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

And so, it ends

Not with a bang, but with an "Oh, for fuck's sake." This was what I harvested today:

In my garden at present, ready to eat, there is one potential swede, the bags of potential Christmas potatoes and the jerusalem artichokes. That's it. And the freezer drawer from the autumn is looking empty already. I think we can officially say that I would not survive winter on my own and while it would theoretically be possible to go the year round without buying any vegetables, that would mostly be through takeaways and pizza.

Today, I go to the grocer's. Sad times.

Still, while the challenge is ended (and I don't think I'll ever try it again in quite so stern a format as I did this year), it has been fun and a hell of a learning experience. It's a long way from over yet - there's still brussel sprouts (hopefully) and purple broccoli, with cauliflower, broad beans, carrots and sea kale overwintering to hopefully come up in the spring. However, I thought that here (at the end of all things), might be a good time to reflect on things that I've learned:

1) Brassica cages and other forms of netting are brilliant. Everything wants to eat your edible garden if it can and even lethal amounts of pesticides don't really do the job. It's a hell of a lot easier to just seal off anything leafy from the evil things that want to destroy it.

As a corollary to this, I think that kale, spinach and chard may become indoor plants next year. I had great success with bringing lettuce inside and keeping it on a windowsill last year, with the only problem being that I don't actually like lettuce that much. I like kale, spinach and chard, but unfortunately so does the local wildlife, so I don't see much of it.

2) Some things aren't worth the bother. The white cauliflowers that I grew squatted in my garden, taking up masses of space and produced the square root of fuck all. The carrots also achieved little to nothing for lots of effort. Don't get me wrong - I like eating both cauliflowers and carrots, but I can go to the grocers with a fiver and come out with three large cauliflowers, a massive bag of carrots and change.

Next year, I'm cutting back on growing things that I can easily get the same quality easier and cheaper from the grocers. Purple carrots and orange cauliflowers are going to be the order of the day, along with asparagus peas, kokihi, purslane, sea kale, day lilies, dahlia yams, chinese artichokes and oca.

3) Other things are definitely worth the bother. Fresh potatoes, while still being a pain in the arse, do taste better. Sweetcorn, courgettes and mange tout as well. Broccoli and green beans aren't massively different in taste to those from the shops, but they produce masses of edible goodness in a relatively small space and the cut-and-come-again means that you get loads of meals out of them. Parsnips will also get a pass for being awesome.

4) Sometimes it's worthwhile buying seedlings rather than growing from seed. This entry shows the difference between a commercially-grown cauliflower seedling and my windowsill effort. It's very satisfying to grow something just from seed (the fact that I not have a fully-fledged globe artichoke plant speaks to that), but on other occasions it's not worth grinding your own flour.

Secondary to that is making use of grafted plants. My aubergines that I grew from seed achieved sod all, while the grafted one kept going way into winter and had to be actively put down to save the soil for next year. Little bit more expensive than growing your own, but a heck of a lot less frustrating.

5) Raspberries kick the shit out of strawberries. They've not come up on the blog much, but I bought 12 raspberry canes earlier this year and they've been producing solidly from August right the way through to December. Meanwhile, my strawberry bed emitted a brief flurry of strawberries in May and June and then settled down to producing leaves and nothing else (despite the bed allegedly containing several different varieties that should've done the whole season). Plus, there's very few pests willing to climb to get a raspberry off a cane. I think the strawberry bed might have one more year to try and redeem itself and then it might get repurposed the year after that.

What I did have success with was strawberry hanging baskets by the door. They also only produced a brief flurry, but they had the advantage of being a) away from pests and b) right there when I walked out the door. An experiment to be repeated.

I also managed to get at least 4 edible pears and 5 figs off my trees, although I expect more next year as they mature and come into their own. The dessert grapes were a massive, massive disappointment - lots of production, but what we ate made us horribly ill. There's several theories for this: I possibly accidentally picked from the wrong vine and picked unripe red grapes instead of green ones, the grapes themselves were small so perhaps not ready, we maybe didn't wash them as well as we could, the grape vines may possibly just be evil and looking to destroy us - there's lots of possibilities.

Unsurprisingly, we waited until the grapes were 100% definitely ripe, possibly even overripe, before picking the next set. Then we let them rot in the fruit bowl as my wife and I engaged in a grape-based Cold War of seeing who'd break first and eat the grapes "that were probably totally fine, really!"

Next year, there may be some kind of grape jam or amateur wine so that the evil can be processed out before we consume them.

5) Fuck carrots. Also leeks grow underground, courgettes grow huge when not in pots, pumpkins are a danger to everything while producing nothing, and parnsips can (and should) be grown in whatever leftover pot and space is available. Also, I should not be allowed to build things.

6) Winter vegetables need their own, dedicated bed with a brassica cage. Having watched my winter kale and spinach die horribly out in the open (partly through pests, partly through next door's cats pooping on them), I've decided that they need to be undercover. Also, everything needs to start earlier if I'm expecting to get crops through the year, which rules out any more misguided sharing with other main crops. I may plant quick-growing catch-crops, like mange-tout, rapini, ball carrots and chop-suey greens, for the spring, but nothing which I wouldn't be happy tearing up if the winter veg needed to go in before they were ready to go out.

Overall, I'm pretty pleased with the growing year so far. I went from June to December without buying any vegetables (a month longer than last year) and I got to eat many more things than I did last year. The count of things which I successfully ate from my garden this year is: broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, courgette, mange tout, broad beans, green beans, french beans, sweetcorn, spinach, kale, nasturtiums, carrots (for certain values), parsnips, leeks, lettuce, aubergines, green peppers, red peppers, potatoes, onions, garlic, tomatoes, rhubarb, blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, figs and pears. Plus there is still rapini, brussel sprouts, swede and jerusalem artichoke to go.

The most important this was that I learned a lot and, as we all know, knowledge is half the battle. The other half is brutally murdering slugs.

PJW

PS. Fuck carrots.

Finally, cauliflower!

Only two and a half months late cauliflowers, but never mind.

I finally got head! Wait, let me rephrase. My cauliflowers have finally produced something edible and I have eaten it!

This is a major first for me - I did plant some cauliflowers last year and did technically get something onto my plate, but it could by no stretch of the imagination be called edible. It was yellow, riddled with holes, infused with a dozen horribly invasive pest-killer sprays, covered in the mucus of a thousand pests that apparently didn't care and it looked like it had partially rotted. It tasted like despair. I tried eating it anyway - it was my garden dammit and I was at least going to eat as much of it as the pests did - and I only stopped trying to choke it down when I realised I was physically retching after every mouthful.

Have I mentioned how much I love my brassica cages? There's no way I would've got a successful cauliflower this year without them. Life becomes a heck of a lot easier when all you have to defend against is ground-based pests and even they have trouble getting in.

As if this two-portion head of cauliflower wasn't enough reward for my work, a couple more have decided to get in on the act and start creating heads. I don't think I'll have enough to freeze some for the winter, and sadly none of the interesting coloured ones seem to be producing, but it's a hell of a lot more success than I had a few weeks back!*

A lot of my gardening thoughts are going towards the plan for next year already, as harvesting creates spaces that will either need to be filled or protected from weeds. While I can't purchase vegetables until next June in order to complete the challenge, I don't think I'll be keeping up such stringent rules after the challenge is over, so I'm looking at my plans for next year with an eye to whether it's better to grow something or buy it.

I like cauliflower as a vegetable, but it's taken up a phenomenal amount of space in my garden for an awfully long time and so far has produced two portions of vegetables. The stuff that I ate was nice, but I couldn't really say it was a significant amount nicer than one from the grocers or farmer's market. And while it's relatively expensive to buy in the shops, one can't say that my garden produce is in any way designed to be thrifty, especially with the amount of dirt I have to buy each year.

The major merit of growing cauliflower at home is the chance to get interesting colours and types that are rare and/or expensive in shops, but so far this year those varieties have produced sod all. So, right now, cauliflower is sitting right on the line of "Can I be bothered" for next year, especially since crop rotation and better planning for winter veg means I'll likely have less space for summer brassicae next year. Maybe I'll just try the interesting colours and not bother with any white ones.

This eventual cauliflower harvesting has allowed another sprouting broccoli to finally take its place in the ground, probably just in time. The orphanage for displaced brassicae was an utter failure and I eventually gave in, dismantled it and attempted to squeeze the potted denizens into spaces inside the brassica cages (after, of course, having made sure that they'd been thoroughly deloused. Didn't want to go to all of the trouble of protecting my brassicae all year only to introduce a Typhoid Mary at the last minute).

It provided as much protection as an out of date condom that's been attacked by a porcupine. This is what happens when you don't have a brassica cage!

I harvested the last of the onions that had been in a bed next to the orphanage, topped up the bed with spare compost from the harvested potatoes and then inverted the orphanage netting to create a new covered bed.

It's covering a smaller, squarer and shallower shape than the orphanage was and is naturally given shape by the trellis that lines the bed. All things told, I'm hopeful that this will actually be fit for purpose this time.

I give it a week.

Although there is one definite winner in this debacle. When I inverted the orphanage netting, I discovered that, not only were there two butterflies under it (whom I swear mocked me as they flew away, but they didn't come back when I challenged them. Yeah, you'd better flutter, you loud-mouthed punks!) and a veritable colony of snails, but there was also tangible results from my devoured sprouting broccoli.

I was going to kill it out of revenge, but realised how churlish that was. Far better to take it like a man -  well played caterpillar, good game, I was well beaten, I'll get you next time (Gadget).

At least someone's going home happy because of my poor construction skills.

PJW

*And to think you wanted me to sacrifice them Bexx! For shame! Actually, you were probably right, but hey - edible cauliflower!

Murdering pests

I've come to the conclusion that it's been slugs and ground-based creatures eating away at my crops - while I haven't caught any at it, some of my crops inside the vegetable cages and under cloches have been eaten, which rules out cats, birds and anything else that wouldn't already be present in the soil. Current best theory is slug eggs and overwintering caterpillars in the compost, which enables them to pop up under cloches.

I'm adopting several plans of attack. The first is to cover the area with non-toxic slug pellets, which double as poison and an alternative food source. The second is to go with preventative measures on really vulnerable plants; I've replanted the mange tout with woollen pellets covering the soil which apparently slugs don't like going over and I've attached copper tape around the side of the pot, which reacts with the slime on their foot to produce electricity.

Burn, you insufferably terse dullards!

One of my esteemed commenters and good friends suggested crushed egg shells on the soil and even kindly offered me a jar that she'd prepared earlier. I turned her down in favour of the wool pellets - while I plan on eggshelling around my spinach, I don't think there are enough eggs in the whole city to evenly cover my expanding vegetable beds and a jar's worth wouldn't even get me a sixth of the way round the garden.

The first two methods of pellets and protection are good, but they lack something. You can tell they've worked because your plants are still alive, but they don't have that special sense of vengeance that I'm looking for. I want corpses that can be used to warn others of the perils of raiding my vegetable garden.

I want to see their heads mounted on a spike outside the house, so I can wave at them, like this. Can you arrange that for me?

Beer in a pot is a time-honoured way of murdering slugs and it's given a little high level of professionalism by a Christmas gift from my brother-in-law-in-law-in-waiting.

 The fiance of my wife's sister, in case you were wondering.

I don't know how much they cost, but I may need to get some more - the lid give protection from the elements and it's designed just right to give the little gits the feeling that they're coming in for a shady snack before finding out that it's actually their doom. Only problem I can foresee with them is the cost of changing the beer - does anyone know how often it needs to be done? Those two traps used up one can of Sainsburys basics lager and while the stuff is only £1 a go, if it needs to be changed every week, it'll add up.

PJW

Nasty little biting things

Everything was going so well...

Before

After. Oh, the huge manatee.

I was completely unprepared for this. Those poor little ravaged plants are/were mangetout, which are pretty hardy and not usually the first choice of pests. I've also had a few runner beans utterly stripped of all greenery and they normally grow faster than they can be eaten.

No, that's not a twig in front of the bamboo cane, it's a corpse

Last year, nothing touched my beans, probably because of the abundance of easy targets elsewhere in the garden. This year the big beds where brassica grow are protected with semi-permanent vegetable net cages and I think it's just deflected the attention onto my other plants.

Annoyingly enough, the nasturtium that I'm deliberately growing as sacrificial plants? Completely untouched. Choosy little bastards.

The annoying thing is that I have no idea what's doing it. It's too cold for butterflies and the very hungry thieving fucktards caterpillars that come with them, none of my slug pellets have been touched so I don't think it's slugs (and they'd've eaten the stalk and all, rather than just stripping the leaves) and while I hate the cats, it doesn't seem like their style. Birds, maybe? Any ideas from the audience?

Because of this, I'm not sure of my options. Without knowing what's eating them, I can't plant companion plants to drive them away/provide an alternative food source that I don't care about. I don't have the patience to deal with netting across the whole garden and if it's small bugs, that won't do any good. The other alternative is to just keep planting in bulk, accept some wastage and try and get enough seedlings to adult plants to fill all the holes in the garden.

Plan C would be pesticides and I really don't want to resort to that again. I did last year, as I was furious with losing all of my cauliflower and cabbage to the depredations of the world's worst children's storybook character, but it accomplished nothing in terms of saving my plants and almost certainly did horrible things to the local bee and pollinator population.

After he'd finished eating 1 apple, 2 pears, 3 plums, 4 strawberries, 5 oranges and 1 green leaf, the Very Hungry Caterpillar felt quite ill. Do you know why that is darling? Because Daddy sprayed him thoroughly with Thiacloprid! It was too late to save Daddy's vegetables, of course, they were quite dead; but Daddy was buggered if he was going to let the little fucker live to enjoy his spoils. And that's why we have no more butterflies, no more bees and no more food in the world. Now, off to bed with you. Night night!

I value my morals and my views on sustainability, but it's really hard not to say, "Fuck it, it's only one garden; how much difference will it make?" when you keep coming outside to see your hard work has been utterly killed to feed something else.

Anyone got any bright ideas?

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