Gardening made up as we go along

Posts tagged ‘diary’

The Yuletide Holiday

The intention, over the long Yuletide break, was to finish off tidying up the garden, clean out those remaining pots which had last year’s perennials in, and get straight on with finishing the digging of the back bed. The reality, however, was that the sofa and fireside proved too attractive.

Despite that, I have started to use one of the garden-related presents I received. From K’s sister: a garden-themed notebook.

Garden notebook

It came from Papermash, ultimately from a Korean stationery company, and inside is a normal ruled notebook; but I do love the watercolour cover. I’m going to use it as a garden diary notebook, so that I can write down what I’ve noticed when I notice it, and what I’ve done when I’ve done it, without having to come online and come here to make a note. So far it has but one entry, from last Wednesday, when I noticed the first garlic plant poking its shoot up above the surface of the soil. So far there is still only one shoot visible: I must have planted that clove rather shallower than the rest.

diary, garlic, notebook, record, recording, winter, yuletide

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The week in the garden

Since the last “week in the garden” post, we have:

  • Done nothing, because we went away on another holiday.

And, the garden hasn’t enjoyed it at all, although I have no idea what the weather was doing. Some of the beans are healthy, but some are rather withered and shrivelled. The spring onions, lovely and healthy a couple of weeks ago, are now looking fairly unrecoverable. The bolt-free coriander seeds we carefully sourced have come into flower, which makes me think it was probably too hot and dry to leave a container garden to its own devices for a week. On the bright side, the Swiss chard is happily sprouting up again with some vigour, when we thought we had harvested all we could get from it.

Still, we always said: after the September holiday we would start planning next year’s garden; start getting ready for the winter and working out our planting. Next weekend we start hacking back the perennials and working out how long it is worth keeping the beans and so on in their planters for; and after that we sit down with pen, paper, charts and calendars, working out what to plant when. So, coming up soon: some posts on how our garden is arranged, situated, and what we think we can do with the space.

autumn, coriander, diary, disaster, green bean, holiday, runner bean, scallion, spring onion, swiss chard

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The week(ish) in the garden

Since the last “week in the garden” post, we have:

  • Harvested the first green beans.

And, because we went away for a long weekend, that was about it. The garden didn’t take too kindly to us going away, either. Or, rather, it didn’t take too kindly to the weather: the combination of dry, hot days without us there for watering, followed by heavy rain, has not had good results. The spring onions have suffered in particular, and the runner beans have also had problems.

Back in the mists of time – well, August – before this blog had properly started, we sowed a few boxes of quick-growing things to give us some more produce into the autumn. As I mentioned then, I tried an experiment. All of the seeds were sowed into previously-used compost; and for each seed, I sowed one box into compost that had been used to grow peas, and one box into compost that hadn’t. It’s three-and-a-half weeks later now, and the results are pretty clear, at least for the radishes.

The Radish Experiment

The pea compost is, I’m fairly sure, the one on the right. Science!

bean, compost, diary, experiment, french bean, green bean, nitrogen, pea, radish, scallion, science, spring onion, weather

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The week in the garden

Not very much has been happening in the garden in the past couple of weeks. Although everything is still productive, now the peas have gone it feels as if things have started winding down for the winter already. Having said that, the beans are still going strong; we’re picking a good handful of runner beans every few days, with plenty more blossom coming, and the first green beans are nearly ready to pick. The sweet peas planted under the green beans are going well, too, some of them almost as high as the beans themselves.

Maybe part of the winding-down feel comes from the weather: lots of rain, with some very heavy downpours, which have broken a few stems. It’s also delayed our ongoing project to dig out the back bed, which we really wanted to have finished by now.

back bed, bean, diary, digging, green bean, runner bean, sweet pea, weather

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The week in the garden

This week we have:

  • Pulled up the pea plants, post-harvest, and dug them in to the back bed
  • Pulled up the English marigolds, and the rocket that had gone to seed
  • Re-sowed the boxes this freed up: two with radishes, two with rocket, and two with mixed salad leaves
  • Sowed the last of our Swiss chard seeds in a spare half-box.

In the name of Science, I sowed the new boxes in an experimental pattern. All of the boxes had the existing compost thoroughly turned over to dig in the roots that had been growing there before, then had extra compost added to top them up. For each of the three types of seeds, we sowed one box which had been growing peas, and one which had been growing something else. We’ll see if the nitrate-fixing effect of the pea roots is noticeable. My suspicion is: it won’t be, especially for fast-growing plants like the radishes, because the pea roots won’t rot down fast enough.

chard, diary, experiment, pea, radish, rocket, sowing, sowing plan, swiss chard

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