We have crops! Broadbeans to the rescue!!

Finally a moment of elation this growing season!!!

We have broadbeans big enough to cook with!

Its the first year I've grown these and last weekend all of a sudden I noticed there were pods big enough to eat.  I meant to check them with my taste buds there and then but gardening jobs distracted me.  But tonight was the night I finally checked them and as soon as I started to open the furry jacket to try one I got nostalgic smells from childhood.  No doubt my father grew them for us when I was a child on the small holding.

Here's a pic of the first beauties I've brought into the kitchen - there were more I could have harvested but would like to savour the others fresh in another meal.

I grew them in a sack container in 50/50 vermicompost/spent compost mixture and the seeds were planted last October.

After many knock backs and trials and tribulations this season my passion for gardening is rushing back in leaps and bounds - even in a year as tough as this it really is worth all the graft.  There's nothing better than eating something you've grown from seed, fed with your homemade compost and your homemade fertilizer and finally savoured in your kitchen. 

How do you protect yours?

As the weather has been so challenging lately, I thought it might be a good time to write about ways to protect plants.

So far this year, my garden has presented to huge challenges that I didn't really have the experience of dealing with before.

You see pigeons didn't really seem that interested in a small patio garden in South London with high fences and winds didn't seem to be that much of a problem either.

But now I have a much more exposed garden up in the Midlands - I thought a larger garden would be the answer to a lot of my previous limitations - I can now grow roots in open soil along with many other opportuntities.  However, I did not anticipate the challenges. 

There are 2 main challenges with being more exposed, the first being the neighbourhood birds and the second being the weather.  The weather is so challenging to work with this year not just in my garden but the country as a whole.  Its mostly wet and windy.  It is the opposite extreme to last year.  We have to try and work with it, whatever it is ... but it does not look like we are getting much of a summer this year!


When the forecast mentioned another rainy storm with high winds was coming this week (this will be the third or fourth so far this year) my thoughts went straight to how do I protect my plot?  The birds have also been pinching young tomato fruit so I need to think about protection on 2 fronts - pest and harsh weather.  The tomatoes are now in a tall fleece tent kindly built by my boyfriend and the heritage peas are under netting - that should stop those pesky pigeons eating my peas!  The fleece should help the tender tomatoes along in this years cool climate.

To bring the seeds on to germination, I've learnt this year about putting fleece down.  The idea for this was when I saw agricultural fields covered with rows of clear plastic and I thought that they must have done this to warm up the soil to speed up germination.  Well the fleece worked a treat.

So far the squash are under cloches or upside down plant pots in harsh windy weather.  The main issue I am having with these is a common one - snails.  Snails is something I have plenty of experience with!  The other issue is that they are finding it too cold.  One cucumber plant has completely perished.  I'd been wondering why the leaves were looking yellow - this time I don't think it was a lack of nutrients but that the plant was completely perishing.  When the squash look big and strong enough I shall be removing their cloches, but not before!

To protect against bird damage, I've been thinking of making willow weave cages to fit over the tops of my plants.  I have a plant in the garden which grows branches very similar to a willow tree so I need to learn this skill.

Last year, I built a kind of a fleece tent around an aubergine that was struggling in our cold summer last year and that worked a treat.   Perhaps this year I will make the cages and then if necessary drape the fleece over the top of that.

What methods of ingenuity have you found to protect your plants?

June Storms

Recently we've had some pretty changeable weather to deal with.  We've had a 10 day summer inbetween lots of unseasonally cool days, followed by lots of rain and then an intense windy storm.

I hope you all fared better than me with the storms!

Prior to our 10 days of summer, I had put fleece over all my germinating seeds to stop the birds from eating them before they got a chance to sprout.  And then the sun came.  With high temperatures averaging 26 degrees C.  The week before we'd had temps around 12 C.  I took the decision to keep them veiled with their fleece as I thought the sun might scorch them and I think I was the only person waiting for that heat wave to end to unveil my little beauties!

And it really did feel like unveiling my patch!  All of a sudden the areas I'd planted were fully populated with seedlings of salad, roots, onions, radishes (including baby rat tail radishes), leeks and the peas finally germinated.

On Jubilee weekend I decided its now June - I can start planting the tenders out.  Naturally I made some bunting with some ribbon, old scraps of blue/white/red cloth and my sewing machine so the whole weekend was not just dedicated to gardening but I did find myself (inbetween watching the Jubilee celebrations on TV) trying to make a start on planting the tenders out. 

I planted out 4 sunflowers, 12 french beans and 4 winter squash.  I didn't have quite enough time to plant out the tomatoes and the remaining winter squash and sunflowers.  I also left some flowers to plant out later.  They were all residing in my plastic greenhouse.

Then the rain came down, and it carried on coming down all week ending in a great big finale of a storm on Friday with very high winds.  I came home to find the greenhouse flat on the floor.  We were devastated!  We love tomatoes!!! 

I rescued all the seedlings one by one, my boyfriend helped me with the carnage.  It was hard work as I'd just come down with a cold and cancelled a weekend to London where I would have been helping my friends at Transition Town Wandsworth's Bramford Community Gardens with their Open Squares event. 

I moved them all the rescued seedlings into a shed, safe from the wind and naturally lost a few squash and some sunflowers - surprisingly all the tomatoes escaped unharmed.

Yesterday, I inspected the veg patch after the winds and all the supports were fine - naturally my boyfiend had done a sterling job with the plant supports a week earlier.  I only had one casualty on the plot - one of the winter squash had perished in the Friday storms.  Luckily I had germinated two of this italian pumpkin variety and this was one variety that had not perished in the greenhouse calamity.  So despite all the drama, I think the population of veg with all the heritage varieties amongst them had lucky escapes.

(I do realise in the grand scheme these are small problems in contrast to the people in Wales who had their homes completely flooded)

However, after all the doom, gloom and vegetable carnage, yesterday was a pleasantly sunny day with the elder flower in bloom and the blackberry bushes budding up with their flowers of promise.  So it was a day of planting - all the tomatoes are now in the new, slightly more secure home of the veg patch (that is providing we don't have another blight epidemic this year and with recent weather patterns this is highly likely!)

And today we are blessed with another sunny day - I really hope it follows true to the forecast today as they are predicting light showers in the evening.  If it remains I shall be planting out all the remaining seedlings currently in refuge in the shed and any seedlings that haven't made it will be laid to rest in my wormery to help those who made it with nutritious worm tea and worm cast!

I do hope the weather's going to start to be a little kinder to gardeners - it must be really challenging for those of us who are just starting out.

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?

Project New Veg Plot Continues

Half a month on from my last post about the new garden and the veg plot has been fully deturfed and the rhubarbs been slightly thinned out!  (It was a very scrummy rhubarb crumble)

We then had that really harsh wind storm and I thought the next door neighbour's eucalyptus tree was going to come down on our garden, it was being whipped around like it was a bendy twig.

I was very relieved I hadn't planted anything into the veg patch by then or I would have been watching my poor veg being destroyed by the winds from the upstairs window or worst still traipsing through the wind and the rain with all manor of contraptions to try and save my poor veg.  This has happened before, sometimes during rain storms in the middle of the night and now I don't plant my beloved squash until after the 1st June for that very reason!

As quickly as the wind and rain came, within about 6 hours they abated and the following morning we had a really warm spring day with sunshine and temperatures in the plastic greenhouse reaching nearly 30 degrees.

This was most definitely a gardening day!!  I turned all the soil in the veg patch to loosen it up and get some air in and added all the worm casts my wormery to offer (and some bits that weren't strictly quite ready to use!) to add a bit of nutrition to the soil.  I dug this in to the upper layer of soil and then raked the whole bed.

With time I won't dig the patch so much, using spent roots to rot into the ground and add their own nutrients and not digging were possible.  However, this patch of ground has been grassed over for what looks like a considerable amount of time, certainly a few years so my thoughts were to initially loosen the soil ready for the population of veggies that will soon find their home there.

I then popped in for a cuppa and a sit on the sofa.  All that exercise had made me tired!  But I was still in gardening mode and on a roll so I didn't want to stop when I sat down for a rest.  I reached for a pad of paper and drew up a plan.

The plot is roughly 4m x 2m and can be neatly divided into 6 rows.  There are planks conveniently stacked against the fence at the end of the garden which I will use to make my paths.  Each of these rows I will divide into 4 squares (about 50cm square).  I got the inspiration for this plan from the square foot gardening idea.

Today its windy and rainy again but I'm itching to plant some peas, carrots and spring onions and get this plot started!!

Maybe the surface needs to be raked once more before I'm completely ready... Patience is a difficult thing when you're itching to have your own crops growing in your back garden!