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

Strawberries and option paralysis

After rebuilding my strawberry patch last year, I was somewhat underwhelmed by the results. It didn't provide a huge number of strawberries and those that were produced weren't great shakes in the taste department. After having gone through the effort and worked hard to keep pests away, this was slightly disappointing.

However, a little bit of research came up with a few reasons why and a lot of them were very easily fixed. I recently acquired the new James Wong book, Grow for Flavour (which I would thoroughly recommend to all and sundry), in which he's done research, experiments and read a lot of scientific papers to find the tricks and techniques to get the most out of growing your own. Like LifeHacking for gardening.

One of the major issues is sunlight. I got unexpectedly excellent results from a pre-made hanging basket of strawberries that I picked up from a garden centre and after a bit of thought, I realised why. The strawberry bed was against the 4ft high garden fence to next door, which is north-facing, whereas the hanging basket was south-facing. Now, I know plants like sunlight (I'm an expert, you know), but I hadn't realised a few extra hours sun could make such a difference to the flavour of a fruit. According to Mr Wong's research, strawberries in full sun are up to 7x sweeter than those in shade and the difference was noticeable in my garden.

In addition, the quality of varieties available to grow differs wildly. I'd kinda assumed garden centres would only sell nice varieties, but the majority of ones available were Elsanta or Sonata, which are the ones that supermarkets use. They're not terrible, but they're cultivars that are optimised for a) durability in transport, b) shelf-life, and c) size, with taste coming a long way down the list of priorities. Apparently they sell from garden centres because people want to buy what they're used to seeing in the supermarkets, which strikes me as a bit weird; I like growing my own cause it gets me something different to what I can get in supermarkets.

The varieties in my bed weren't bad ones, but they weren't the best ones out there either. That, combined with the need to move to sunnier climes has led to me scrapping the whole bed and starting again.

I have two distinct sections of garden around my house - the useful garden, where the vegetables grow, and the pretty garden, which is mostly non-functional except for a couple of fruit trees. The agreement with my wife is that the vegetable beds can expand as I like, as long as they don't broach the border into the pretty garden. The only problem is that the pretty garden gets the most sunlight and there was nowhere really in the useful garden that they could go. So my wife has rather foolishly allowed the strawberries to make their home just on the edge of the pretty garden. I don't think she realises what she's done.

The thin end of the wedge. Soon, it'll be all, "Hey sweetheart, you know how strawberries were allowed as an exception? Well, courgettes are a flowering plant too and they're really very pretty in their own right..."

I'm once again experimenting with vertical gardening, after last year's efforts ended in total failure. The above rather nifty wooden planters came from e-Bay and cost £22 each - they hook over and hang from the top of the fence and are just the right size for a strawberry plant each. The plants for these ones are Snow Whites, which are one of the ones recommended by James Wong. They also have the advantage of being white-coloured, which means birds don't recognise them as food, so no netting required.

One thing to look out for when buying strawberries - there are listings on Amazon and Etsy and e-Bay for strawberry seeds for berries of weird and wonderful colours: blue, black, yellow, etc. Unfortunately, these are all scams. You buy a seed packet for £2 a go and by the time you've grown them and found they're ordinary strawberries (or worse, whatever weed seeds were easily available to the vendor), any refund period has long since expired. Be careful when buying seeds online!

Anyway, going back to more normal coloured strawberries, my other varieties are Buddy, Red Gauntlet, and Honeyoye (latter two available from Homebase, whose website is rubbish). These, unfortunately, are visible to birds and so need to be underneath netting if we want to see any of them.

Thoroughly covered in garden netting and thus entirely secure against any birds or Peters who might want to get at the strawberries.

As I've mentioned before, I hate garden netting. It tangles as soon as you look at it, hooks around everything but the thing you actually want to fix it to and has two possible settings - a) fly off in the wind and trip up Peter when he next goes through the garden or b) so tightly secured that it's impossible for me to actually get in when I need to harvest or tend the plants. I'm hoping this teepee thing will work, although history doesn't lend itself to that hope.

The upshot of all this strawberry manoeuvring is that I now have a 2m x 1m vegetable bed sitting empty in the garden and I've found myself a little bit lost for ideas as to what to put in it.

This is very odd for me, as I'm usually complaining about not having enough space, but the bed's not very deep, so it doesn't lend itself to root vegetables or tomatoes. As for brassica, I already have my plan laid out for the space I have, which will give me 7 broccoli, 2 cauliflowers, 7 swedes 3 cabbages and 5 winter brassica, as well as 2 courgettes, 7 sweetcorns, 16 runner beans and 5 broad beans! So I'm a little unsure of what more I could actually need!

Added to this, the very fact of having space is leaving me with option paralysis - I'm just not used to being able to plant more than I planned for. Actually planting more than I planned for is a regular occurrence, but having the space for it is weird.

I've settled on using the space for three more cauliflowers, an extra broccoli, and some more beans and courgettes (sort of a two sisters approach). The first one is because I live in hope of actually seeing a viable home-grown cauliflower one day and the last three because they are massively productive and easy to freeze, so I'm hoping they'll to fill my freezer and enable me to last slightly longer through winter this year.

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.

Free strawberries

Since I've already had one person respond to my throwaway line that I might donate my omnivorous strawberries to good homes, I thought I'd open it up to people who might not have seen it.

Not pictured - the trail of destruction left behind them

I've got three of these going spare, so if anyone else near Bath wants a boisterous strawberry plant (and is willing to not sue for emotional or physical trauma related to said plant), comment here or on Facebook.

PJW

Strawberry fields forever

When I was writing my last post about the vertical garden, I went to link to the post about my rescuing of the strawberry patch and was kinda disconcerted when I couldn't find it. As it turns out, I didn't get round to writing it, having been distracted by seedlings (which incidentally, are now thriving).

So, here we are - my strawberry patch as it was:

It's... not my finest work.

The problem occurred when I tried to move the strawberries from one end of the garden to another. There was a small strawberry bed in existence when we originally bought the house and, while it was very nice and grew strawberries very well, it had the major disadvantage of being well-known to every ant colony within a mile. As soon as a fruit started ripening, the little buggers were there, lifting it away. A bit of research told me this was a common problem when you had strawberries in the same bed for 4-5 years and that once the ants found where it was, you were better off just killing the bed, and moving your strawberries to a different part of the garden.

Killing the bed proved problematic in itself - I tried every herbicide known to man, dug over the ground dozens of times and still found strawberries trying to grow from everywhere. They grew out of the gravel, they grew across into the next bed, they grew behind the compost heap, they formed an unholy alliance with a raspberry cane and started growing out of that plant - I even found one growing out of a brick. Not growing from dirt that's on a brick mind, literally embedded into the brick itself. I pulled it out and the brick crumbled to dust.

Eventually, after a dosage of herbicide just short of Agent Orange, the damn things died and I left the bed fallow for a year before growing green manure on it and adding a tonne of new compost for it's new incarnation as a brassica bed this year.

Having such a setback made me decide to build a new strawberry bed. Not just a new one, but a better one. A perfect one. I would build a perfect new bed and I would even get some straw to act as mulch and keep the slugs and pests away. So I built the bed, bought the strawberries, laid the straw that I got from a local pet shop...

Yep, that's exactly what it looks like.

Fun fact - pet shop straw is cheaper than horticultural grade straw, but that's because it's only short-term stuff. It's either bedding which'll be changed or food which'll be eaten, so there's no need to worry about what'll happen if you leave it for a while, cause no-one does. Certainly, they don't worry about making sure it's seedless, cause what kind of idiot would use it in a situation where it would sprout and create new straw?

 Who's got two thumbs and just learned a valuable life lesson about false economy? This guy!

So yes, I started growing straw in my strawberry patch and it grew as fast as I could remove it. Unfortunately for the strawberries, towards the end of the season I became a father and rescuing them from the straw invasion became less of a priority. The bed went to rack and ruin and the strawberries, remembering that they once used to be wild creatures that roamed free, decided to strike out for new homes.

The bed was surrounded by concrete, but that didn't stop them. Strawberry runners tried growing into of the fence, in a water trough, in the netting, in a pile of fallen leaves. They tried forming an alliance with next door's blackberry bramble, but were betrayed when that started growing down into their bed and actually succeded in kicking out some of the straw. They tried growing down into the outside drain, which could've ended very badly for all concerned, and I suspect that some of them made it through into my horticulturally-challenged next door neighbour's garden. When they eat through the foundations of his house and declare the independent state of Strawbtopia, I plan on denying all and moving house.

The morass of desperate runners surrounding a bed of sickly looking straw and a rather smug blackberry bramble sat in the corner of my garden for a good few months, always just at the bottom of my to-do list. Every weekend I would announce that I was going to clear out the strawberry bed and every weekend evening I'd come in having found a dozen other chores that needed doing first.

Finally, I knuckled down and spent half a day weeding and clearing out everything that wasn't a strawberry and quite a lot that was. I ended up rescuing about ten small strawberry plants from various places where they'd found a foothold and repotting them for later. Some have made it into the vertical garden as mention and I'll find a use for the others somewhere. Maybe I'll give them away on the blog - virulent strawberry plants, free to a home that doesn't mind accepting them as their unquestioned overlords. No responsibility accepted for any destruction of property and children devoured by our strawberry masters.

PJW

Growing up

Working in a relatively limited growing area, I've been interested in the idea of vertical gardening for a while. The idea is to have plants that grow up, rather than along, and use walls and shelving to create several tiers. Most of the really interesting ideas have been either out of my budget or impractical for my garden due to limited angles of sunlight, however a friend linked me to one that I thought was worth a try, mostly because I had all the raw materials to hand.

So far, I can thoroughly recommend it for people who want to play along at home. All you need is a drainpipe on a wall that doesn't point north, some compost and a lot of plastic bottles.

Did I mention my Diet Coke addiction? Plastic bottles were never going to be the limiting factor.

What you need to do:

• Cut the base off all but two of the bottles and wash them out thoroughly. Remove the labels and throw away all but two of the caps.
• Select one bottle to be the bottom of the tower and screw one of the caps on tightly. Take a small, sharp knife and stab two holes on opposite sides, just above where the bottle curves into the neck. These are drainage holes to make sure it doesn't get water-logged.
• Fill your newly created bottom bottle with compost. Make sure to pack it tightly or the whole thing will go slightly wobbly later. Place it at the bottom of your drainpipe, facing as close to south as you can get it. I put mine in a pot full of compost for extra stability.
• Take a second bottle and wedge it, neck first, into the bottom one. Fill with compost. Repeat until you have only the two uncut bottles left.








• Once you've reached your last two bottles, cut them both in half. Drill/bore with a knife a very small hole in the top of the last remaining cap and screw it to one of the bottles. Put the capped bottle inside the other and wedge it in as hard as it can go. You should have something which looks like this:
  
  


• This is the reservoir. Shove it into the top bottle of compost and then fill it with water. The water should drain through the little hole in the cap, dripping through the clear air created by jamming the two bottle halves together and feed into the compost.
  
  
  
• Strap this tower of bottles to the drainpipe to prevent it from falling over and then start making planting holes.






• The original guide recommends herbs and lettuce, but that's boring. So while I am doing some lettuce and some mint and oregano (thyme and rosemary have their own pots, while parsley is in the spinach patch, keeping the slugs away (in theory)), the top half is now filled with strawberry plants rescued from the runners that tried to escape my straw and weed-ridden bed last year.
  
  

Overall, I'm very pleased with the results. There are several major advantages to growing lettuces and strawberries like this, not least of which is that a lateral bed containing this many plants would be at least 1m² of garden space instead of 1 coke-bottle's-width in a space that wouldn't've been used anyway.

It'll also lift the fruit and leaves away from marauding slugs and woodlice and the top-down watering makes it phenomenally easy to keep the soil moist and add liquid fertiliser when needed. Granted, the plants at the top will get first dibs on the nutrients, but that's why the strawberries are at the top and the less hungry lettuces and indestructible mint are at the bottom. My only concern is that I may have tried to squeeze in too many strawberry plants and they may be too squashed up to produce much. I guess time will tell.

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