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

Vegetable jam

I haven't had a chance to do much in the garden of late due to work, family and other commitments and my to-do list was filling up, so I was very glad to set aside this morning as my day for doing all of the gardening chores.

Thor is angry that people are butthurt about a female Thor!* The sky must be rent!

I quite like rain, so I went out anyway, but only lasted about 10-15 minutes before coming inside as drenched as if I'd jumped in a swimming pool fully clothed.

The one advantage of having a rainy gardening day was that it gave me a chance to plan the garden a little bit better. When I decided that I wanted to try a year without buying vegetables, I sat down and planned out how I was going to get things year-round. I have a schedule which details when I need to plant seeds, when I get to harvest things and which new plants will go in to replace the harvested stuff. This was all painstakingly researched and I thought I had a foolproof plan.

However, either I am too much fool to be stymied by mere foolproof or the interwebs research I made led me astray. The plan tells me that I ate three cauliflowers and two cabbages by the middle of last month, making room for the winter cabbage and the overwintering sprouting broccoli. The reality is that none of my cauliflowers have formed a head yet and I have harvested only my first cabbage today.

Photo not taken in June

Granted, this is much better than last year, in which the Very Bastardish Caterpillars ensured that I didn't get any cabbage and that most of my cauliflowers never formed a head (the only one that I did get, I threw away halfway through eating for being utterly disgusting and riddled with dead caterpillars). So +1 for the brassica nets for doing a brilliant job. However, it has left me with something of a log-jam. The seedlings for the winter and spring brassica have grown up big and strong and are ready to be planted, but there's nowhere to plant them.

This is further complicated by the fact that I can't just put them in any bed that has a space - any bed that I grow spring brassica in won't be usable for brassica next year as there won't be a season in which it can be rested and used for green manure. My grand plan took that into account, as I had set aside which cabbages and cauliflowers would be harvested first so that it would fit perfectly into my crop rotation scheme. Unfortunately nature doesn't appear to've read my grand plan, as the only things close to being harvestable are in the beds that I wasn't planning on rotating!

All things told, it's a mess and has left me trying to fit a quart into a pint pot. I've had to pot up seedlings, then repot into bigger tubs when it became obvious the problem wasn't going to be solved before they became pot-bound, then find a place to put them where the butterflies won't get them. I did have them in the brassica cages inbetween the actual planted cauliflowers, broccoli and cabbages, but the summer vegetables have grown now so there's not enough space.

Thankfully, I got rid of a shed last month and opened up a whole new area of space in my garden, allowing me to create... this thing.

It's like an orphanage for displaced brassicae... in a shanty-town. Made by people who'd never built a shanty town plant orphanage before. Out of inferior materials. Yes, this literally was the best I could accomplish. There's a reason why my wife does the construction in our house.

It's just about sturdy enough to keep the butterflies off, which is the main thing, and has managed to keep most of the winter brassica alive long enough for the first one to be planted into its final position.

Thrive, little sprouting broccoli. And don't let those big kids push you around and steal your lunch sunlight.

The important thing is that I've learned a valuable lesson about trying to cram too many plants into my garden and will learn from this experience next year by reducing my ambitions and growing slightly less. I definitely won't just react to this by trying to build more vegetable beds and expanding the empire further.

Honest.

PJW


*The best stupid comment I've heard about it was someone on Facebook who mentioned off-hand that superhero comics now have an unrealistic and unnatural number of characters as women just to placate 'liberals'. Unfortunately, it was a topic on a friend of a friend's post, so couldn't ask him exactly what percentage of people being women he thought to be "realistic."

More promise, fewer results

Long pause between updates, as the play I've been in came to conclusion. Great fun to do, but massively tiring and hasn't left me much time for anything that's not play or daughter. On the bright side, I've been surviving mostly on junk food, so the continued lack of vegetables hasn't proved too much of a problem.

Actual size

The carrots have continued to be pitiful, despite my attempts at appropriate fertiliser. I have some theories as to why that is - I think I've spaced them too closely together and have possibly pulled them up a little too early - but any suggestions from the audience would be appreciated.

On the bright side, the garden has flourished in the face of being neglected for a week or so.

From the humble original seedling of a few months back...

To the "Holy crap, broccoli!" of today

There's promise of broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower and also imminent courgettes and beans.

It still seems like magic to me that all of these came from tiny little seeds. Doesn't seem possible. Of course, the promise of  vegetables isn't quite the same as actually getting some. We'll see next month, I guess

The major change to the garden this month is that I've got rid of one of my many sheds. It was falling apart and a fortuitous turn of events allowed me to get it taken away for free by someone who thought they could rebuild it on their allotment, but it has given me the nice side-effect of giving me more room for another vegetable bed.

Spot the difference.

I'm resolutely not building anything there yet, as I want to see how this year's harvest goes before deciding what I want to put there. I'm currently struggling to fit everything in that I wanted to grow this year, especially the winter vegetables. The purple sprouting broccoli is going great guns and I've got nowhere to put it until I've harvested a few cauliflowers. At the moment, pots are my friend, but it's not a permanent solution. Hopefully, it won't stunt the winter vegetables; despite my appalling start, I really would like to have year-round vegetables.

Next challenge is going to be sowing seeds for the overwintering spring vegetables and then attempting to grow carrots that you can't pick your teeth with.

PJW

Mid-May update

I love this bit of the year. I think the best way to demonstrate that is with three photos:

January

Start of May

Today and the great wall of potatoes

Everything is growing, some of it is even outgrowing the things that are trying to eat it, and I feel like I might not starve next month when the moratorium on shop-bought vegetables kicks in.

One thing which hasn't gone to plan is cauliflower. Under the original plan, May's vegetables were supposed to be cauliflower, cabbage and carrots that were planted back in January. This has turned out to be grotesquely over-optimistic and mostly constructed from how long it took to get vegetables last year from pre-bought seedlings, rather than this year's growing completely from seed. I think next year's May will rely a lot more on vegetables frozen over the winter than I expected.

Anyway, the carrots are good, the cabbage has bounced back, but the cauliflower has proven to be both fiddly and utterly delicious to whatever's eating my crops (and exading all slug pellets, cloches, barriers, nets, anything to still eat at its whim. But that's another post for another day). So, I've decided to cheat.

George's Marvellous Medicine in full effect!

Since I do want to actually eat some cauliflower this year, and some of the beds that currently have cauliflowers are due to be replanted in July/August with purple sprouting broccoli and winter and spring cauliflower, I made the decision to ditch some of the less promising home-grown seedlings and replace them with fully grown plantlings from the local garden centre. I can thoroughly recommend this route to anyone else who fancies growing some brassica and is starting late in the year/can't be bothered with seeds - £3 gets you 9 big plantlings which are all likely to turn into real plants.

Everything apart from the cauliflower is going great guns though. Here are the broccoli and a cabbage at the back.

These are all home-grown, which I think demonstrates just how much of a slacker that cauliflower above was being. Rubbish.

And the fruits are looking promising too. There are 9 figs ripening, the pear tree is covered in little pearlets, the strawberries are pocked with little white flowers, the raspberries and loganberries are shooting up and even the grape vine is considering the possibility of grapes. Nothing major from the cherry, plum, blackberry, gooseberry or blueberries yet, but it is the first year for all of them so we make allowances.

Hopefully next month should be all about the harvesting!

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

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.