I’ve been on the lookout for a bird table for some time now and couldn’t find anything that took my fancy. Most bird tables in the shops were either too expensive or the build quality was poor and I couldn’t justify buying something when I could quite easily build something from leftover material.
Potato blight is a fungal disease that can devastate a potato crop. The first sign of infection are black spots that appear on the leaves and then turn yellow. If left untreated, the plant will die back completely and can also affect the tubers. Continue reading
Onions can be grown in two ways; from seed or onion sets. Onion sets are small onions that can be planted out in autumn (over wintering onions) or in spring. If possible, purchase onions sets that have been heat-treated as this will stop them running to seed. Continue reading
If you read my previous post, you will have seen I went overboard with the radish in the square foot bed. Well this weekend, I started to harvest them and in the process pulled up some rather large but tasty roots out. Most where an inch across, while some measured around 3 inches. The one below was one of the larger ones.
Last year I stumbled across the concept of square foot gardening. The idea is that you create a bed and divide it into sections to create a densely planted bed, and in each section you plant a different variety of vegetable or plant. Wanting to give this a try, I created a new bed over winter that was roughly 5 metres long and about a metre wide, filled it with fresh manure and compost, ready to be planted in spring. Continue reading
Cobnuts or hazelnuts are not very large nuts, but they are sweet, tasty and easy to crack. The trees are easy to grow and have the advantage of producing catkins or tassels of male flowers from midwinter to early spring. The female flowers are inconspicuous red tufts. Fortunately, both types are wind pollinated, which compensates for the lack of pollinating inserts so early in the year. There are several self-fertile varieties, so it is not necessary to grow more than one if you are short on space. They are perfect for providing shade in which to sit plants as well as to grow shade-loving plants. They are really a large bush, rather than a tree, growing to no more than about 4m/13ft high, which makes them suitable for a small garden, unlike many of the other nut trees. Continue reading
Nothing beats eating fresh peas straight out the pod on a summers days. You can sow your peas in a cold frame in autumn or straight into the ground in spring. The soil will need to be warm though as peas will rot in cold wet soil, so if you want an early crop cover the soil beforehand to warm it up. Continue reading
I wasn’t planning on growing any chillies this year, but for Christmas I received a gift set with three packets of chilli seeds and various spices and thought it would be a waste not to have a go at growing them. So in late January I sown a packet of Anaheim and a packet of Cayenne in the hope to have some fresh chillies come summer time. Continue reading
First day on the allotment before I started doing any work.
I got my allotment in April 2012 after been on the waiting list for a couple of months. The plot itself isn’t very big, 12 metres by 5 but it keeps me busy. The first couple of days on the plot was spent digging it over and generally giving it a once over. My plan was to get my potatoes in and then work out where everything else was going to go at a later date. I had 9 rows of potatoes; 3 first early and the rest second early, and these were probably the most successful crop I had that year, weighing it at around 30-40kg.
The next couple of months was spent experimenting with different sowing techniques, planting out various herbs, strawberries and other bits and pieces, just to get into the feel of things. My aim was to find out what works and what doesn’t, and found that I had too much lettuce and radish, my french beans were the dwarf variety and didn’t climb up my frames, and that I didn’t sow enough onions. Continue reading
Home grown tomatoes taste so much better than the supermarket tomatoes and they are easy to grow in any garden as long as its in a warm sheltered spot. They can be grown indoors, a greenhouse, containers and hanging baskets, or outdoors so it’s important to choose the correct variety for where you want to grow them. Continue reading