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.

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.

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!

Project New Veg Plot

As regular readers will already know, I recently moved to a new home in South Birmingham. 

My new garden is absolutely huge in comparison to my 4m x 4m patio in London, but its been fairly neglected in the last few years of tenants!

Its got plenty of shrub planting and I'm lucky enough to have inherited some good edibles - an apple tree (that's not been pruned in years and years), a rhubarb and a very sorry looking globe artichoke.  I was surprised with the globe artichoke as I thought left to their own devices I thought they made sister plants - but maybe it just hasn't had much love.  It'll be getting plenty of worm juice now that I live here!

The veg plot is totally grassed over and at the top of the garden.  It's not the sunniest position of this south west facing garden but most parts probably get a good 4 hours of sunshine and this may be extended in the mid 3 months around midsummer.

At present, as we had so many waste cardboard from moving house, we've placed this over the grassed areas to try and start to kill the grass a little before a big clear up job this weekend when my boyfriend and I will both work on removing the grass and exposing the soil armed with garden forks to remove the grass so I can start planting lots of VEG!!!!

I am also working my way around the garden gradually pruning the trees and the shrubs.  Some branches of the apple tree could take our eyes as we walk on the path, so I removed all these low growing branches.  Looking forward to a proper prune job with ladders with my Mum this coming autumn.  There's also a lot of fir trees that need taming.  I think I've even got a bay tree hidden at the back, but there are other overgrown shrubs and firs in the way so I need to make a closer inspection.

The front border nearest the house also needs a lot of love and pruning.  The bed has completely grassed over but I'm thinking of replacing the grass with something like low growing chamomile.

Can you suggest an interesting low growing perennial to replace the grass at the bottom of a flower border with something more interesting?  Preferably edible or herbal :)

Root Veg from the Container Garden

I've been spring cleaning all my containers in readiness for a house move to Birmingham.  Today it was time to empty the roots containers and harvest the contents - beetroots, parsnips and carrots.

When I pulled the roots out, there were interesting results.  I probably planted the same quantity of all three but most of the harvest were beetroots.  I had a few parsnips although all the parsnips had good sized roots and only one carrot.

They were growing in containers about 30 cm deep by 90 cm long and there were two pots. 

All the roots were grown in spent compost that was home to tomatoes the previous year with a little scattering of wormery compost right at the base as a motivator for the roots to seek nutrients. 

I thought that the spent compost would be sufficiently poor for the roots, but maybe it was not poor enough. 

It was probably OK for the parsnips and the carrots as the parsnips formed great roots, but maybe not the right conditions for the beetroot. 

The beetroots didn't form nice, round beets.  Perhaps the soil was still too rich for them?  Another possibility is a lot of the beetroots were long, like carrots so perhaps that little bit of wormery compost treat at the base of the pots has encouraged them to seek the nutrients! 

It is looking likely that I will be growing in open ground next season so many more comparisons between the two styles of gardening to follow I'm sure! 

Towards the end of last season, I was trying to form a list of crops I found easy to grow in containers and to concentrate on these in the future and crops that don't grow so well in containers to grow them in open ground in the community gardens I support with growing advice.  Roots were on the list of things not to grow in containers as although they are not much effort, unless you count watering - I don't think there is such a high yield from them.

On a happy note for roots grown in containers, all the roots above provided me with my evening meal this evening.  I steamed the beetroot tops and roasted the roots and they were delicious!  I think the worms in the wormery will also be really happy to eat the trimmings from these organically grown veg too!

Do you grow roots in containers?  Do find them a success or a struggle?

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.

2011 Gardening Year of Trials and Tribulations

What a challenge 2011 has been for us gardeners but with challenges comes resourcefulness and problem solving.

If we look back over the past year we've had an extremely warm start in spring with April reaching over 20 degrees centigrade.  In May, temperatures dropped (but I find they do most years so waited until early June to plant out the cucurbitaceae (squash)).  Then the summer didn't really come.  July was grey and wet through some of the weeks.  Then August came and didn't really bring summer either ending, certainly in the South East with a day of severe rain that swiftly followed with blight attack on many tomatoes (the community gardens and school garden I support suffered this more than my small patio garden).  In September as there were so many green tomatoes being given to me I learned to make chutney for the first time.  Followed by a crazy Autumn and really high temperatures in the first week of October when lucky people who hadn't cropped yet got a week's summer.  And now we are experiencing a rather warm winter - in fact, I'm not sure whether to call it winter at all.  Usually the nasturtiums have died off by now but my sheltered patio garden hasn't really felt the bite of a frost yet.

So a rather challenging year to garden in but his meant lots of adaptation and resourcefulness.

Early in the year my boyfriend bought me a plastic greenhouse.  It was absolutely fantastic for hardening off seedlings in early spring and I used it for this purpose from March all the way through to June.  For a few months I left it vacant, but I've really got into growing chillies this year and our summer wasn't really a good one for them so as the weather started to disappoint in July I started to move them into the plastic greenhouse - and they loved it!  I didn't even have to water them that much as they would sweat off the excess water and it would stay in the green house.  I continued to use it all the way through to October.  If you don't have one, and don't have the space for a glass green house I really recommend getting a plastic greenhouse!

In the summer I also started to use horticultural fleece.  I've never used this before, not even in the winter but I bought some by mistake when I was buying some horticultural mesh for my cabbages.

For ages it remained stored in its wrapper and then when I started to see flowers on my aubergines I had little hope of them bearing fruit and I thought about the idea of using the horticultural fleece.  It worked a treat!

Definitely using it next year, especially if I get impatient with my tomatoes!

This year I stumbled across a really good variety of winter squash that seemed completely unperturbed by our disappointing summer.  They are called Zapallito de Toscana and I ordered them from the Garden Organic Heritage Seed Library Catalogue.  I am definitely going to be sourcing more seed for next year.

It was the first year I grew from seeds sourced from the Heritage Seed Library and I had some absolutely beautiful purple peas. 


I wouldn't recommend them for crops to be grown in a container garden as they didn't really give enough of a yield but the flowers were beautiful and I just couldn't help take photos of them.

I would definitely recommend growing Heritage Seed Library varieties and to learn seed saving.  Its a great source of seed if you like to experiment with unusual or old heirloom varieties.

I tried seed saving for the first time this year and found it tremendously rewarding.

Next year, I am going to grow more varieties that are perennial/biennial and/or are low fuss to grow. Varieties I found to be in this camp this year were nasturtiums (plant them anywhere you have a spare bit of ground - you can make pesto, a little chopped leaves on top of curries, flavour for salads - they are truly wonderful and add colour to small plots), zapallito de toscana (winter squash), kai lan, chard, kale and herbs, salad potatoes...  

I am also going to introduce more early varieties of tomatoes as these will probably be more UK climate friendly.  I'll also look for early varieties of chillies, sweet peppers and aubergines as these could be more suited to the UK growing season too.

In 2012 I will be looking for more varieties to add to this list.  I am still trialling Egyptian Walking Onions and broad beans.

A review of gardening in 2011 wouldn't be complete without mentioning my wormery.  It provided me with wonderful worm casts and the garden benefited so much from the worm tea.  If I didn't have my own wormery I would pay for worm tea.  So much more superior than bought organic fertiliser.

Next year I plan to be far more savy in July and August with my winter planting.  Its lovely having things growing in the winter garden and I think you should be able to graze and browse your garden no matter what month of the year it is.  I still have some winter salad growing and brassicas in my garden.

I think it so important to keep a relationship with your garden no matter what season and that includes eating/grazing from it as many days of the year as possible!