterly rejected the concept of water? It's happened to me a couple of times in the past when I failed at indoor pot plants - once is reaches a certain level of dessication, the soil decides that it never liked water anyway and is better off with that bitch out of its life. So you try and bring soil and water back together and the soil is all, "Nu-uh - you broke my heart, but I don't need you anymore. I'm stronger without you and I'm happy with my new girlfriend, DeadLettuce."

So, I spent the better part of a day trying to convince soil that it did want water back in its life, which was mostly accomplished by trying to drown it. If there's a water shortage in Bath in the next couple of weeks, then sorry - that was me, emptying an entire reservoir's worth into a tower of plastic bottles.

If we're taking that metaphor to its logical conclusion, then I kidnapped and tortured the soil until it agreed to get back together with water. Also, please note the skeleton of the mint plant at the bottom. I tried removing it - it considered removing me instead. We've called a truce.

So, I finally have a moist tower once more and will be trying to grow things in it. The only inhabitants currently are two strawberry plants - I live forever in hope that, one day, they will be able to thrive here. Or at least produce one lousy strawberry between them. I've also got some lettuce growing under the artificial sun with the hope that, one day, I might eat some lettuce.

In other news, all but one of the "Swift" bags of potatoes have now shown signs of green bits. I don't fancy my chances of getting potatoes next week, as I was promised, but at least they may produce something at some time.

Far more interesting is that my Purple Majesty potatoes are showing signs of life. Actually, they may have been producing leaves for a while and just escaped my notice - the leaves are a very dark purple, which is very, very cool. Hopefully this bodes well for the purpleness of the potatoes themselves.

I've also managed to plant out some of the better seedlings into their beds inside the brassica cages. We now officially have 2 brussels sprouts and 3 broccoli.

I have once again used old coke bottles as home-made bell cloches to protect the vulnerable seedlings from wind, cold and the depredations of the local wildlife. This was my best trick last year and it's saved me a lot of stress and lost plants.

In looking up that link, I came across a picture of how big my seedlings were at the end of April last year. I'm definitely getting better at this game!

27th April 2014

12th April 2015

I've since had to remove the bell cloche off that one because the seedling was already pressing up against the top of the bottle. The difference is likely the improved artificial sun that my wife built me and that I outfitted with a more powerful bulb. God knows what it's doing to our electricity bills, but it's certainly improving my gardening.

There's also the first signs of mange tout coming up, which is promising. With any luck, it'll survive the pests this year. I plan on putting egg-shells around the more vulnerable ones and praying.

Not slug food. Please.

PJW

Audience participation and leafy veg

Last week, I invited comment on what on earth I could use the unexpected extra space for that I'd freed up by relocating my strawberries. The main suggestion from Facebook comments was that my growing plan was lacking in leafy greens and I should get on that.

Now, I plan to take the advice, but it's important to understand that leafy greens and I have had an iffy gardening history. Dedicated blog-followers may remember that I extolled the virtues of windowsill lettuce last year and planned many more in my vertical garden. It is true, I successfully did achieve lettuces last year. Then I sat and watched as they died from nobody ever picking and eating them. Salads are not a common occurrence in my household (and let's have no quips about my weight from the more witty among you) and while it was lovely to be able to snip off some leaves when I needed them, I didn't need them often enough to stop the plant from feeling underappreciated and turning into a pretty flower.

The other suggestion was cooking greens - spinach and rainbow chard. I have a friend who swears by rainbow chard as being the easiest thing in the world to grow, but it just doesn't seem to happen like that for me. She gets this:

Lifted from http://onegreentomato.net/2010/10/28/fall-garden/

While I get this:

My garden, 5 minutes ago. Maybe I should start reading that onegreentomato blog?

Spinach and kale are the same story. They seem to be the food of choice for pests in my garden, now that the broccoli have been locked away in brassica cages, and there is nothing less appetising than a leaf that's got more holes in it than a colander. Even when they do survive, they don't seem to produce very much for me.

Looks nice enough, but considering spinach shrivels when cooked, that's about one mouthful's worth. If that.

This year is going to be different, however. One of the coveted spots in the brassica cages is going to be set to one side for a chard plant, with the dream that it might escape predation and grow into a proper plant. I am also giving up the dream with either spinach or perpetual spinach (which is supposed to be easier!) and going straight onto a plant called kokihi or New Zealand spinach, as it's sometimes known.

Quite apart from looking very cool, it has the distinct advantage of being native to the Antipodes (as the name would suggest) and thus allegedly invisible to domestic pests. I'll believe it when I see it, but apparently nothing here recognises it as food, which sounds promising. Plus, it's treated as a weed in New Zealand because it grows vigorously anywhere it can get hold of, which sounds very promising. Last on its list of virtues is that it can also be used just like real spinach in any recipe so I'll be very interested in how it adapts to the kitchen.

Here's the new plan for the ex-strawberry bed after the suggestions from the audience:

Incidentally, if anyone I know would be interested in joining my experiment with kokihi, the allegedly bulletproof green, I have plenty of seeds going spare.

On that subject, what is wrong with gardening firms and suppliers? It is impossible to buy anything in sensible quantities - plants or seeds. I wanted to buy some broccoli seedlings to replace the dearly departed and the minimum that I could buy was ten. I don't need ten broccoli seedlings and I speak as someone who has loads of room and grows a metric butt-tonne of broccoli. Worse than that, I decided to just buy cauliflower seedlings this year to avoid the debacle of last year, but the minimum quantity I could buy interesting colours in was 15 and to get the ones I really wanted I had to buy 21! It's not like they're that dear, but... okay, let's do the maths - that's about 3m2 of solid cauliflowers. Who does that? Who wants that? What the hell?

And let's not forget that these are advertised as "Grow Your Own" so it's not even like they're targetted towards businesses. I dedicate more of my garden and more of my spare time to growing vegetables than is strictly sensible and even *I* don't have room for 21 cauliflowers.

Seeds are even worse. I've got 100 onion sets this year because they only come in packets of 50 and I wanted both red and white onions. Swedes come in packets of 300 seeds, marked use by 2016. Even if you assume that half of them won't grow (which I wouldn't regard as acceptable anyway), that's more than one swede every three days. Now, I like swedes, but there's a limit!

In short, if you're inspired by my adventures and fancy growing anything, ask me first before buying seeds, cause the odds are good that I'll have some that I'm more than willing to press on you.

The garden is picking up this month from the disaster that was March - the replacement broccoli seedlings are growing well and I also have cabbage and brussels sprouts that I've grown from seed.

At the bottom, there are the broccoli seedlings that decided to try growing while the artificial sun was switched off that I was about to give the last rites to. They've bounced back superbly and I'm now confident that they'll actually thrive.

The fruit plants are greening up, including the mutant raspberry, which I thought I'd take a picture of as I didn't have one for the post about its rampage.

Evil mutant raspberry, as brought to you by JJ Abrams

I also finally have evidence that the Swift potatoes are growing something!

Well, one of them at least. The rest all still look like this:

I swear to you that this is a different picture to the last two times I've shown these three bags!

Entertainingly enough, they are being overtaken by the Anya potatoes, which are all thriving, despite having made no particular promises about quick-growing. I suspect that it's partially my fault - I clearly didn't start chitting the Swifts early enough and if I had, I might have better results by now.

Not Swift, but swifter than Swift, who I'm swift to say are not that swift.

Lastly, the winds that decapitated my babies are still swirling around, although at slightly lower speeds. It's an occupational hazard of being on top of a giant hill and our location on the corner where the prevailing winds normally aim means that we get a lot of rubbish and detritus blown into the garden (which is delightful). However, I think this takes the biscuit as the weirdest thing I've found in my garden:

That is the creepiest toy I've ever seen and would be so even if it hadn't just randomly appeared in my garden.

PJW

Why March needs a good punch up the bracket

This month has been something of a disaster in the garden. Firstly, you may remember the over-wintered cauliflower that formed very tiny heads very early. The ones where I quipped that I should harvest the 5p sized heads now and have done with it to avoid further disappointment?

I'm a pretty flower!

Should've listened to my own advice, no matter how sarcastic it was.

Secondly, the Swift variety potatoes that I bought that were supposed to be harvestable in mid-April? There is not a single hint of a potato plant yet - I appear to just be providing lodgings for bags of dirt. I'm not hopeful of homegrown potatoes in a fortnight's time.

"Swift"

Thirdly, I planted the next tranche of broccoli seeds into pots before I went away from home for a long weekend. I didn't put them under the artificial sun because it seemed pointless to waste electricity on unsprouted seeds. I come back to:

The one time I don't want you to be bloody efficient and quick sprouting. No, Up =/= Light! Not yet, not until I've plugged the sun back in! Just chill the fuck out, okay?

They are now under the artificial sun constantly, in the hope of saving them. I don't hold out much hope.

Now, this shouldn't've been a massive disaster. I had my most successful seedlings ever this year - sown in February, nurtured under the artificial sun and I'd spent this month acclimatising them to outside conditions, ready to be planted out in a week or two. I had doted on those seedlings, giving them perfect soil, perfect conditions and going out to move them between the mini-greenhouse for shelter and warmth and outside in the sunniest spot in the garden to help their growth. I was going to have early broccoli, created myself purely from seeds and it was going to be beautiful.

And they would've been delicious.

You may notice a lot of the conditional perfect in that above description. You may also notice that, in the picture, taken just three days ago, they are on top of the mini-greenhouse, rather then inside. The weather had been fine and they needed to get inured to a little bit of wind and rain to build them up big and strong. So, that was where they were left when I left for the weekend.

Anyone who's been in Bath this weekend will attest to the 30mph+ winds over the last couple of days. I live on top of a tall hill. There is no current picture of what remains of the seedlings; I'm too upset.

Needless to say, I shan't be having early broccoli this year.

Bollocks.

PJW

Beds paved with gold

Every time I try to convince myself that vegetable gardening could be seen as a money-saving enterprise, I have only to think of my last visit to the garden centre to shake it off.

This weekend, I have bought over 500 litres of compost, soil and manure. If you can't picture that, it's about enough to fill 4 and a half bathtubs full and would normally cost more than £50. I only bought that much because the garden centre was doing a half-price clearance sale to get rid of old stock and I thought I could stock up and sort myself out for the year.

It's all gone already. And there's still more needed.

February's payslip, right there. The most expensive cat litter tray imaginable.

This is the problem with gardening in raised beds and pots, rather than in an actual garden. All the matter that goes into creating cauliflower leaves and carrot tops is very finite, so when I pull my crops out, the dirt can only be replenished from my wallet. Or from home composting, but the small amount I get from that doesn't put a dent in my garden's needs.

Still, in using all the dirt, I have managed to get a lot of the garden set up for the growing season. I now have all my main growing beds set up and ready to go, as well as having all of my potatoes planted, which is good Unfortunately, the "Swift" potatoes I planted last month don't appear to be that swift at all - there's not even a hint of a sprout yet, which isn't promising for me getting the first potatoes next month.

Do you see the difference between last month's Swift plantings at the front and the newly planted bags behind? Nope, neither do I.

The early broccoli, on the other hand, is going great guns and has already been moved outside to get the best of the sunlight and get used to the temperatures. I've put them into biodegradable peat pots, rather than plastic ones, as these can be planted straight into the soil whole and hopefully give the broccoli strength from not having their roots buggered about with. I'm really hopeful of getting an early crops from these.

One thing which has been a surprising success has been cat shit prevention. Back when I first started complaining about cats digging through and shitting on all of my work, someone suggested that men's urine was a suitable deterrent. It seemed like a sensible idea in terms that cats won't soil an area that's the home ground of another cat (hence why they all come here, as we're the only house on the block without a cat of our own), but it involved either filling a bottle which was kinda grim, or going out at night and hoping the neighbours weren't looking, so I didn't get around to it.

However, I've given it a try the past month and it really appears to be working. No cat shit since the first application, which puts it head and shoulders above any other method so far. Gardening advice for March - piss on everything you can.

PJW

And now the saga continuums

The first sowings of the year are now in the ground.

First up is Swift potatoes, which as their name suggests are supposed to be the quickest on the market - planting mid-February is supposed to result in a mid-April harvest. I picked this variety back in November, when I still thought the challenge would be a going concern and I was going to have to feed myself until June. Thankfully that's no longer the case, but I'm intrigued by the idea of a longer potato season and I'm hoping these will work as advertised. Last year's new potatoes were ready late June, so that's the mark they have to beat to be a success.

The seed potatoes have been chitting on my windowsill for the past couple of weeks, but with somewhat of a disappointing lack of results.

Underwhelming, and not promising for mid-April early potatoes.

Chitting is actually supposed to speed up potato growth, as it lets them get their first bit of growing done inside in the warmth, and I was hoping for a bit more from them. However, they're going in the potato growing bags today whether they like it or not, so hopefully they've got enough of a head start.

Due to special offers from the mail order company that I used, it was as cheap to have three packets of seed potatoes as it was to have two. Therefore I've also got Anya potatoes, a small, nobbly, tasty new potato that you may have seen in Sainsburys, and Purple Majesty, which are the logical extension of last year's Salad Blue variety. The Salad Blues were pleasingly mottled purple, but didn't taste particularly spectacular and went an unappetising grey when cooked, whereas the Purple Majesty are alleged to be purple through and through, stay purple when cooked and taste delicious. They are a vital part in my ambition of making purple soup, so hopefully they'll live up to their reputation as well.

Anyway, the downside of having three varieties of potatoes is that you cannot buy any of the interesting varieties in anything less than 1.5kg bags. I'm planting 5 sacks of the Swift and I'll still have 7-8 seed potatoes left over and I expect to have the same for the Anya as well (haven't calculated the purple ones yet).

With that in mind, is anyone in and around Bath planning on growing potatoes? If so, you are welcome to the seed potatoes free, the instructions are here from last year and I will even provide some old compost bags for you to grow them in - all you'd need to buy is about £5 worth of compost. Comment here or on Facebook please.

The same has happened with my onions - I buy them as sets (basically dried onion seedlings that you just put in the ground and they grow to full size) and you can only buy them in packets of 50. Since I'm growing both red and white onions and they have to be planted 12cm apart, that's an entire bed of 1.25m2 filled with the buggers and, while I like onions, I've got more interesting things to plant as well. So if anyone wants some onion sets, they're welcome to those as well, although they'd require ground rather than pots or bags, so only good to people who have a garden.

As for other early growers, I am repeating my experiment for indoor carrots again this year, with the hope of getting better results. Not sure I fancy my chances, but never mind. I've also planted some very early broccoli seedlings, in the hope that I'll be able to spread out my broccoli harvest this year, instead of a frantic few weeks of harvesting and freezing everything. They are both currently under the artificial sun that my wife built, which is still standing because I wasn't involved in its construction.

Outside, there are some overwintering plants that I suspect will mostly come to nothing. The mild winter has meant that the cauliflower has got cocky and started producing small heads already, which will almost certainly be destroyed in the inevitable late cold snap. The carrots are, well, carrots and we know my opinions on those already. The only bright sparks are the broad beans, which are going great guns having been sown in late November. Beans of varying varieties have been the major success story of the garden, so I'm hoping these will continue the fine traditions of those that went before them.

Maybe I should just harvest it now and save myself the disappointment? 

Broad beans, momentarily released from their cat protection for the photograph. I hate next door's cats, the little shitting nightmares.

Next bit of planting won't happen for another fortnight - the weather's got to brighten up a bit first. Hopefully it won't do anything weird like March snow again.

PJW