Growing

Sights That Made Me Smile

Immature medlar

A young medlar growing on our patio medlar tree.

Growing your own can be disheartening sometimes. A couple of my runner beans suffered minor attacks from snails when they were in pots on the patio, but the vast majority were pristine. Within a couple of days of planting them out into the vegetable patch, every single one has been attacked by slugs/snails, and is covered with blackfly. As things stand they look like they’ll all survive, but it can be demoralising. But, just when I’m reflecting on the prospect of not getting the harvest I imagined from a particular crop, I’ll see a sight elsewhere in the garden that…

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The Garden – A Quick Update

Squashes and courgettes in the pumpkin patch.

The area now prepared with a grand total of 7 squash, 5 courgette, 1 pumpkin and 1 patty pan plants all in position.

It’s been a busy couple of weeks in the garden. Aside from the mammouth tasks of weeding, watering and generally tending to our plants that are already in their final positions, we’ve also planted a lot more out. Our most noteworthy achievement in the last fortnight is probably that we cleared the remainder of the pumpkin patch. We have now, for that whole square area that was lawn, removed all of the turf, turned the soil, forked in manure, made ridges for the plants, and planted out something into all but two of the positions. These final positions will be…

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Growing Our Own Mushrooms – First Batch Harvested

The first chestnut mushroom harvest - they grew faster than I expected!

As you may have guessed from the photo, despite my plans to the contrary, I didn’t manage to harvest the first crop of chestnut mushrooms whilst they were still small. The problem was that they grew so much faster than I expected. I posted on Thursday that they were almost ready to be harvested. Then on Friday they looked just about there (by which I mean they were nearly the size of the chestnut mushrooms that the supermarkets sell). Then on Saturday morning they already looked bigger than the supermarket ones. Joe and I were very busy in the garden…

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Growing Our Own Mushrooms

Last Sunday was Father’s Day here in the UK. In recent years I have found it increasingly easy to buy gifts for my father due to our shared love for all things self-sufficiency. Basically I look at things I’ve been thinking of getting for myself, and then pick one of them that he doesn’t already have. This year I opted to buy him a mushroom growing kit. I knew he’d love it. It’s something that I’ve been thinking about for some time. In their excellent Practical Self-Sufficiency book, Dick and James Strawbridge have a couple of suggestions for growing mushrooms….

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Official Unveiling of the Pumpkin Patch

Our new pumpkin patch

It’s official: we now have a pumpkin patch! Well, sort of, there are currently no pumpkin plants in it, but there are some squash plants. I just think ‘pumpkin patch’ has more of a ring to it than ‘squash patch’. We were running quite late on Saturday as I ended up helping my dad at the allotment into the early afternoon, and in the end Liz and I didn’t get to work on the garden until the evening. But we made very good use of the three hours or so we spent out there. We removed the turf from a…

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Start of the Strawberry Season

Albion Strawberry

The season's first ripe strawberry

Yesterday (20th June), marked the official start of our strawberry season. We harvested our very first ripe strawberry of the year, and it surprisingly wasn’t the one in the basket at the front of the house that was on the verge of ripeness a week ago. Instead it was one in a pot in the back yard. We’re still yet to get round to arranging the back yard and it is currently strewn with plants in pots from the old house. Most of these pots contain strawberry runners that I have kept. It was one of these that was bearing…

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What We Achieved This Week

Parsnip Seedling

Parsnip tops sprouting between the seedling leaves!

For various reasons I was late home every night this week, and so I didn’t get to spend nearly as much time in the garden as I would have liked to have done. Which of course goes without saying, even if I hadn’t stayed late once! Here’s a day-by-day summary of what we managed to get done this week: Monday After the colossal task of watering the plants that are still in pots, I focused on the vegetable patch. I dug and sieved the gap between the row of parsnips and the lawn that adjoins it. There is space either…

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The Start of the 2015 Redcurrant Harvest

Redcurrants fruit on old wood, blackcurrants fruit on new wood. This affects the way they are pruned, as blackcurrants should be cut back quite heavily every year to promote new growth, which will produce fruit the next year. Redcurrants on the other hand, shouldn’t be pruned too heavily, otherwise the lack of old wood will mean no fruit the next year. When I first read of this difference in pruning requirements several years ago, my first thoughts were ‘I’ll never remember which way round they are’. However, this proved not to be the case. The fact of the matter is…

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The Vegetable Patch Gets Its First Vegetables

We’ve had a couple of busy evenings in the garden. On Wednesday evening my dad came round to help me prepare some space in the vegetable patch for our plants that were in most desperate need of planting. We turned over the soil, but it was so full of roots and stones that we had to dig out a row, sieve it, and fill it back in. It was very time consuming, but I felt it necessary as I had two root crops to plant. I plan to split this vegetable patch into four sections, a classic four crop rotation….

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Clearing the Vegetable Patch

It was a busy weekend in the garden! There is a section of our garden, about 53′ x 17′ (16.2m x 5.2m), that the previous tenants used as a vegetable patch. By the time we moved in it was a dense mass of mostly nettles, alexanders and cow parsley, as can be seen in the photos below. We’ve been in the house for just over a month now, and this weekend, with the help of some friends, we finally tackled this area. It’s a great feeling to have finally cleared this patch, it’s been something we’ve been eager to do…

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