The salads are in!

Yeash!

Look at the time! :/ 3:37am...

Well just wanted to do a quick post to say I got the lettuce and pak choi plugs planted. It's good to have something growing :)

It's been raining real heavy tonight though, hope my little plants are strong enough! :/

Guess I'll find out in the morning, keep your fingers crossed!

New beginnings... Take 2!

Let's just not mention last year, OK?

OK!

As I'm a pathetic blogger, I'm going to keep things simple and just blog from my iPad, because well I'm just that lazy!

I'm sure everyone knows that the weathers been a little unpredictable lately...

But I'm hoping the warmer temperatures are around the corner and so i've hit the garden centres! :)

I've decided to start things off with a few plugs, just so that I have something to plant before my seeds are sown, grown, etc. I bought some lettuce and pak choi, they aren't planted yet but hopefully will be by the end of the day!

I have planted some strawberries and onion sets though, weeded all the beds, tided up the paths between the beds and pruned some of the hedge (the bits I can reach!). So going alright so far. :)

That's all for now, hoping to update progress daily though... We'll see!!! :/

Keep your fingers crossed for me!

It's not going so well...

July is here and, from what my veg mags tell me, I should be enjoying bountiful harvests by now...

:(

The reality is: the sparrows have eaten all my peas, most of the strawberries ripened while we where on holiday (the black birds probably enjoyed those), the spinach has run to seed,the lettuce is growing soooo slow its getting eaten by the slugs, who also managed to get into my grow house ONE night and polished off all my cauliflowers and some of the broccoli, cabbage,sprouts and kale. On the positive side, I did run some of them over with the car! >:)

Still, the garlic and onions are doing well, the potatoes seem to be alright, my carrot seeds have finally emerged and I managed to harvest something:

These are the Jamie O one's I bought from Homebase. It was
a pack of mixed seed, quite exciting pulling them out,
always a suprise as to what you will get!

Only problem is I have nothing to eat them with!

At least our garden critters are getting a healthy diet! 

Right, off to search for recipes now... 

Wonder if I can find any for radish and strawberries?

Incy Wincy Spider!

As well as the lack of planning, the cold October climate and the 2 foot of snow; there were many another reasons my gardening seriously tailed off in 2010...

Eeeek!

From around September this fellow and his/her big brothers and sisters began stringing their webs between my beautiful vegetables, trees, etc. The one above had a web spanning the path between the shed and one of the front beds and the largest one of all took up residence inside my growhouse. :O

Now although I have seriously reduced my aversion to spiders since producing my offspring (I didn't want them to pick it up from me, like I did from my Mom) I can't help reverting to my original shrieking and leaping out the way when the kids are not around... 

say for instance when I'm in the garden... 

or when they're in bed and one walks across the lounge while I'm watching TV!

Anyway, the reason I mention this now is that I've just had a little potter around the garden to check on progress and happened upon two of these baby garden spiders, already setting up residence and claiming  their dominance over my garden... :(

I also had one crawling over me yesterday as I was enjoying my cup of tea in the sun. Wiyot kindly removed it from my back, while I (as usual when the kids are around) remained perfectly calm, saying I just wanted it off so I didn't accidentally squish it!

Well time to get battling the phobia before the garden again becomes a no go area!

Garden Chess

As I mentioned previously, my gardening tailed off towards the end of last year... well actually, my gardening stopped, is probably a more apt description! So now, and for the last few months, there has been little growth in the garden. Today as I sat in the sunshine enjoying a nice cup of tea, all I could see was 6 empty veg beds :( 

What a waste of space! 

Shouldn't there be something growing??

So I got my veg books and magazines out, and have now planned out what will grow in the garden till April 2012!! :D Whether it will work out that way remains to be seen! But I feel content that there is at least a plan in place now! Thank you to the designers of GrowVeg.com, I couldn't have done it without you!

... 

Well I probably could, but it would have been more difficult!

On a more positive note, lots of good has been happening in the garden; the shed and fence have finally been painted, the left and right boarders have finally been properly marked out and mulched, a tool rack has been put up in the shed and all the toys/tools/pots that have been lying round the garden have been gathered up and put away.

Also, most of the seeds I recently sowed have begun to grow, so in a week or two my beds will finally have some life in them! Yahoo! I'm really looking forward to some salad leaves fresh from the garden :9 Until then Tescos bagged salads will just have to do.

More seeds that have been sowed are my seed potatoes and some early carrots. I've sown both of these into potato grow bags... Can't see why they can't be used for other veggies other than spuds!?

Well thats all for now.

TTFN x

Sow and sow and sow some more!

Spring's sprung and so starts the sowing of seeds... 

If anyone is paying attention, you may remember last year I tried sowing some of my seeds in paper tubes... aka toilet roll inners. For those of you that don't remember I got the idea from My Zero Waste and although the initial carrot trial was a failure (probably due to their kamikaze flight on the collapsing cold frame :/) subsequent seeds were more successful.

So for the last 12 months we've been saving loo rolls and waiting for the sowing to commence! 

From my trials last year I've come up with my own loo roll method... maybe I should coin a term for this?! Anyway, I initially tried using the rolls as suggested in the link above, but as my tubes were sitting in a regular seed tray, I found them to be fairly unstable and also too tall to fit the lid on the tray. other posts I've found recommended folding the tubes into square shapes and cutting an inch up from the corners, before folding in to make a kind of pot. I liked the idea of this, but found they kept falling over as the bottoms opened up (only when unfilled and dry) and also found that unless you are taking some time to make your cuts all the same length the bottoms turn out fairly wonky.

And so was born Littlefoots little loo rolls... Ok I can't claim that this method is unique to me, I'm sure other people have done this, and there are probably also blogs and whatever about it (if anyone else is sad enough to sit and write about it that i!), but as I have not seen or heard evidence of this, here is my method.

So what was my ingenious solution I hear you cry??? 

Take your loo roll, flatten it out and then.... cut it in half! 

Voila!

Your loo roll is now (more or less) the perfect size to fit in a (B&Q) seed tray, with the propagator lid on top. And, as an added bonus you get twice the number of little pots!

Here are the little beauties waiting to be filled

Its easier to sit them in the tray if you put a couple of centimetres of compost in the bottom first and, following the old geometry rules, they fit more snuggly together if you fold them into squarish shapes.

Filled with compost.

And then, just to prove what a penny pincher I am, here are my plant labels. Made from margarine lids... well technically they are spreadable butter lids, but you know what I mean! Cut the edge off, snip into strips and use some kind of marker to write your label.

Is that a sneaky slug in the background? >:(

In my beds:

• The garlic is growing nicely, having survived the bird attacks.
• The onion sets have been planted, a little later than planned but hopefully they will be ok.
• Radish seeds have been sown (not on my plan, but was intrigued by the new Jamie Oliver seed range in Homebase)
• Spring onion seeds sown, went for White Lisbon ones this year, so will see how they go.

In the growhouse:

• Brussel sprouts
• Autumn cabbage
• Cauliflower
• Broccoli
• Kale
• Spinach
• Peas
• Leeks
• Loose leaf lettuce

More to do tomorrow.... busy, busy, busy!

New beginnings...

So this blog has been neglected for sometime now... But while the blogging stopped, the gardening continued.

There were successes and failures... Biggest successes being the salad leaves and the courgettes. Both growing so well that it began going to waist. The failures being the butternut squash that got eaten as soon as it sprouted and the sweetcorn that grew but never got cobs.

We also enjoyed blueberries, broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, onions, spring onions, leeks, cabbage, french beans, strawberries, radish, plum tomatoes, potatoes and probably others that I can't remember at the moment.

Another positive was that we managed to cancel a number of our organic veg deliveries, saving probably over £200... Not exactly a profit, but its good to have a hobby that will eventually pay for itself!

However, the gardening all came to an abrupt end when we went on holiday to sunny Florida. We had a great time in the 30 degree heat, but on our return I found that I was now too much of a wimp to face the cold British climate (-1, brrrrr!)... Of course a few weeks later we experienced the worst winter we have had since living here, temperatures plummeting to -15, snow reached waist height at our gate and 12 plus inches above our back door. The garden was pretty much inaccessible!

But now the sun is shinning again, at last! And the garden looks a bit of a mess again. Things have been flattened under the weight of the snow and weeds have started to grow from the time its been abandoned...

Spring has sprung, and now is the time for new beginnings :D

Bed 4 has been cleared of debris, mulched with a fresh layer of compost and planted up with some garlic :9 The birds had been doing their best to pull up said garlic, but now they are starting to grow nice green shoots and the birds seem to have forgotten about them.

My seed potatoes are chitting themselves XD and will be ready to go into the potato sacks again soon. Not sure what else I need to do at the moment... need to have a read of my gardening books and check my garden plan...

Well thats all for now, lets hope I can keep the blogging up this year!

x