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I must say this is a top thread, and your mistletoe has me going green with envy wish I had somewhere I could get it going
My small patch is my escape (after a week of sorting other peoples computer problems it’s great to have something rewarding to do that doesn’t involve the bloody things) on year 2 of restoring it from total dereliction at the mo
But you can’t beat being sat out in the early morning with a nice joint & a good pot of coffee listening to the sparrows coughing
Keep up the good work

Sunday 17 April 2011

the weather these past two weeks in the garden has ranged from summer-warm to spring-cool and layers are coming off and going on like nobody's business ... but still no substantial rain

one on-going task has been to use a dutch hoe to work into the vegetable beds the organic chicken manure pellets i use as fertilizer ... they are easy to handle, but really give off the full chicken manure smell when watered with the garden hose ... thankfully i am next to a large commercial market garden field and can alway pretend that the smell is coming from those fields

it has been so long since i dug the second half of one of the potato beds that the clumps of soil dried out (because there has been so little rain over the last few weeks) and became rock hard and were impossible to rake level ... so i had to drag the garden hose the length of the back garden to pretend to be the rain and give the bed a good soak ... after leaving it for a couple of days to let the water soak well in, i then was able to rake it level and join it to the first half to make a decent sized potato bed ... it is an area that has just been liberated from deep-rooted nettles and brambles and will benefit from having potatoes being the first crop ... the soil is dug over so many times in the potato growing cycle that it helps clear new ground for other crops the next year

with the completion of the raking i now had three separate beds earmarked for potatoes, so the next step was to mark out the rows so that the trenches can be dug when needed ... the scottish seed potatoes have been chitting somewhere light and cool inside the house these past few weeks and are sprouting nicely ... some are advanced enough that they will need to be planted within the next couple of weeks

for the first time ever before the end of april i have mowed the entire back garden lawn at setting 'D' and raked the clippings ... there has been a lot of growth this year and it was a case of having to get at it or drown in a sea of long unmowable grass ... the growing patterns in the garden seem to have changed over the last few years

in a small vegetable bed where the russian mammoth sunflowers were last year i have planted a small amount of italian salad mix, swiss chard, lettuce and salad onions, so now the bed is the 'salad' bed ... at the end of the bed for the zucchini i planted some gypsophila and in the other free end of the comfrey bed i planted some calendula officinalis, the original 'pot marigold' with single orange flowers which attracts butterflies

i weeded and dug over the flower bed under the dining-room window in the front garden ... this bed is on the east-side of the house behind a tall fence so gets no direct sunlight ... i have been trying to find plants which like shady conditions, but the problem is they all like moist soil conditions and my soil is very fast-draining ... so the task is to build the humus content of the bed to improve its ability to retain the little rainwater that it gets ... fortunately i have a bag of compost that i made in the compost tumbler last year and it needs a home, so the next job is to dig that in and then plant some green manure crop to be dug in later in the year

before the winter i drained the strimmer of its fuel to prevent the mixture turning to sludge and blocking the fuel system ... one of the tasks for the spring was to get a can of new fuel and add the 2-stroke engine oil mixture ... then hope it started ... well i pulled and pulled and set the choke and pulled and pulled and unset the choke and pulled and pulled and then rested and then reset the choke and pulled and pulled and finally wore myself out ... so i gave it a small rest and then unset the choke and pulled and it finally started ... thank heavens

i then set off to strim the entire edge of both the front and back gardens, particularly along the long side with an old neighbour who has lost the battle with her big garden and her nettles and brambles keep invading my side ... well within a few minutes the strimmer line on one side popped out as it had reached the end of its length and now i had to remember how to refill the mower head with new sections of line ... the first job was to find the instruction manual which, fortunately, was where it was supposed to be ... then the next job was to find the reel of new line which, fortunately, was where it was supposed to be ... that doesn't usually happen ... and then it all went together well and i was away and strimming

yesterday was skip day ... i have accumulated over the past couple of years a lot of garden rubbish that i always intended to take bit-by-bit to the trash dump but never did ... to the garden rubbish was added over time a bit of building rubble and the next thing i knew the area between the kitchen and the garage began to look like a builder's yard ... following work on the garage and kitchen roofs this last autumn the area looked so bad that i decided to use the building budget to pay for a skip and take it all away in one go ... i calculated i had about 7 cubic yards of stuff and the 8 cubic yard skip was the biggest one which had a door ... having a door that can be folded down allows easier access to the interior of the skip for dragging large stuff or for a wheelbarrow

well now on sunday morning the 8 cubic yard skip is full apart from a few things my neighbour wants to throw in before it is collected on monday morning

it was delivered at 0945 on saturday morning and i started filling it at 1000 ... a neighbour's young teen-age boy (paid help) and his friend (unpaid volunteer) started at 1045 ... with a 10 minute break every hour and 25 minutes for lunch they both worked hard at what was real physical labour ... their effort on what was a tough and at times simply boring task was impressive ... the friend left at 1430 and the neighbour's boy and i finished an hour later at 1530 ... over that time we moved a large pile of undersoil, 3 old wooden doors and other bits of timber, a small pile of bricks and coke cans left behind by the builders next door (in the bit between my hedge and their new fence), a large pile of wood/metal/glass/old chipboard roofing/bits of the old garage tarred roof/other debris/various bricks, a large pile of brick rubble/stones/gravel and finally a very large pile of an old ivy hedge which had been growing on a trellis fence which became rotten and finally had to be taken down last summer

but now the area around the kitchen and garage is clear of a lot of rubbish and could be made to look good again ... it has inspired me to restore a flower bed which used to be under the kitchen window and gave a nice view when doing the washing-up of the dishes

so much is happening out in the garden at the moment that i couldn't choose just one photograph for this report ... instead there are lots

the hops in their 'veg' stage



an apple blossom



the bees at the moment are the giant bumbling sort ... this one is enjoying some dead nettle



potatoes being chitted - as at 24 march



potatoes being chitted - as at 12 april



where there was only little daisy in the winter now there are many ... and pretty they are too

Saturday 14 May 2011

there have been four gardening weeks since my last report and there are two words which account for the long interval, namely digging and potatoes

at the moment i have five beds for vegetables, one large bed and four smaller beds ... the smaller beds were dug over last year and again this spring, so they are in good condition for growing ... the large bed is an old vegetable bed that was last in good condition about 15 years ago ... over that time some deep-rooted invasive weeds have taken over and last year it was only shaved and not dug properly ... during last summer the pumpkins grew well and covered the ground completely and kept the weeds down ... during the winter, however, the weeds had a chance to grow some proper tops and re-establish themselves ... one of this spring's tasks was to dig over the bed which measures 23 feet by 15 feet, over 300 square feet in area

well i always knew that the digging would also involve weeding and that it would be a slow and hard job, so i kept putting it off and finding other jobs to do which i used as displacement activity ... through february, march and much of april i continued to find other things to do rather than start the hard job ... finally in the last week of april i realised that i was going to need the ground to be ready quite soon in may and no one else was going to do it, so it really was down to me and me alone if i was going to have a bed for some more potatoes, the pumpkins and the french beans

one afternoon i went down to the bed with my gardening fork and started at the north end and tried to get the first row started by turning over the ground in place and taking out by hand carefully all the weeds, both tops and roots ... if you leave a single piece of root of an invasive weed like bindweed or couch grass (aka twitch grass) behind in the turned-over soil, then that single piece will regenerate a new plant and then that plant will spread in succeeding years as far as it can

well the ground was so hard from not having any substantial rain for the last few weeks that i could hardly put the fork into the ground, much less turn over the soil ... the earth was as hard as a rock and was impossible to work, each clump had to be bashed with the fork to get the weeds roots out ... in an hour i managed to do a ten foot row six inches deep and i realised i was going to have to drench an area with the hose the evening before i intended to dig it to loosen the soil and make it easier to dig

the next day i managed to do 20 square feet in two hours of work before my body gave out from the physical load of the job itself, around 10 square feet per hour ... the next day i did another 20 square feet ... and so on

the practice of hosing down in the evening an area to be dug the next day was a useful way of keeping the activity going day after day ... i was getting exhausted by the work each day and it was tempting to give it a miss some days, but i knew that the soil would be too dry the following day so i got myself out there each day to carry on with the digging

what was nice to discover was that the more i dug, the stronger i became and i began to make some progress and finally realised i would actually be able to finish the job, something i had despaired about at the beginning

the back of the job was broken on the day of the wedding when i had a right royal dig of 49 square feet in 3 hours, a best rate of 16 feet per hour ... the last two smaller areas of 20 and 15 sq ft were finished on the next two days and amazingly i had done it ... i couldn't believe it ... then after three days of raking the bed looked better than it had done for the past 15 years

once the digging was done, the planting of potatoes began ... they had been chitting in a cool light environment inside the house and their shoots had reached their upper limit of an inch long and really needed to be put into the ground ... due to a mistake in my calculations of how many potatoes i would need, i had ended up with 130 scottish seed potatoes instead of the 45 that i thought i would be able to find space for

so the job of finding space and planting potatoes began ... this involved marking out the rows and the gaps between the individual potatoes in the row, digging a trench for each row, making a nice nest of fine soil for the potato planted with its chitted end up, then covering completely each potato and its shoot with fine soil ... i found i could do about six an hour so for 130 potatoes that would have been over 20 hours of potato planting

in the end i ran out of room for potatoes at a total of 69 ... i managed to give another nine to spidergawd for him to plant in three tubs that he had spare as an experiment ... the remainder will go into the compost bin

during this time i also managed to plant some marigolds and sunflower seeds ... the flower bed under the kitchen window which was revealed by all the junk disappearing in a skip one saturday has been dug over and planted with two rows of marigolds ... i find the marigold seeds hard to germinate and have had to reseed a lot of places in the rows, but if they do come with their light green foliage and orange flowers, it will be a lovely improvement to the area by the kitchen

first thing each and every morning i now have the job of checking whether any of the potatoes have grown a lot overnight and pushed their green shoots out of top of its heap, if so then i have to add more fine soil to the heap to cover the shoots completely for the day ahead

as an experiment i added chicken manure pellets to the bottom of some of the potato trenches and it seems that the roots of a couple of the plants have found the pellets because they are growing by leaps and bounds every day ... i now have to check these mutant potato plants during the day as well just to keep on top of things, it's crazy

the sun is getting warmer now and the soil is warming up nicely for planting the courgettes, pumpkins and french beans ... after that all the veg, apart from another round of salad, will have been planted and then i have the flower beds near the house and the front garden to tend to

again there is a lot happening in the garden, so there are a number of photos for this report

one of my favourites in the garden - the geranium, with just about all the rain we've had over the last month or so




a mystery wildflower in bud ... this was one of the plants transferred to the wildflower preservation garden bed, i am wondering what it will turn out to be




a white campion flowering in a patch of 'wild' ground ... i am trying to capture the seed from this plant, but didn't time it right last year




i am always amazed by the structure of an iris




when i see this bluebell in the garden, it seems to me to be pink, but in the photo it looks more a shade of blue ... are there such things as pinkbells?




the comfrey is in flower and the bees just love it ... i am supposed to be cutting the comfrey now for the compost bin, but i can't do it if i see so many bees enjoying the flowers so much

StonedSince'67, Do you have any photos that show something like the full extent of your patch? (Pretty please)
As I sort of have a vision of it in my head from your reports, but will be miles off

I agree with you about the chicken manure pellets they are one of the best feeds I have ever used
(if a tad wiffie)
And loved the photo of the comfrey it reminded me of when I was a kid
My mum has had arthritis for years and we always used to have it in the garden to make in to bags to boil up
to put on her joints

Cant wait for the next update

25211 wrote:StonedSince'67, Do you have any photos that show something like the full extent of your patch? (Pretty please)
As I sort of have a vision of it in my head from your reports, but will be miles off

well this is a google earth photo from about 10 years ago when the garden was more neglected and wild than it is today

i have the turned the photo upside down so north is at the bottom ... the property is roughly 10 metres wide by 100 metres long which works out to be about a quarter of an acre ... it really is too big and i have had to make a number of smaller beds to work in so that i don't feel like i am in the midst of a huge wilderness

That is defiantly some plot!
I know what you mean about making smaller beds, even though my patch is tiny by comparison
I split the back bit in to 4 beds last year with the bricks as one of my main objectives was to make it manageable for me
In the hope I don't let it get out of hand again

"Stoney's potato masterclass"

i found i could do about six an hour

Hah! I thought I was slow , you should stick with the sativa in the mornings like me old chop . Now I'm going to bung those tatties in, you did say they are a Scotty variety,

Smashing photo's matey .

I seen on the news the other night alot of people are putting in gardens now because of the economy. IM glad to hear that.

cattales1960 wrote:I seen on the news the other night alot of people are putting in gardens now because of the economy. IM glad to hear that.

And it's so healthy for a person in lots of other ways .

Thursday 2 June 2011

nearly three weeks have elapsed since my last report on saturday 14 may and that time can be broken into four periods

the first period involved a four day trip to amsterdam to attend a gustav mahler concert ... i had bought my ticket back in january with no thought about potatoes then, but the timing of the trip was slightly inconvenient as my potatoes were starting to grow vigorously once the roots had found the chicken manure pellets distributed along the bottom of the trenches ... the heaps needed earthing up just about every day and being away for four days just then wasn't the best thing to do, but there was nothing i could about it ... what i had to do was to earth them up the best i could upon my return

unfortunately i returned from my trip with a recurrence of my usual back problem and during this period of time i was only able to perform the very lightest of gardening duties for about a week

then as i recovered and was ready to get down to the next phase of seed planting it started to rain, finally, and the wind blew up and it was impossible to get out into the garden at all for several days ... of course this was good as the break gave my back a bit more time to settle down

finally the rain and wind stopped and it became sunny again and with a better back i was able to get out and do some overdue gardening chores

the first job was to repair the gaps in the double row of pot marigolds which i had planted in the restored garden by the kitchen window ... the seeds were planted originally at intervals of 30cm and in order to minimise the reseeding task later i planted two seeds for each position in the rows on the basis that at least one seed should probably germinate ... in the end there were four places where neither seed germinated, but there were seven places where both seeds came ... so at the end of the day when it was cooler and the bed was out of direct sunlight, i carefully transplanted four of the duplicate seedlings into the gaps so that both rows should be complete ... it looks as though the seedlings have taken root, so the operation seems to have been a success

the next job was to decide how to lay out the remainder of large vegetable bed and fit in the french beans, pumpkins and maybe a courgette or two ... for the climbing french beans i built two tepees of four garden canes each, the first tepee has been planted with a pair of seeds at each corner of the pyramid-shaped tepee of canes ... where both seeds come up, i shall keep the better of the two plants and take out the other, where neither seeds come up, i shall plant another pair and hope for success ... in another 3 or 4 weeks i shall plant the second tepee in the same way so that i have nice young beans through the summer

the space for the dwarf french beans was marked out with small stakes and the positions of the "stations" for the pumpkins was decided upon ... one quarter of the beans were planted and i shall plant the rest in 10-day intervals until the end of june, that should keep me in fresh beans for the summer ... at each pumpkin station a spade-wide rectangle of soil was dug out and the bottom two-thirds mixed with manure and replaced in the hole followed by the top third just of soil ... the idea is that once the pumpkin seeds germinate and the roots head downwards a few inches, they will hit the manure and, hopefully, become a happy plant ... each station will be planted with a pair of seeds and i will take out any duplicates ... there will be four carving pumpkin plants and two soup pumpkin plants

the constant background task has been to continue earthing up the potatoes ... after spidergawd told me about how his father used to grow his potatoes way back when, i decided to follow that example, so i went out and bought a draw hoe ... i haven't had a draw hoe for many years and basically forgot all about that particular tool as i normally use a dutch hoe to do my weeding ... but the draw hoe works beautifully for earthing up potatoes and is easier than how i was doing it ... i bought the best wooden-handled hoe i could find in town and it wasn't particularly cheap, but i have found that good quality tools last forever and you only to need to buy the tool just the once ... in the end buying good tools makes the per-day cost of use quite low

due to the rain and wind it has been difficult to take the usual photographs, so this report only has one showing how well the michaelmas daisies have taken to being moved into the wildflower preservation garden ... behind the daisies are some nettles and poppies, then the climbing french bean tepees and finally my apple trees at the bottom of the garden

What a lovely photo Stoney .

I fooking love this thread. Its an inspiration to me..

Twichaldinho wrote:I fooking love this thread. Its an inspiration to me..

Seconded

Friday 17 June 2011

for the first time this year i have cut the entire back lawn at setting 'C' ... as some sections were previously done at setting 'D' there was some raking to be done ... if i now can keep cutting it every week or at worst every other week, the cuttings should be very small and i won't need to rake them as they can just work their way down into the grass to rot and become a kind of mulch to help the lawn retain the little moisture that we have been getting lately

i have also finished earthing up the potatoes ... the plants have been growing well and i remembered too late that it is best to finish the earthing-up as soon as you can before the plants grow too tall ... when that happens it is difficult to get the hoe down into the space between the rows without knocking the plant itself, this makes earthing up difficult if not impossible

finally the remaining six courgette stations were dug out and refilled with soil/manure mixture ready for planting

in the large vegetable bed i have been using my new draw hoe to partition the bed with a set of small earth dykes around each pumpkin station, each sowing of beans and the row of pot marigolds ... when i was watering some newly-planted seeds recently, i noticed that a lot of the water was running off the bed into the trough running around the edge ... in the current drought-like conditions in my region it is important not to waste whatever rainwater we manage to get, so i decided to build a small 2-inch high dyke around the complete edge of the bed and then decided to partition each separate planting as well so that everything gets its fair share of what water does fall

for the same reason i repeated the process in the courgette bed, making surrounding earth dykes around each station and the french marigold bed

it was time to make another cut of comfrey to add to the compost tumbler, but it has been difficult to do as the bees just love the comfrey flowers and the plants are always covered with many buzzing nectar seekers ... in order that they always have some comfrey in flower, i am having to stage the cutting process and always leave a couple of plants in flower ... as a side note i have noticed that the bees spend around two seconds in a flower of viper's bugloss, but up to five seconds in a comfrey flower ... that makes it much easier to get a photo of the bee in the comfrey than anything else in the garden

with the planting of french marigolds in the end of the courgette bed to attract beneficial insects the first round of planting in the vegetable beds was finally complete ... at this point each packet of seeds has been opened up and at least two seeds from the packet planted somewhere ... there will be successive plantings of beans, courgettes, lettuce and salad onions over the next few weeks to keep the pickings fresh throughout the season

so at the moment i have the pleasure and excitement of waiting for many newly-planted seeds to germinate and pop above the ground ... it is one of my favourite times in the garden

i also dug and planted the small nasturtium bed by the kitchen door ... a tall variety has been planted at the rear of the bed to grow up and into a bit of conifer hedging which i don't like very much ... and a compact variety has been planted in the front of the bed, this will be allowed to spill over the edge of the bed into the patio just slightly

now that the vegetable beds are planted the focus of the work has moved to the front garden

the front beds have been neglected for some time and as a result i have the loveliest display of poppies running alongside the picket fence which surrounds the garden ... i love it, but i am sure that all my neighbours and every passer-by thinks it is a total mess and horribly neglected

well neglected it may be, but i have come to see the neglected areas of my garden as rich wild areas with many different plants flowering together in a dazzling mix of colours ... in fact i am enjoying these areas so much that i have decided to incorporate two new areas of the rear garden as wildflower preservation beds, making three in all ... this year so far these areas have given the best display of colour ... the veg beds give me food and pleasure, the wildflower beds give me joy

the first job in the front was to attend to the flower bed under the dining room window ... it is a semi-shaded area and i have been trying to find plants which enjoy such conditions, every plant i find seems to need well-mulched soil with a lot of humus in it to retain moisture ... as my soil is free-draining, i have the task of digging in as much rotted vegetable matter as possible in preparation for next spring

fortunately i had one large bag of home-made compost i had worked on over last winter and spring and i hadn't yet found a home for it, so it was perfect for the bed i was digging over ... i also had a spare bag of manure which was dug in as well ... i had bought some manure for the pumpkin and courgette stations and as i had calculated i would probably need just over one bag, i had to buy two bags to be safe, but that particular weekend the garden centre nursery had a 3-for-2 offer on bags of manure, so i ended up with a spare bag, it also was perfect for the bed i was digging over

once the digging was complete, i raked the bed into shape, firmed the soil down by standing gently everywhere and then gave it a good watering ... all i have to do now is decide what kind of soil conditioning plant i should put into it for this growing season, something i could dig in in october to add even more vegetable matter to the bed for rotting over the winter

it has been rainy and windy over the last two weeks and as the plants have been waving around, it has been difficult to photograph them ... but there were a couple of lulls in the storms and i managed to get some shots of the current state of the garden

viper's bugloss in flower - the bees love this plant




calendula officinalis (pot marigold) - in bud




calendula officinalis (pot marigold) - in flower eight days later




unknown weed - in bud, i just love the pattern




unknown plant - is this perhaps borage ???




my neighbour's cat - who is now relaxed enough with my presence in the garden to use my old pile of grass cuttings as his outdoors cat basket, i feel honoured really that he likes my garden for chilling

My garden is doing awesome this year. I will try and take some pics. I have cucs, eggplant, lots of tomatoes, okra, zucchinis and peppers.