Foxgloves

I have always loved foxgloves, they are so bright and beautiful. We planted some seeds in the garden a while ago and this year they have come in to full bloom. A great opportunity to get the camera out and take some photos. 

Winter Salad Experiment - an update

About 7 weeks ago I decided I wanted to see if it was possible to grow salad indoors during the winter because frosts outside meant that there was a fairly limited supply of home grown veg. This week the seedlings finally looked strong enough to plant up! As you can see from the Lettuce plant above the seedlings have grown some lovely strong roots but they were starting to suffer a little from overcrowding. The most important thing when potting up seedlings is not to damage the stems (as this will kill the plant). Start by filling the pot or tray the seedling is going in to with compost and make a well in the soil for your new seedling. Support the seedlings with two fingers just below the leaves but keep the pressure of your fingers very gentle. Use a teaspoon or something similar to gently lever the roots out of the soil and then put gently in to a the well in the new pot. Carefully firm some soil around the plant so the stem is supported and all of the roots are buried. Put a few drops of water around the plant to wash the soil down and tap the pot very gently on a hard surface (this gets rid of any air gaps that will cause your roots problems). These tops that you can get for water bottles (which you can find in most good garden centres or online) are great because they allow you to drop or sprinkle water around your seedlings without the pressure being so hard you squash and break them!

 I have started using a new (to me) peat substitute called coir (the outer fibres of a cocunut shell). There are so many reasons not to use peat but finding a more eco-friendly alternative is not as easy as you might think. The coir comes in compacted blocks and by adding a few sachets of nutrients, a few litres or water and some vermiculite (and leaving for a couple of days) does seem to produce a lovely product. I will definitely be giving it a go and will report how it goes at the end of the season. One thing I like already is how little space it takes up for storage because it comes in compacted blocks. 

So the Chard, Rocket, salad plants and Spring Onions have been potted up and seem to be doing well. The Florence Fennel is also doing well and can probably be potted up in the next couple of weeks. The Spinach on the other hand has done nothing! No sign of life. So I am leaving it in the propagator for now but I think I am going to have to plant some more and see if we have more luck a second time. The salad crops can start to be sown outside soon and from that point will be planted every 4-6 weeks to provide food throughout the spring and summer.


This weekend we have also planted Butternut Squash, Broccoli and Cabbage seeds, as well as some of the annual flowers, Sweet Peas and some more Broad beans and Mange Tout. The temporary greenhouse is up and ready and the cold frame has been cleaned for the new season. It really does feel like spring is here and the ladybirds think so too; they are everywhere! :-)

It's spring in the garden

The spring flowers are really starting to come in to their own and the garden is full of birds! Last week I drew this picture of one of the blue tits that has been feeding from our bird feeder. I am going to try and catalogue the birds coming in to the garden in this way – which hopefully will also help me to learn to distinguish one from the other!

It has been a while since our last post but a combination of a week’s holiday and catching up with the spring cleaning means that we haven’t done much of interest. This weekend however we have finally started to work on the garden again. The beds have been dug ready for the coming year’s vegetables and the last of the winter vegetables are being used up. Still in the ground are a few swedes, parsnips, white cabbage, sprouts and leeks. The salad crops that we planted a few weeks ago (in our winter salad experiment) are doing well and I think next weekend will be a perfect time to pot them up. I also need to start planting the first seeds of the year.

Today we have spent a bit of time preparing the beds by digging out any weeds and stones and forking in the compost from last year’s grow bags. I have also done some weeding in the flower beds to get out the dandelions and nettles while they are still relatively small.  

I have always found it interesting that the best thing for a nettle sting is to rub a dock leaf on it and that (conveniently) dock leaves and nettles often grow together. This week I learnt a new fact about nettles from mum – apparently the first sting of the year (which I got today) genuinely does feel worse than later in the year because your body gets accustomed to the sting. So each time you are stung it hurts less than the last time - I still think I will be avoiding it at all costs but interesting fact none the less! 

A year in the garden

We spent yesterday in the garden tidying up the last of the annuals and trying to dig out all of the stinging nettles before the bulbs come up (a losing battle but I keep persevering). We live in a rented house but were lucky enough to find one that had a garden and a letting agent who was happy for us to use it! Anyway, whilst I was stood in the rain and had stopped for a break (having just banged my head on the bird feeders again - why do I never remember that they are there?) I tried to remember what the garden looked like just a year ago.

 This is what the garden looked like in September 2010:

Essentially a lawn, a dead apple tree and some paving slabs (oh and of course some stinging nettles). Over the winter we dug some borders around the edge of the lawn and bought some plant pots for the patio. We also made a cold frame to bring young plants on. We don’t have a greenhouse but luckily there is space in the house to germinate plants. Once established the seedlings can be moved to the to the cold frame (to make space for the next lot). The frame is made from wood and sterling board and the lid from polycarbonate sheeting.

This was very much a joint effort and we are still learning about ways to improve it. The frame needs some ventilation in calm weather (hence the lid being lifted by wood in the picture), it however needs to be closed in windy weather as the plants inside get damaged otherwise. Also we need to paint the inside white in order to allow more light to be reflected in to the frame (although tin foil stuck to the inside walls worked quite well as a temporary solution this year).

We had grown Lupins, Hollyhocks, Aquilegia and Delphiniums from seed at the end of 2009 that were still sitting in pots. So once the beds were dug in November (a little late but they seemed to take ok) we planted them out. We also started to buy seeds so that in the spring we could grow on our veg and flowers. It is much cheaper to grow plants from seed and we now had room to bring the young plants on.

Almost everything in the garden was grown from seed or cuttings and some of the plant pots are from recycled food containers. We grew the seedlings in cardboard toilet rolls to save on the number of plant pots we had to buy.

By June this year the garden was really flourishing:

We grew herbs in red IKEA waste paper bins and to our surprise this was a massive success. For some reason the slugs and snails did not seem to climb the pots so despite neighbouring pots having regular problems the herbs were ok! I don’t know whether it was the bright red colour or the slippery sides but even the Basil flourished with no slug problems at all for the whole summer! We will definitely do this again. Aphids became a huge problem in the summer demolishing the Lupins and Nasturtiums but my mum suggested spraying the plants with soap flakes diluted in water and this made a huge difference - thanks Mum!!!

The vegetables did quite well, well except for the butternut squash plants that grew about 3 m long and then died in a storm! L I think perhaps next time we need to plant them in a more sheltered spot. The carrots were huge and even at the end of the summer when we came to clear the bed there were about 1 kg of carrots left. We tried Florence Fennel for the first time and have discovered a new vegetable – so good in salads or griddled in some olive oil. The marrows just rotted on the plants but apparently this was a general problem this year. We had beetroot, spring onions, lettuce, rocket, chard, mange tout, broad beans and spinach consistently for several months having planted new seeds every couple of weeks or so. We will definitely grow these again because they were so easy to grow and it meant we had fresh vegetables all summer long.  

It has been so nice to watch the garden develop. Looking back at the photographs that we took when we moved in has reminded me just how little there was just over a year ago. There is still so much to do this year (if we can stay here – always a problem in a rented house). I am determined to try and get on top of the stinging nettles!

Flowers to last the winter

The days are drawing in and we had our first frost this week so the number of flowers in the garden has massively reduced. One of the only flowers in full bloom is our red Rudbeckia  (photographs I took early in the week can be seen in the borders of our blog atm).


I always miss having bunches of flowers in the house when autumn comes. It seems a shame to buy flowers from the supermarket that have been flown for miles and will only last a week or two. So this year we chose to grow some flowers that we could dry and have in a vase all winter long. Here is the result - a fairly rustic bunch of flowers but beautiful none the less and they will stay fresh all winter long.

We have included Helichrysums, Statice, Alliums, Cornflowers, Lavender and Dill flowers. We dried them in our airing cupboard (but any dark and dry space will do). The cornflowers seemed to bleach sometimes and weren't the most successful but the rest of the flowers seem to have kept their colour amazingly. I think for a more elegant look next year we might do extra vases with only one type of flower in - having said that I quite like the hedgerow look we have ended up with! :-)