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

The Three (English) Sisters

While my garden is neither self-sufficient nor organic (and I hate the automatic assumption that organic is best and anything carrying that label is naturally healthier), I am very interested in the natural ways of getting the most out of the land and the space that you have. I've already experimented with companion plants to ward off pests, with using green manure to prepare beds and will be paying a lot more attention to crop rotation this year.

One interesting idea which I came across was that of The Three Sisters growing system, which is an Iroquois tradition of growing beans, maize and squash together. Most companion planting involves a main crop and a secondary crop in the same bed, with the idea that the secondary crop does something beneficial for the main crop without getting anything back (or in some cases, with the secondary crop being completely ruined). The Three Sisters is novel in that all three of the crops are the main crop and each of them benefit the others. The maize provides a support for the green beans to grow up, the green beans put nitrogen into the soil and the squash has large leaves that shade the ground, keeping the roots cool and blotting out weeds. None of the plants compete with each other as they require different minerals from the soil and the result is a better crop for all three.

I wanted to try this myself, but there were a few factors that were holding me back.
  1) South-west England is not north-eastern America. Maize doesn't particularly like south-west England and, if I was to plant all three plants together, the greater rainfall and lesser sunshine would result in the beans growing far faster than the maize, meaning they had nothing to grow up. Even if the maize did grow quickly enough, our climate makes for very leafy beans which would blot out the sunlight from anything they climbed up.
  2) It requires a lot of space to do properly. Every guide I've seen suggests a minimum of a 3m² space minimum - I had 1m² maximum.
  3) I don't like squash.

Minor details aside, I decided to try this out for myself. The plan was to grow green beans (up bamboo canes) in an arc at the back corner of the bed so they wouldn't shade out the other crops. The sides of the bed would be lined with blocks of pre-grown sweetcorn seedlings, while at the front corner, I would grow a pumpkin on a mound of compost. Granted, this loses a lot of the effect of the Three Sisters - the seeds won't all be sown in the same mound and the beans won't be growing up the corn, but it's still three disparate crops growing in the same bed and improving each other.

Things got off to a rocky start - I bought a set of twelve sweetcorn seedlings from the garden centre and planted eight of them in the bed. All eight I planted died within a fortnight, eaten by slugs and other predators. Thankfully, I'd kept the last four from the set and potted them up, just in case, so I was able to plant those and watch them die within a couple of days. Cursing, I bought another set of twelve... only for those to suffer exactly the same fate. At the same time, the green beans that I'd planted had sprouted, grown big and strong and put out thick leaves in order to be stripped back to the stalk by whatever was eating the rest of my garden.

Thankfully the third set of sweetcorn and the second planting of beans survived long enough for the copious amounts of slug pellets that I'd been carpeting the garden with to put a big enough dent in the local parasite population. Which led to this situation at the start of this month:

Which has now developed into this:

I am actually in danger of getting corn out of this, which is very cool. Partly because it's a new and exciting first foray into grains, which is cool, but also because I'm not the biggest fan of sweetcorn and I'm reliably informed that it tastes worse the longer its been picked. So corn that's in the supermarket tastes very different to corn that's just been from its soil untimely ripped, which vindicates my decision to grow my own rather than buy it.

Hopefully I'll like fresh corn, else this will be a bit of a failed experiment regardless of the yield. I'm already putting effort into growing pumpkins that I already know I don't like the taste of. My wife wishes to have one to carve for Hallowe'en and I'm helpless before a mild whim of the lady. Plus I didn't realise until it was far too late that courgettes would've filled exactly the same companion niche and so I could've grown something I actually liked instead. Oh well.

PJW

Glory or scurvy awaits!

Last day where I can buy vegetables and I'm cooking a roast tonight to use up the last of everything in the house. It's a little bit worrying, as the garden is yet to conclusively be providing. I see salads in my future, as the lettuces are the only things producing reliably.

Windowsill lettuce! You are my only friend.

There is the promise of carrots, but I've had the promise of carrots before, only to discover that the massive great green heads are there because no energy has gone into growing the tasty orange bit. I'll be pulling them up tomorrow to either be elated at the bounties of the eart or distraught at the prospect of a month of pasta bakes and rice-based meals served with needle-thin carrottettes.

Schrodinger's Carrots - the cat is both alive and dead at the same time until it is pulled from the earth by its green leafy tops

Aside from that*, I'm vegetableless. The cauliflowers and cabbages haven't grown as quickly as expected and the mangetout that should be producing now is instead recovering from being mostly eaten by slugs. This month, I are to be mostly eating carrots.

I did have a few tempting thoughts of delaying the challenge for another month, or even calling the whole thing off with some comments about how silly I was being. However, I've put quite a bit of work and planning into this and I refuse to be thwarted in the first month. Needle-thin carrots for dinner it is, every night!

On the bright side, the new daylight bulb and reflector is working great. Due to the dim weather of late, the latest set of seedlings has been pretty much solely under artificial light and they're doing great. Much better than under the old system.

This is especially important as these are swedes for Oct/Nov, purple sprouting broccoli for Feb/Apr, chard for Nov-Jan, and kale and spinach for Jan-May. And pumpkins, just cause I can. Basically, this is the seed tray to make sure I'm not suffering from deficiency diseases** at the start of next year, even if I will be a bit tired of leafy green winter vegetables.

I'm off to go cook my last broccoli for 2 months and my last parsnips for 4 months and I guess we'll see the state of the carrots tomorrow. Wish me luck.

PJW

*Well, there's some new potatoes that won't get used tonight, which is kinda cheating, but I'm not going to throw them away on an arbitrary rule!
** On a side note, my daughter's food will be separate from this challenge if I do run short of vegetables!