Success!

What I harvested from my garden this evening:

It's not perfect, but there's enough for a portion of potatoes, a portion of carrots and mange tout, and rhubarb crumble for me and my wife tomorrow night (plus some strawberries). And it all came from the magic seeds* I planted in my garden. Hurray!

PJW

*Technically speaking, the mangetout comes from magic seedlings bought from the garden centre as the slugs ate the ones I grew from seed. Still totally counts though.

More promise, fewer results

Long pause between updates, as the play I've been in came to conclusion. Great fun to do, but massively tiring and hasn't left me much time for anything that's not play or daughter. On the bright side, I've been surviving mostly on junk food, so the continued lack of vegetables hasn't proved too much of a problem.

Actual size

The carrots have continued to be pitiful, despite my attempts at appropriate fertiliser. I have some theories as to why that is - I think I've spaced them too closely together and have possibly pulled them up a little too early - but any suggestions from the audience would be appreciated.

On the bright side, the garden has flourished in the face of being neglected for a week or so.

From the humble original seedling of a few months back...

To the "Holy crap, broccoli!" of today

There's promise of broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower and also imminent courgettes and beans.

It still seems like magic to me that all of these came from tiny little seeds. Doesn't seem possible. Of course, the promise of  vegetables isn't quite the same as actually getting some. We'll see next month, I guess

The major change to the garden this month is that I've got rid of one of my many sheds. It was falling apart and a fortuitous turn of events allowed me to get it taken away for free by someone who thought they could rebuild it on their allotment, but it has given me the nice side-effect of giving me more room for another vegetable bed.

Spot the difference.

I'm resolutely not building anything there yet, as I want to see how this year's harvest goes before deciding what I want to put there. I'm currently struggling to fit everything in that I wanted to grow this year, especially the winter vegetables. The purple sprouting broccoli is going great guns and I've got nowhere to put it until I've harvested a few cauliflowers. At the moment, pots are my friend, but it's not a permanent solution. Hopefully, it won't stunt the winter vegetables; despite my appalling start, I really would like to have year-round vegetables.

Next challenge is going to be sowing seeds for the overwintering spring vegetables and then attempting to grow carrots that you can't pick your teeth with.

PJW

And the results are...

No, not really.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I define my own victories.

PJW

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!

Mid-May update

I love this bit of the year. I think the best way to demonstrate that is with three photos:

January

Start of May

Today and the great wall of potatoes

Everything is growing, some of it is even outgrowing the things that are trying to eat it, and I feel like I might not starve next month when the moratorium on shop-bought vegetables kicks in.

One thing which hasn't gone to plan is cauliflower. Under the original plan, May's vegetables were supposed to be cauliflower, cabbage and carrots that were planted back in January. This has turned out to be grotesquely over-optimistic and mostly constructed from how long it took to get vegetables last year from pre-bought seedlings, rather than this year's growing completely from seed. I think next year's May will rely a lot more on vegetables frozen over the winter than I expected.

Anyway, the carrots are good, the cabbage has bounced back, but the cauliflower has proven to be both fiddly and utterly delicious to whatever's eating my crops (and exading all slug pellets, cloches, barriers, nets, anything to still eat at its whim. But that's another post for another day). So, I've decided to cheat.

George's Marvellous Medicine in full effect!

Since I do want to actually eat some cauliflower this year, and some of the beds that currently have cauliflowers are due to be replanted in July/August with purple sprouting broccoli and winter and spring cauliflower, I made the decision to ditch some of the less promising home-grown seedlings and replace them with fully grown plantlings from the local garden centre. I can thoroughly recommend this route to anyone else who fancies growing some brassica and is starting late in the year/can't be bothered with seeds - £3 gets you 9 big plantlings which are all likely to turn into real plants.

Everything apart from the cauliflower is going great guns though. Here are the broccoli and a cabbage at the back.

These are all home-grown, which I think demonstrates just how much of a slacker that cauliflower above was being. Rubbish.

And the fruits are looking promising too. There are 9 figs ripening, the pear tree is covered in little pearlets, the strawberries are pocked with little white flowers, the raspberries and loganberries are shooting up and even the grape vine is considering the possibility of grapes. Nothing major from the cherry, plum, blackberry, gooseberry or blueberries yet, but it is the first year for all of them so we make allowances.

Hopefully next month should be all about the harvesting!

PJW

Artificial sun, mk 2

About a month ago, I decided to adjust the reflector on my seedling sunlamp just a tiny little bit. Unfortunately, as you may recall, the reflector's build quality was typical of my construction work and was held together by sellotape, blu-tac, inertia and prayer.

The inevitable happened and I just managed to catch all the pieces before they destroyed my latest set of seedlings. Thankfully, my baby daughter was in bed at the time or she would've learned several new and interesting words.

It was at this point that my wife decided it was cruel to let me struggle on alone and offered her expertise. She designed and built for me this magnificient creation:

I don't think it looks that much sturdier than mine, do you?

Instead of being built from cardboard, wire and sellotape, this setup is built from hardboard, square dowel and metal fixings to hold it all together. More importantly, the reflector itself is supported from a base on the floor, rather than the previous method of having everything attached to the light fixture and creating a single point of failure.

So, this brand new and improved reflector was created, and that was of course the signal for the bulb to break. Massively annoying; it didn't even have the decency to break in some devastating fashion - the pin broke on the bayonet fitting. It still works, but it won't stay in the socket anymore.

However, that was the excuse I needed to buy another and buy bigger. The new bulb is 105W and kicks out 6800 lumen rather than the paltry 4300 lumen of the old one.

In laymans terms, it's gone from "Ow that hurts," to "AGGGHHH!" if you look directly into it.

Unfortunately, the month-long gap has not been kind to my seedlings. The best windowsill I have is still not particularly bright, as we're semi-detached and the south side of our house is the adjoining wall to the next one.

Up == Light, right? The carrots told us that was right.

The current seed tray is replacement cauliflowers for those lost, chard, tomatoes, peppers and a rather optimistic attempt at growing a globe artichoke plant from seed. None of them are particularly irreplaceable, but I'm really hoping that I don't have to start again.

With any luck, the extra power will be enough to rescue these ones and I can look at moving them outside next weekend.

PJW

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