Grow Your Own Magazine

9 days after sowings of beans in 3" pot covered in poly bag and left in pantry to germinate. Not impressed as some beans have rotted (Cosse Violette & Minidor) while Cupidon and Teepee haven't exactly sprouted if they haven't rotted already. Yard long beans never fails, extremely reliable and good with germination. Runner beans fared so so if not, looking too good. Only Fingourmet and Longio beans (thanks to Choclare) did brilliantly. Mistake learnt is not to cover with polythene bag and leave in pantry, too hot and humid for rotting. Will simply leave them on window sill, perhaps with just 30 minutes soaking but only because it's end March.

Bigger seeds tend to suffer more from rotting in heated propagator and warm pantry (as has happened with Sweet Pea). Pre-germination another option.

Have noticed that Brassica gets leggy more than any other vegetables even with fulltime daylight given outdoors. Might be best to plant them in their final bed as soon as I possibly can (early-mid March) with some form of protection.

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Food for Free

Oh so happy today ,OH put me electric in the greenhouse so tried out my 2kw heater last night, with success. So I umplugged the heater and plugged in the radio & spent the rest of the day potting on toms, peppers, & my raddish have produced their second leaf shoud I plant them out yet under cloche, will they survive ?
GOt me a tub of the chicken pellets from morrisons 2day £4.99 10kg,and mixed it into most of my beds, added growmore so hope to have some success this year

bought myself a pomegranet tree and 4 rhubarb crown for woolworths for a total of 6.95

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---) CARL (----
ILFRACOMBE
NORTH DEVON

a seed planted today makes a meal tomorrow!

www.freewebs.com/carlseawolf

now in blog form ! UPDATED 01 / 04 / 08

As we've had frost for the past few days, I rigged up a kind of homemade cloche thingy - basically some fleecy blankets supported with some old fruit boxes - works fine but my lovely neighbour came round (the one that built me my raised beds) and he's now in the process of making me some foldaway supports with hooks so I can cover up if I need to, but then fold away easily and quickly. My broccolli I started off on kitchen roll only a few days ago has started to sprout as have the peppers, but the chillis were looking kind of mouldy so I chucked them away. Still no sign of my spuds, globe artichokes or spring onions and my pomegranite tree is still doing a very good impression of a stick!! LOL

been involved in a bad car accident, swerved to avoid a fox on way to get some growbags and stuff, car ended up on side, I have been cut out of car and been to hospital, suffering with severe whiplash, car is a write off


Feeling very miserable

Oh poor you allotment lady just take it easy for a while, years ago i had whiplash and it takes a few days to come out fully, I hope you will feel better soon.

Today I went to the lottie and pkanted 3 courgette plants and some cabbage plants
( thought i would buy plants instead of seeds) struggled to out netting over cabbages so didnt do much had to get home in time for daughter to get home from school.

Finally got round to planting my Asian Pear tree , and some iris that have been sitting in a bucket all winter (amazingly they are still alive!). Also planted some Vales Emerald spuds in pots, some Ikarus Sunflowers in pots and some Gypsophilia in the flower bed. Am itching to plant all my other veg seeds but trying to resist until back from holls.

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Newbie,
keen but clueless

Unloaded a trailer load of vintage manure and mixed it with lottie compost and filled another raised bed wih it. This was prompty planted up with mammoth improved onion seedlings.

On another plot rainbow chard was planted out, mammoth red onion plants went in too as did some flat leafed parsley.

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Kindest regards, David.

http://pigletsplots.blogspot.com/
updated lots - Sunday 28th at 1640hrs

Planted a small bed of onion sets at home and then dug third bed at the lottie. Planted a few Anya spuds there - first planting on new allotment!

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Earth laughs in flowers. Ralph Waldo Emerson

www.vegheaven.blogspot.com

Updated October 12th

Alotment lady, hope you are feeling a little better. please let us know how you are.

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And when you're back stops aching,
And you're hands begin to harden.
You will find yourself a partner,
In the glory of the garden.

Rudyard Kipling.

Spent two hours clearing out my lottie shed that was absolutely FULL of massive spiders.. shudder.

Dug the second bed on new lottie, these first two will be for spuds.

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Sowed Broad beans, Sugar snaps, Shallots, Early PSB, Autumn SB and Parsley seeds, also planted Globe Artichokes and Pink and White Liatris. Good day!

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Always aim for the best result possible not the best possible result

sorry to hear about your accident allotmentlady, take it easy. Went shopping for a new fireplace today, also managed to scrounge from the shop a 5ft wooden container that the they was throwiing out, I told them it will be grate for growing my carrots in. Got a strange look from them but hey ,since starting gardening I've found that you scrounge anything that would be useful to us gardeners!!!

i have planted my 2 corgette seedlings into there own larger pots. sown 6 more tom thumb lettuces.

Just in case anyone thinks this allotment lark is always an ejoyable bed full of roses, think again.
Been to the allotment today and had a sh*t of a day!
After being ecstatic about progress yesterday, today was a dead loss. I had a few highlights like buying six strawberry plants from Aldi cheaply and buying a bag of compost reasonably cheaply, but from there it went rapidly down hill!
Bought some glasing clips, and ess shaped bits to join glass as well as a new pack of nuts and bolts for my greenhouse project to find I won't have enough!
Took me ages to get all bolts in and tightened.
Sowed some parsnips on cloth, sweet peppers plus chillie peppers and also swedes in a tray.
Started to disassembel the rickety greenhouse to pillage the glass. The glass was puttied and siliconed in places and I broke quite a few sheets getting it out.
It now looks like I won't have enough glass and what I have is all different sizes. Even though I'm off work this week, I won't be going to the lottie tomorrow as I'll finish up smashing all the glass, so I think I'll just 'chill' and do something boriing like wash my fleet of old wrecks and do a bit much needed maintenance on them.
That way I should be able to go to allotment on Saturday refreshed and raring to go!

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My Majesty made for him a garden anew in order
to present to him vegetables and all beautiful flowers.- Offerings of Thutmose III to Amon-Ra (1500 BCE)

Made a start on clearing last year's brassica bed yesterday, removing old plants and taking up the ground cover sheet. Forked up a few clumps of grass that had grown up through tears in the ground sheet, and contemplated digging around the edges where more grass had encroached. Then it started to rain. And hail. And rain even harder

By this time I was down in the high street, cowering under my brolly and thinking of getting a bus home, but then it stopped and the sun came out with every appearance of wanting to stay. So I went back to the lottie and spent a very pleasant hour, partly cutting down the old raspberry canes but mostly sitting in the sun and chatting to my neighbours

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Small Plot? No Problem! - my blog about growing organic veg

Yesterday I went to the garden centre and spent vouchers (leaving prezzie from old job) on potting compost, general purpose compost, growbags and a few mini plants and broad bean seeds (Sutton, Longpod) just because I liked the look of them. And a big pink trug. There are more vouchers and more growbags to be bought but there's a limit to what I can get in my car!

I met up with allotment-mate and we discussed growing plans and jobs needing done. So my old bath is going to be the carrot & salad onion bed. Glad I was too lazy to organise a skip when I got a new bath! Her old kitchen sink will be the herb bed.

Today I sowed...
3 kinds of cauliflower
2 kinds of cabbage
swede
calabrese
3 kinds of lettuce
2 kinds of tomato
chili pepper
3x courgette
3x winter squash
florence fennel
basil
parsley
16x pea (meteor) in peat pots

I'm going to try successional sowings of lots of different things this year to avoid last year's problem of having 20 cabbages of one variety all ready at the same time. So I have sown the brassicas, lettuces and fennel in modules. 5 modules each with 2 seeds in to be thinned to one per module.

And for the garden: I planted 5 dahlia tubers in separate pots, 6 montbretia in one pot because it looks good in a clump, 10 trailing begonias for baskets.

Spent a good hour blogging and logging what I've sown on excel because I'm a geek.

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You are a child of the universe,
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
Max Ehrmann, Desiderata

blog: http://allyheebiejeebie.blogspot.com/ and my (basic!) page: http://www.allythegardener.co.uk/

Friday today, yesterday transplanted the 5 Feb sown Broccoli (Autumn Spear) from the awfully crowded fruit punnet to the raised bed although that's not their final place so planted them close together, about 2-3 inches spacing (not that I'm recommending this to anyone but I have space shortage in my garden). I will test the broccoli's limits when I may transplant or thin them out again to see if that will have any impact on growth or even the final crop. There's always the broccoli shop affordability to fall back on, not exactly the end of humanity .

I hadn't meant to sow the broccoli this early but was simply testing the seeds viability ahead of recommended sowing times as the seeds was bought from car boot sales with Jul 2007 expiry date. How is it that the germination of dubious seeds zoomed 100% ahead of T&M newest packets of F1 cabbage and cauli AYR seeds? Running out fast on cabbage seeds, next time I won't be buying F1 seeds as they don't provide enough seeds to allow for errors.

Mulched around the broccoli plantets with grass cutting to protect the roots from cold/frost, covered with a single layer of Wilko's fleece (should have been double layer but forgot to cut it right first time), then covered over with bubblewrap plastic lying around. The ideas only came up after reading up on ways of protecting your plants from the Net. Bubblewrap is only for night time protection, might be too hot & steamy in the daytime.

Hand pollinated the dwarf peach Bonanza in the greenhouse using art paintbrush although not exactly sure whether I'm doing it correctly, then again I can't be more wrong than a pollen-clueless bee. Branches are smothered in pink blooms by this time of end March, with little or no disturbance from strong winds or rain water for 'leaf curl' syndrome.

Potted 4 seedlings of possibly Kabocha squash that had sprouted in the kitchen compost bin. They were loads more seedlings and these were supposed to be rejected seeds from last sorting! There were also lots of pale, thin pepper seedlings, most likely supermarket's bell peppers.

As for today, potted the squash (TS Sweet Potato) that had finally germinated ahead of other squashes in 12 days from pre-germination in k-roll method. When it sprouts, a tail sticks out of the pointy end of the seed. Though I peeled off very carefully the rest of the outer seed skin, I wonder if I should have continued leaving in the damp k-roll until all skin off or that I should have left the skin on, in the pot of compost.

Pre-germinated in k-roll Parsnips had also sprouted after 12 days (from 10 days onwards), looking like tadpole with tail sticking out from pointy end of seeds. Acceptable germination rate of over 60% for seeds bought last year (stated on packet as 'packed for year end Sep 2008). Sowed both sprouted and unsprouted seeds in 2" cell tray/insert about 3-4 seeds per cell. Didn't realise these cell trays are so flimsy so cut the 40 cells into 20 cells for more stability (that one could buy their matching sturdy seed tray, what a rip off ). Hopefully I can get the seedlings planted out in their final bed before the roots reach the bottom.

More will be added later subject to progress....

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Food for Free

Stood looking out of window at teaming rain and strong winds, wondering what I could do and wishing I'd kept my sowing for today instead of yesterday

Chris

Did another dozen 'germinated parsnip in a loo-roll' things. Made some celeriac soup from the celeriacs given to me on the allotment yesterday. The chap asked if I liked them - he was clearing his bed - and I said they made a cracking soup, as I helped myself to a couple. He came round to ask how I made it - I gave him the recipe and permission to raid the bay tree on the way past. Sharing's what it's all about!

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Earth laughs in flowers. Ralph Waldo Emerson

www.vegheaven.blogspot.com

Updated October 12th

Aching and feeling very sorry for myself, just a nightmare with the insurers!

Got plenty of gardening mags and books, making plans and having time to reflect on what next to do.
This weather is lousy..... need a few days of drying weather for the ground before i can rotovate......well gordon can rotovate I will delegate!

Thanks to all for the lovely comments and messages.