The flowering veg plot

I love nothing more than giving plants the room to do their thing with a little bit of natural abandon.

I think its a bit along the lines of permaculture - but I still dig ground over now and again before I plant my garlic bulbs or sew some seeds in a bed and I only grow a few perennial edibles so I don't quite think I'm one of the perma crowd set yet.

What I like to do is allow my veg to self seed.  My first motivation for this was to save my own seed as I became more and more of a Heritage Seed Library addict.  So I like to encourage my plants to flower and seed and it makes the veg plot look beautiful!  My favourites have to be the umbellifereae flowers of the parsnips, carrots and parsley.  Brassica flowers can look very bold with their bright yellows.

Right now in mid June, the veg in full flower is kale, kai lan, parsnip, parsley, chives, broad beans

and soon I will have radish (followed by their tasty radish pods), salsify, amaranthus, pea flowers, bean flowers, garlic scapes, egyptian walking onion flowers and if I'm lucky the globe artichokes.

Since I've been letting my kales flower at abandon I've been spotting ragged jack kale sprouting up all over the place.  Performing its very own crop rotation.  Eventually when its self seeded enough around the plot I will dig over the bed where I've been growing the kale and grow something completely different.  By then I'm sure I'll have kale growing where it wishes in different spots around the plot.

I have this idea that when a plant germinates naturally it will germinate earlier and at more optimum conditions with a longer growing season than when I deem it safe and warm enough to plant the seed direct.  I first starting thinking about this when I found things germinating from seed that got into my wormery compost.  When I found it particularly hard to germinate seeds I started to chuck those difficult ones in the wormery so that when I used the compost on the patch I would get seedlings springing up randomly.

I really enjoy this type of veg patch - its relatively low effort a little like helping nature along and guiding it with your choice of what you want to grow rather than you physically cultivating it.  Its not completely easy gardening - you do need to manage the weeds you don't want growing in your plot.

There are some seeds I will always plant myself such as peas and garlic but wouldn't it be wonderful if the carrot and parsnip flowers self seed across the plot and I get some surprise roots growing in a new place.  The weeding will be such an adventure of discovering new seedling gifts from my flowering veg plot.

Gardening Guilts and signs of spring

You may have noticed I've been a bit remiss with my blogs. Well I tend to write when I'm doing lots in the garden and I feel inspired... of late, it hasn't felt like there's been much to write about and that's because the snow's been stalling me.  Really?  I think that's just an excuse!  And gardening at the lovely Urban Veg just makes me feel more guilty about my absence from my own patch.  There we've been sowing broad beans and salads for the green house and its really starting to be populated with baby seedlings and lots of seed trays. 

Meanwhile, at home my seed box has barely had a ruffle since I restocked it over Christmas.  I should be sewing those seeds that need an extra long season like the chillies and the aubergines (summer willing - pleeeease!).  All my seeds are organised in month order so its not as if its hard to do and over Christmas I bought my seed compost so there really is no excuse.  Hopefully committing my gardening guilts will spur me into action!

In terms of the garden, hey it might be winter still but there seems to be lots of signs of life starting up.  We may be getting lots of snow but that's not halting everything out there.  Over the Christmas period garlic started to peer through the soil and the HSL crimson broad beans germinated (I think something got a taste for one of them though) and despite the snow keeping the ground cold there are some lovely rhubarb shoots in such a vivid red and little lush leaves making a start.  The chives are starting to grow too. 

So if the more hardy residents of the plot are braving their first shoots I really should get on with my window sill sowing in earnest and dust off the heated propagator for those chillies and long season tenders.  Its about time my windowsills are bursting with young seedlings!

Preparing the garlic bed

Its way way time to plant my garlic.  I usually aim to do this in October, but we had a holiday away in Singapore and with the nights drawing in its hard to find time in the garden.

However, we had it today.  There was pleasant sunshine, if a little cold but a fair autumnal day all the same.

So I set myself to the task of preparing the beds for garlic and shallots.  I decided upon the spot where the peas grew this summer.  Some of the pea plants had not quite given up the ghost, but it's time for the garlic all the same.  Its unlikely the few flowers I spotted would materialise into peas.

Interestingly this year, peas were the most surprising of my veg plot survivors.  I planted them in April, they took a long time to appear as the ground was not warm (I thought the birds were stealing them but I'm pretty sure now it was the ground temperature preventing them from germinating) and then from July through to late September they just kept producing peas.  Usually the heat of July kills them off but as we had such a cool summer, they survived through the summer into autumn.  But today it was time to turn the soil to its next occupant.

The old pea shoots were added to the wormery for my worms to chew their way through and turn into wonderful worm casts.  Then I started to weed the bed.  The soil that the peas had been inhabiting now looks incredibly rich and loamy.  The weeds were easy to pull as the ground is nice and moist.  As I was weeding away, it made me think how much we get to know our soil from weeding.  The aromas, the weeds that succeed there, it tells us so much.

And what weeds was I finding in the soil today?  Well as the veg patch was a grassed over patch of earth some 6 months ago, there was plenty of grass.  There were also a few docks and their long tap roots and buttercups.  There was also the aroma of mushrooms and interestingly a strong aroma of carrots being pulled.  I have never planted anything from the carrot family there so can only assume that there was a wild member of the carrot growing away happily until I chose to weed.

I was not surprised to smell mushrooms as my garden seems to be full of them at the moment.  As to what kind, I have no idea as yet but I am eager to find a local mushroom foraging course and as soon as I know more I will be able to share. 

If you know of any Midlands based fungi foraging walks please do pass the details on to me.

As with usual gardening sessions in November, I started to lose the light and my fingers and toes started to get very cold so I only have 2 sections out of 3 prepared for my garlic and shallots but I am hoping for another fair afternoon tomorrow to get those bulbs planted in.

The wormery method of seed sowing

Whilst visiting Fiona Law vivekagardens.com in London recently I made her laugh with one of my latest gardening anecdotes so I thought I would share it. 

In my garden in Birmingham I wanted some poppies to grow, but they didn't seem to want to grow where I wanted so I tipped the seed into my wormery.  I later distributed the worm compost around the garden and I found that the poppies just started growing where the positions were right for them.  (i.e. in the recently disturbed soil on the veg plot!)

So I guess if you are struggling to grow any seeds and you have a wormery, chuck them in with your veg waste and they will grow in your garden in their favourite growing position!

I also use this "chuck it into the wormery method" if I think seeds are passed their best and won't sow.  My original thinking was that it is vegetable material that the worms can make use of.  I often find the seeds I have given up on germinating grow randomly around the garden.

I love plants self seeding in their chosen position - a little chaos in the garden of your favourite friends is a good thing in my book.

Gardening with Birds

Birds, birds, birds...  I have to admit they were here first...

I have a bit of a dilemma with the birds in my garden. 

Here's my story....

I prepared my veg patch by deturfing it, turning the soil, raking the soil, feeding the soil and then I thought I was ready to plant the seeds.  I was a bit behind in sowing as I only moved house at the beginning of April - we were about mid April at this point due to the work I had to put in before reaching this point.  So I sowed my seeds and waited for them to pop out of the ground.  After a week I would look at the soil everyday waiting for signs of life but couldn't see anything.  I waited another week continuously checking the soil and then I saw it... the resident magpie was eating my pea seeds!  A day or two later the pigeons were completely grazing on the plot and had probably been grazing on my seeds the whole time when I hadn't been looking.  On inspection, I could see little holes all over the place, probably where they'd squeezed their beaks in to get at those no doubt delicious seeds.

I have to admit, they were here first and they live in the tall trees surrounding the garden.  The birds in question are magpies and pigeons.  To be honest, if I was a bird and someone exposed the soil and started planting edible things into it, I would see it as a snack source too.  Its probably a lot easier to get at the seeds in the exposed soil of the veg patch than scratching around on the lawn.  Who can blame them? 

So now I am game planning how to grow veg with birds around.  I am new to dealing with them as a pest and I don't want to think of them as a pest but would like to live in harmony with them and get to eat my veg all at the same time.  Someone else pinching my veg makes me very upset!

The Soil

I am new to growing direct in garden soil.  Prior to seeing my grazing neighbours visiting the snack shop that is the veg patch, I was worrying over whether the soil was not soft enough and easy for the seedlings to poke through and make their home. 

When my father came to visit he checked the soil (with a very cool PH/water probe) and confirmed that it has an excellent neutral PH (erring little on the acidic side but only very slightly) and it also has perfect water content - not too little, not too much.  I guess the garden being on a bit of a slope is helping with this drainage and the West Midlands rain is also making a good contribution! 

The soil looks nice and loamy to me.  I didn't get as far as the jam jar and water test but it feels nice, smells nice, lots of big worms in the soil.  I've fed it a little with worm casts (which probably introduced a few tiger worms into the soil also).  But I still had this paranoia that the soil just isn't soft enough for new, delicate seedlings to establish, so I've put a thin top layer of peat free compost for them to germinate in.  Maybe this was just paranoia and the only reason I didn't see much germination was that they'd been snacked on - but there's not much time to get things going now so I want to throw every chance at these seedlings to establish! 

Row divisions - Square Metre Gardening Method

I am sowing incorporating a little bit of inspiration of square metre gardening but on the scale of things in my plot. 

My plot is divided into 6 x 50cm wide rows and I'd already decided to split each row into 4 sections making 4 x 50cm2 sections per row making ideal sections for growing large crops like squash for example. 

When sowing the smaller crops like roots, spring onions, radishes, salad, etc I've divided each section into 4 making 4 x 25cm2 in each of my sections.  So for example in a root section I should have a 25cm2 of carrots, 25cm2 of beetroots, 25cm2 of salsify and 25cm2 of parsnips.  I will be blogging on this in a month or two so watch this space for progress!


The Protection (from grazing birds)

I've been looking for methods online and spotted on the RHS website placing fleece over the seedlings while they establish.

I'll keep you posted if this works.  In the meantime I have placed an order with Organic Gardening Catalogue for some bird repellants which use sound, sight and feel to dissuade them away from the veg patch. 

I also need to raid the CD collection for some that I will never think of listening to again!
 
I'm new to gardening with birds and I'm learning day by day - do you have any tried and tested methods that work for you?