|
Post by bjd on May 8, 2023 14:27:16 GMT
Perhaps your summer will be better than last year, Mick. No hosepipe bans and no very high temperatures.
I was just moving a few things around -- as one does -- and the soil is so dry and dusty. Rain forecast for tomorrow and we really need it.
|
|
|
Post by tod2 on May 14, 2023 12:00:02 GMT
Our new heightened vegetable beds - Much better on the back!
|
|
|
Post by mickthecactus on May 14, 2023 12:01:15 GMT
Serious envy....
|
|
|
Post by bixaorellana on May 14, 2023 13:51:37 GMT
Wow ~ those are impressive!
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on May 15, 2023 16:58:28 GMT
You may have to start roadside sales. I saw plenty of those when I was in South Africa.
|
|
|
Post by mickthecactus on May 15, 2023 17:22:07 GMT
A lot of veg for just the 2 of you.
|
|
|
Post by lugg on May 15, 2023 19:51:22 GMT
Our new heightened vegetable beds - Much better on the back! Nice ...here ( in my neck of the woods ) we tend to make them out of old railway sleepers or other redundant wood
|
|
|
Post by tod2 on May 16, 2023 15:56:23 GMT
A lot of veg for just the 2 of you. Definitely Mick but we have a large domestic staff that assists with the growing of these beautiful vegetables and they get a good look in for sure. My son who lives next door gets whatever they desire and then my neighbor on the otherside of our property also gets loaded with lettuce and cabbage etc.
|
|
|
Post by mickthecactus on May 16, 2023 16:15:49 GMT
In which case you do need it.
|
|
|
Post by cheerypeabrain on May 16, 2023 18:56:48 GMT
I was out walking the dog last week when I stopped to admire a garden. There's a lot of social housing in Leicester, housing associations and council owned. A lot of the front gardens are neglected, some are used just for parking or the awful trampolines people buy these days. Anyway..this particular garden is loved. The residents have installed a little solar fountain over a tiny wildlife pond, the plants are crammed in and a small pvc greenhouse nestles by the door. The garden is very small but there is a patio with a table and chairs...they've put up a garden fence to divide their plot from the rest of the terrace..it's lovely. I saw the owner of the garden and complemented her on the lovely area...We got chatting about gardening and this year she's growing veg for the first time...so I'm taking her a few tomato and cucumber plants tomorrow. So far she only has one tomato plant and there are 8 people living in the tiny house (mostly children). What made me even more impressed is the fact that the family have also cleared the weeds from a patch of wasteland facing their garden, and have planted a magnolia there. Gardening is brilliant.
|
|
|
Post by mickthecactus on May 16, 2023 19:03:40 GMT
That certainly is. Good on her.
|
|
|
Post by bjd on May 16, 2023 19:28:16 GMT
That's nice of you, Cheery. With any luck, some of her neighbours will realize that it can be pleasant to have a nice garden and will improve their own yards.
|
|
|
Post by bixaorellana on May 16, 2023 23:07:27 GMT
What a lovely story, Cheery. All gardeners are artists in their own ways, and that family even more so, in the face of difficulties.
|
|
|
Post by tod2 on May 18, 2023 16:13:18 GMT
I have to admire people using all the little space they have. Most people who live out in the countryside don't bother with trying to grow any vegetables because the neighbors goats and cows just come in and demolish any greenery UNLESS they have an elderly relative stuck at home to oversea the wandering animals. There is no such thing as gardening Lots which people in England are very familiar with.
|
|
|
Post by mickthecactus on May 22, 2023 20:06:26 GMT
Finished earthing up potatoes in pots and planted 2 patio tomatoes in one big pot. Variety Plumbrella which I haven’t grown before.
Tomorrow I’ll be sowing lettuce and maincrop rainbow carrots in pots.
Just hardening off the tomatoes to plant out in a few days time.
Beetroot and Chard have germinated and early broad beans in flower. Planted more broad beans yesterday.
|
|
|
Post by tod2 on May 23, 2023 15:56:32 GMT
I can see a mouthwatering election of fresh veg coming up Mick!
|
|
|
Post by mickthecactus on May 23, 2023 16:10:58 GMT
Now the weather has warmed up we do have a chance.
|
|
|
Post by tod2 on May 25, 2023 16:03:41 GMT
Well it must be a global warming as we reached 29C today after bitterly cold snow capped mountains..
|
|
|
Post by mickthecactus on May 26, 2023 18:49:18 GMT
Planted out the tomatoes and staked the broad beans.
The germination of the chard and beetroot has been very patchy because of the weather so I need to do some resowing tomorrow.
My box of cut and come again lettuce has been dumped because it was full of greenfly. So that has been resown.
Maincrop rainbow carrots sown yesterday.
|
|
|
Post by tod2 on May 28, 2023 14:13:58 GMT
I was watching a YouTube gent advising the best way to sow peas. He had some really good tips which I will follow this week when I sow peas where my green beans have come to an end. Tip number one was dropping two seeds into 1 inch deep holes, so that when two come up you can transfer one of them to a blank space or simply take a scissors and nip the smaller out. Also the nitrogen feed was important as to when one should apply it. I'll give it a go and see what happens as I love peas!
|
|
|
Post by mickthecactus on Jun 2, 2023 15:14:44 GMT
Sweet corn and courgettes planted today.
|
|
|
Post by bixaorellana on Jun 2, 2023 16:07:42 GMT
Mick, you have been busy! Hope you're completely recovered from the sore throat. Tip number one was dropping two seeds into 1 inch deep holes, so that when two come up you can transfer one of them to a blank space or simply take a scissors and nip the smaller out. Have any of you gardeners experimented with no-dig planting? I had to use that method in my yard in Mandeville, Louisiana, across the lake from New Orleans. Builders had trucked in dense red clay from Mississippi to build on. Shortly after we moved into that house, the area had 6' (feet, not inches!) of rain in January alone. I mostly had a blank slate to work with, but having seen established plants rotting & dying all around, I was stymied as to where to begin. A nice older lady who ran a plant nursery in the area told me not to dig. She said the result would be to create bowls that would hold water & wind up rotting anything planted there. I got a couple of flatbeds of rotted horse manure trucked in & planted right on top of that. It was extremely successful. This was for an ornamental garden, so I've never grown vegetables this way, although I hope to soon. I recently read about Charles Dowding, who produces £25,000 worth of produce on 1/3 of an acre in Somerset, England. This is excerpted from a NYTimes article about him, which I won't even try to link, but ~~ Tilling doesn’t build soil structure, he contends; it destroys it. He advises that we follow nature’s example, “just leaving the soil alone as much as possible and feeding the surface with compost, so that the soil life does the work for us.”
Transforming an existing bed or another largely weed-free area to no dig typically requires nothing more than raking the surface level and spreading a two-inch layer of compost.
To turn a piece of lawn into a bed, first mow it and then spread overlapping sheets of brown cardboard. Moisten the cardboard and top the surface with about three inches [or more] of compost.
“You haven’t got to wait for the weeds underneath to die because your new plants, or seeds, start growing in the surface compost.”
By the time they’re rooting deeper, the cardboard will be decomposing, along with the lawn or weeds underneath. “And the soil will be opening up for receiving the roots of your new plants,” he said.
The usual objection he hears is that people don’t have enough compost for that initial application. Buying a load of well-aged compost is your best investment, he suggested, adding this reminder: The no-dig gardener will be buying no other amendments — and that means no more fertilizers.Here are some links, if this is of interest to anyone: This article & podcast is from the woman who did the NYT interview. No-dig vegetable planting in April, May, & June in England: vegsoc.org/lifestyle/spring-on-the-plot-by-charles-dowding-no-dig-gardener-and-writer/Dowding has many youtube videos. There is a clickable Table of Contents, irritatingly displayed in pale gray type on a white background (pet peeve).
|
|
|
Post by mickthecactus on Jun 2, 2023 16:37:20 GMT
I haven’t tried it but I’m sure it works.
As it happens, I enjoy digging and the final result pleases me. I get good results so I shall carry on as I am.
|
|
|
Post by bixaorellana on Jun 2, 2023 16:42:02 GMT
I also enjoy digging -- seems an essential part of gardening. However, I have a situation now, somewhat similar to the one I had in La., for which no-dig should be the answer.
|
|
|
Post by mickthecactus on Jun 2, 2023 16:55:06 GMT
The RHS site sees benefits for it but not necessarily better than the usual method.
|
|
|
Post by bjd on Jun 2, 2023 18:04:00 GMT
It seems to me that Dowding's no-dig method should work if you have a large space where you don't want to plant anything for over a year. Then you can do the cardboard+mulch to kill the weeds. But I don't see how it would work in a flower bed where there are already plants. In places where the soil is really lousy (sand), I did dig in some compost and leaves.
Anyway, I don't dig very much. While making the recent flower beds, I have just removed the grass, added some compost and planted. What I would like is to find decent mulch -- all I see here at the garden centre are bags of pine bark, which is not useful since my soil is already acid. I could buy large quantities of compost at the regional centre where all the garden refuse is taken and made into compost, but we have a small car and no trailer hitch so I don't see how I would get it home. And no, they don't deliver -- it's mostly used for municipal plantings in the various local towns.
|
|
|
Post by bixaorellana on Jun 2, 2023 23:34:40 GMT
When I made my garden in Mandeville, it was on a subdivision lot that was mostly lawn. There were five pin oaks(?) in front of the house that had to be taken out because they were dying -- probably because of the awful red clay that had been dumped over their roots. I had the compost delivered, spread it out where I wanted the main ornamental garden, & proceeded to plant. I can't remember if I tried to get out some of the grass first, or just smothered it with compost. In any event, I got lots of payback very quickly.
Hmmm. Would it be cost effective to rent a pickup truck for a few hours in order to get some of that municipal mulch, Bjd?
Wilmington, North Carolina, where I used to live, had a peanut packing plant. You could go over there with a pickup truck, back it under the hopper, and they'd fill it with peanut shells. It was the best mulch I ever had. Flash forward to when we moved up to the state to near the Virginia state line. That area also had a peanut packing plant, so I was happy to go over there & get some of the wonderful shell mulch. But this plant did not have nice clean shells. No, there was a good deal of residual peanut bits in the load, something I didn't know until a few days later. That's when the copious amounts I'd spread here & there on the property started generating flies -- lots and lots of disgusting buzzing flies. I was walking around the neighborhood with a friend & she asked if I'd noticed the sudden alarming number of flies in the neighborhood. I said no, that I hadn't noticed anything out of the ordinary, as I steered here away from the vicinity of my house
|
|
|
Post by bjd on Jun 3, 2023 6:46:10 GMT
Would it be cost effective to rent a pickup truck for a few hours in order to get some of that municipal mulch, Bjd? As I said before, there are almost no pickup trucks here, certainly not for rent. There is a place that rents heavy equipment to contractors but I don't need that much mulch and probably wouldn't want to drive it anyway.
|
|
|
Post by tod2 on Jun 3, 2023 10:17:53 GMT
Mr Tod keeps digging but now surrounds the plant - especially lettuce - with hay or wood shavings to prevent the soil splashing onto the plant. Where there is soil there are snails and worms climbing up. horrible for me but the birds still have to eat.....
|
|
|
Post by bixaorellana on Jun 4, 2023 0:06:23 GMT
As I said before, there are almost no pickup trucks here Just out of curiosity, where did you say that before?
|
|