Insecure plants

This weekend is the first time in over month that I've been able to get into the garden. September was a month where three weddings and an overseas trip meant that we were not physically in the city for a single weekend and my few weekday evenings were spent recuperating and coping with a fractious and unsettled baby.

Coupled to this was an Indian summer which made the weather unseasonably hot and dry. I came back to pretty much what you'd expect.

Basically, my garden now has abandonment issues. After a long summer of watering, fertilising and regular harvesting, it's panicked at being left alone and different plants have reacted different ways,

- The green beans and courgettes have attempted to buy my love back by putting out as much food as they possibly can, only to realise far too late that I really have gone and the watering is not coming back, resulting in dozens of immature and withered courgettettes and beanlings hanging off desiccated plants.
 - The winter cauliflower seedlings on the other hand just gave up without a fight - they've been dead for weeks, having apparently abandoned all hope the minute I left the house.
 - The fig tree and raspberry plants have demonstrated their pre-existing hatred for me by ripening as much fruit as they possibly could in the first week and then letting it rot while laughing behind my back.
 - Two of the leeks have decided that they don't want to be vegetables anymore, they want to be pretty princesses flowers instead. I have taken measured and fair action, listened to their feelings, tried to understand where they were coming from... and then decapitated them to put an end to that deviant behaviour.
 - The broccoli and brussels sprouts don't appear to have noticed I was gone at all.
 - Two of the cauliflowers saw what the raspberries and fig were doing and decided to try their hand at it because they wanted to be cool. Unfortunately, they must've failed to take into account how incredibly slow they were, as they've managed to produce some perfect cauliflower heads just in time for me to harvest them. Thanks guys!
 - The pumpkins are the clear winner in terms of outward expressions of disapproval at my absence. They have decided that, since there was no more food and water coming at the base, the only solution is outward expansion to go find more supplies. While the base of the plant has withered and died, the vines have kept pressing further outward, forming little pumpkinettes along the way before abandoning them and moving onto fresher ground. In the process, they've been clinging onto any plant foolish enough to be in their way, like a drowning man after a lifeband. In the course of their ramblings they have ensnared a tomato, potatoes, sweetcorn, blueberries, gooseberries, a grape vine, several random pots and a shed.

See that plant pot in the background, nearly 3m away, with the withered plant sticking out of it? Yep, that's where the base of the plant is.

This has basically meant that I've spent the day closing down a lot of the summer cropping section of the garden, which basically means digging up and composting. The courgettes, green beans, cabbage, sweetcorn and most of the cauliflowers are now done for the year, although I have got some frozen and stored for winter. The broccoli is mostly done for as well, although I have a late summer planting which I'm hoping will come to something before the frosts come.

I have also finally taken Bexx's advice and sacrificed one of the crap cauliflowers (actually the one in the picture on that link!) in despair that it would ever produce anything more than leaves.

All mouth...

Although on breaking it down for composting, I did discover the fruits of its 6 months worth of squatting in my brassica cage...

...miniscule trousers. 

PJW

And the results are...

No, not really.

I should point out for the sake of perspective that that's my tiny wife's tiny hand. So they're even smaller and weedier than they appear.

To say this is disheartening is something of an understatement. I was hoping to get two, maybe even three meals worth out of those carrots, instead of a bunch of spindly little things which I'm scared to peel lest they disappear.

Nevermind. They shall be eaten in one glorious swoop this week and we shall go back to the drawing board a touch.

The problem with these carrots, I believe, is that they weren't fertilised enough. By which, of course, I hadn't got round to fertilise them at all. I thought they'd do all right; they were in pots of pure compost so there must have been enough nutrients for them to grow big and strong, right? Wrong. Well, sort of wrong.

Vegetables need three things to grow big: nitrogen, phosporus and potash (potassium). Nitrogen does the up - the leafy bits, phosporus does the down - the roots and stuff below ground, and potash does the all around - the general health of the plant. The compost which I planted the carrots in had a roughly even mix of NPK, which is great if you're growing a lettuce and find the green leafy bits just as important as everything else. Slightly less good if you're planning on throwing away the green leafy bits and just eating the roots.

I have since applied a good dosing of phosporus-and-potash-heavy fertiliser to the next batch of carrots to be pulled and will try and leave them a fortnight to put some bulk on. Here's hoping that the next lot are more like the first picture than the second.

On the bright side, I have rhubarb and therefore rhubarb crumble.

Tiny hands not shown for perspective in this picture, but they're a lot bigger than the carrots!

And rhubarb is technically a vegetable, so therefore I claim success.

I define my own victories.

PJW

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

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