Sunshine On Kilsyth

I wish! I’m sitting writing this out as it howls a gale outside and the rain lashes down. We’ve certainly had a mixed bag of weather, late March into early April was great – I even got a suntan! whereas the rest of April was a mixture of sunshine and showers. Not that bad for the garden, but the temperature has been a bit erratic too, there has been the odd occasion where the temperature in the greenhouse has reached 40 degrees! Then there are days where outdoors it struggles to reach double figures.

Anyway, April has been a very busy month in the garden. I’ll go into the plants in detail throughout the next week. All the vegetables I’m growing this year are now sown in one way or another, whether they be indoors or outdoors.

On 14th April I started off peas and carrots outside, whilst also putting out the Maris Piper potatoes. 2 weeks later parsnips, beetroot, swede and turnip were all started off outside.

Last week I sowed some more carrots – Yes that’s right, successional sowing! I think I might master it this year! And yes, a second sowing of carrots! People who have followed me from the start will know the issue I’ve had with direct sowing of carrots, in fact I’ve had nothing from the ground, just last years bucket grown carrots.

Indoors I have runner beans, sweetcorn started, although today I realised I have grown 4 sweetcorn plants fewer than I wanted… Battled the wind and rain today out to the greenhouse and rectified that. I also have ‘yellow scallop’ squash, butternut squash, courgettes, onion squash and a pumpkin in 16 roottrainer modules.

I’ve started moving some plants into the greenhouse, tomatoes have been moved out with no adverse reaction. I was hoping to move plants into the greenhouse as plants were moved outside but this year I’m being more patient and I’m leaving most plants until the start of June – Another change from the past couple of years.

I’m off to twiddle my thumbs patiently

Gardener’s Gold

As Monty Don once said leaf mould is gardener’s gold. When we moved into the new house, being in quite a woody area, the driveway was covered in leaves (it was the end of October). We cleared a load of leaves away from the front of the house when we moved in and recently swept all the leaves from the side of the drive way.

I will be getting the chicken wire I used on the old vegetable patch to make a frame to keep it all in, and hopefully in a year or two it will be useable.

On the subject of organic gardening, forgetting I lived in the countryside until I was out taking Max for a walk, I spotted masses and masses of nettles with which I can make a nettle plant food. I was going to do this a couple of years ago when I was working in Craigellachie and again being in the countryside the was masses of it there. But by the time I left I forgot.

It’s amazing that in 21 years of living in the city I seldom saw nettles, but now I’m back out in the country they’re everywhere. I probably haven’t been stung since I moved to Glasgow! Worst sting I had I still remember to this day… I was about 10 years old and me and a couple of other kids were messing around at the stream that ran beside the farm. At one point I trod on a nettle bare-footed, moved my foot away in pain as the nettle sprung up then back down onto the top of my foot! Oww!

Filling Up

Following on from Fridays post about the herb bed, progress has been made.

As said last week, I have phlox, black mint, pineapple mint, lupin and Pieris. I prepared the soil with a scattering of blood fish and bone and adding some compost which was all dug in before planting the plants.

Not sure what else is going in, but I’m not planning anything in advance it will be a random assortment of plants, flowers and herbs. As long as it is bright and colourful to attract some pollinating bees.

Garlic

I was going to write a whole post about growing vegetables in containers and pots. I started off with some elephant garlic I got from a garden centre in the new year sale – a packet containing 2 cloves for 50 pence! You know how I like a bargain! I promptly snapped up the 2 remaining packets, tossed the cloves in some multi purpose in pots and left them be.

 

3 of the 4 cloves germinated and appeared  as above. Why aren’t I writing a post about growing in pots? The pots were too small (roots can be seen under the second pot!) and they are now in the ground with rest of the garlic planted last year.

So yeah sorry about that

Cymru Am Byth

So I got some red Welsh onion seeds for christmas 2009 from my mother in law (see the link? Me being Welsh). I sowed them in a propagator in 2010, nothing. 2011 the same again plus some scattered direct into the ground, again nothing. 2012…

I finally have onions! How have I got them? Scattered on seed compost in the greenhouse. Nothing different as before as such apart from maybe the greenhouse is unheated whereas the previous 2 years the propagators were indoors.

Don’t know why they have grown this year and not previously, but at least they have finally grown

 

Thyme for Tea

I got a little creative, or shall I say my highly creative wife gave me the inspiration We had this ‘Grovancroft’ teapot that we no longer had room for… I say we no longer had room for it, we moved from a 2 bedroom flat to a 4 bedroom house of course we had room! Umm… Ok we had no use for it any more, so the suggestion was mad about putting a plant in it.

So I got this little thyme plant (not grown from seed) which I thought would look good in it and placed it on the table on the decking.

The lid is there purely for artistic purposes

Herb Garden… Part Deux!

Another part 2! My initial plan when we moved into our new house was to overhaul an overgrown bed and turn it into a herb bed. I made a start but I got beaten by bind weed which I am still pulling up on a regular basis, but the cheap plants I got last year are still there along with several daffodil bulbs I tossed in there for good measure.

Part Deux though has involved transforming this:

To this:

Dug over thoroughly and weeded so hopefully *crosses fingers* I won’t have the same trouble as before. The plan is the same as before, to have a mixture of flowering plants and edible plants. Waiting to go in so far is pineapple mint, black mint, lupin and phlox. But of course that’s only a small corner… And it’s Easter weekend… And plants are on sale…

JUST SAYING!

 

Project Bin Raider… Part Deux!

You may or may not – depending on how new a reader you are – remember project bin raider last year with my strawberries. Well, moving to a new house meant I couldn’t take it with me… 1 – it was too heavy, 2 – the bottom was rusty and about to fall out!

This year, well late last year I picked up several reduced strawberry plants from the garden centre for 50 pence and left them on the decking over winter.

I must interject here. Don’t bring strawberry plants indoors overwinter, or leave them in a heated greenhouse. They will happily survive winter outdoors as mine proved 2 years ago in minus 20 temperatures!

Back to the story, I needed somewhere to plant them and fruit planting has been quite a dilemma this year believe me! A rummage through the garage found me a large plastic container previously used for coal, and within half an hour I cobbled this up…

A couple of runners from last years plants as well which had overwintered in pots are also in there. Looking forward now to being able just to stroll out on to the decking and picking some fresh strawberries!

I’ve Bean Through This before

I was on the verge of giving up on broad beans. It turns out I need to just give up with ‘aquadulce claudia’.

I bought these seeds for last years growing season, “they’re great for over-wintering”,  so they said. But no I couldn’t get them to grow in the blow away last year and eventually got them to germinate indoors where they were quite leggy to start off with.

This year I thought they would be fine in my proper greenhouse… Again no. I had 16 in a roottrainer but nothing. Last year I bought ‘masterpiece green longpod’ as a back up if the aquadulce didn’t grow, so a hunt through my seed box found them and I set about sowing them in the roottrainers alongside the aquadulce.

11 of them! The first seedlings out in the garden Of course, I decided the 11 wasn’t enough and decided to fill up the rest of the roottrainers with more beans – this time they all germinated and I have another 16 plants ready to go out in the next couple of weeks!

This year I shall remember to pinch out the growing tips to hopefully prevent the mass of blackfly I had last year

Reuse, Recycle

You’ll remember my greenhouse post of a few weeks ago and how I was trying to spend as little as possible on making it usable again. Yes and no…

I’ll start with the no – My plans of not spending any money flew out of the window when I realised the roof was leaking like a sieve. I’ve replace 1 but the rest will need done too over the next few months.

On the plus side I’ve got free shelves!

You may or may not recognise this. It’s in fact my old blow away greenhouse! Cover removed and shelves re-jigged have given me plenty of storage space, and saves me leaving the plant pots scattered all over the floor… If only I could be the same indoors…