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

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

Winter is coming

I'm always a bit ambivalent about this time of year - it's sad to be throwing away hard-grown plants and acknowledge that there will be no more courgettes this year, but it's also the time of planning for next year and clearing out soil for potential new crops.

Most of the beds have gone from this:

to this:

There are a few vegetables left from this year's planting, mostly the long-growing ones that get planted at the start of the year and don't come up until November/December time. The brussels sprouts, leeks, parsnips and Christmas potatoes are looking very promising indeed, whereas I suspect the swedes and jerusalem artichokes have decided against forming any kind of root in protest at being shoved at the back of a bed and ignored. It's the problem with root vegetables - you can't predict whether you've got a bonanza or bugger all until you dig them up, meaning "What's for dinner?" doesn't really have an answer until Schrodinger's vegetable is unearthed.

Still, even without those two, I'm confident of surviving winter. There is a whole freezer drawer packed full of frozen vegetables, even if half of it is my sister's courgette. Plus almost all of the winter vegetables are now properly planted in their rightful positions (finally!), although whether any of those will produce anything is a different matter altogether: I've never tried growing purple sprouting broccoli before, my cauliflower record is shoddy regardless of the season and my previous attempts at kale and spinach have proven delicious to the slugs and snails. Ah well, it's part of the adventure.

Part of putting the winter vegetables in has been drawing up the plans for next year. My gardening schedule is relatively intensive on the soil, but because I use raised beds that are on a concrete base and have year-on-year expanded my operations by handing over my paycheques to the garden centre for more dirt, it's not proven a problem as it's practically new dirt every year. Next year is going to be different, as I'm reaching the practical limits of how many beds can be fit in the garden and so I need to make sure I'm not overtaxing or building up diseases in the soil. A bed which grows broccoli from April to September, purple sprouting broccoli from September to April and then more broccoli the next year is soon going to run out of the minerals that make broccolis and be full of the germs and pests that like to live off them.

The answer is crop rotation where you grow a different thing each year to give the soil time to recover, but unfortunately a lot of my favourite vegetables all belong to the same plant family of brassicae, which makes it hard to move things around. Traditionally, you're supposed to replace brassicae with root vegetables the next year and put the brassicae into the space vacated by legumes (green beans, mange tout, et al), which wouldn't really be plausible in my garden. I'd have 5m² worth of onions and carrots, with 1m² in which to fit all my broccoli, cauliflower, swede, brussels sprouts, cabbage and kale. Not really going to happen.

So I've decided to set to one side the two oldest brassica beds, as they have grown the same crop family two years in a row, and turn them into something else next year. The other two are going to grow brassicae again next year, but they'll get a green manure of field beans (which are a legume) grown on them over the winter to replenish the soil and also have a top-up of new compost to hopefully keep them happy.

As such, the winter veg is being grown solely on the to-be-retired-from-brassicae-beds, as the others need to be left unproductive to replenish them for next year. Which is hard to remember when I'm trying to find a position to home for all of my kale seedlings.

PJW

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