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. 

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!

Container Garden: Using Spent Compost

In urban areas, growing in containers and raised beds on rooves, terraces and patios is the method of choice.  Compost is really quite expensive and I don't like spending money needlessly or throwing away anything that can be recycled or have a second life.

I don't throw away spent compost but I do make a note of what has grown in the soil most recently.  For example, if I have grown something from the solanaceae (potato family) I ensure I do not grow anything from the family in the same soil when recycling it - in fact I will try and find a legume to grow in the soil next following the crop rotation rule of legumes following the potato family.

In the second hand soil, if growing something that's a hungry plant (e.g. pretty much anything except roots)  I add a generous portion of vermicompost, the beautiful black compost that my wormery makes and mix it in well with the secondhand soil.  If you are lucky enough to have the space for a traditional compost heap or a darlic composter this will be great too.

This saves me a lot in valuable compost - but using this approach you do have to be very mindful of  crop rotation and what's been growing in the soil before.

When growing perennials, I change the soil annually - especially for tree onions and kai lan which can be prone to disease.

I don't usually extend the use of compost past two growing seasons and usually just dispose of it in the borders where my landlord's shrubs live and I sometimes grow salads in the dappled shade under the small trees and shrubs and they grow really well in this third hand soil.

In theory I think you could just keep continuing to extend the use of growing in the soil by adding feed or vermicompost but it gets difficult to keep track of the compost after about two seasons which is why I stop using it in containers after that point.  I feel sure it can be done, but you would need a good system or to keep good records to keep track of which soil is where and its history.

Do you have any techniques or systems for using spent compost?  Would love to hear other approaches.