Page 4 of 7
Posted in Garden Diary, Photobloggery, Practicalities, The Old Garden In Bristol on Monday, May 14th 2012 (10.31 PM).
Never trust anything you read, especially if it is on the back of a seed packet. “Self-supporting if sown in a block”, it says on the back of the packet of peas I’ve been sowing for the past couple of months. Self-supporting if sown in a block. Now, I admit, the pea stems aren’t exactly lying flat on the ground, but they have lurched rather drunkenly over to one side, the well-grown stems from the first batch completely swamping the later ones. I have, rather belatedly, added some string to prop everything up and get everything growing a bit more upright. I’m not too sure how these peas are doing: the first batch may have plenty of leaf and tendril, but there is no sign of any sort of flower yet.
Both batches of potatoes are well up now and have completed earthing up – the second batch with a few sprigs of leaves showing, the first batch with a good head of foliage. The leaves of this year’s variety are, initially, a beautiful deep maroon in colour.
I was hoping that the plants would retain the colour as they grow. As the leaves get larger, however, they fall back to a more conventional deep green, with only the midrib and some of the larger veins keeping the red pigment. There is no sign yet, touch wood, of the leafhoppers which plagued our potatoes last year.
Two weeks ago, I sowed the main batch of courgette seeds, and was rather wary. We’ve not tried to grow them before, and I’ve heard stories of people having lots of trouble with them this year. However, in exactly 7 days every seed in the batch had germinated and was showing itself above the surface. I’ve killed off one as it was showing signs of rot, but the rest seem to be going well. They have started hardening up, and before they’re three weeks old should be ready for planting out.
One last thing for today: if you read Alys Fowler’s advice column in the Guardian Weekend magazine, you might have noticed last Saturday’s query about mossy containers. My mossy containers, that is: that was my letter! In particular, the container with our Swiss chard plants in, which developed a thick green carpet last autumn which didn’t seem to bother the plants at all. I shall stop worrying now that the moss might be bad for them.
courgette, pea, potato, swiss chard
Posted in Garden Diary, Photobloggery, Practicalities, The Old Garden In Bristol on Sunday, April 29th 2012 (1.59 PM).
It rained all last weekend; and since planting up the runner beans on Tuesday the rain has been essentially continuous. So I’m getting somewhat behind with the gardening, and getting more and more depressed about the state of the place. Gardening has been limited to poking the camera lens through the kitchen door, which is an angle I don’t normally try. The curly parsley decided, when the weather was hot over Easter, that it was time to bolt into flower. So far its flowers have not yet come out: maybe the rain has made it regret its decision.
From that angle, the garden looks rather lush. It doesn’t feel that way when you’re standing in the middle of it. Moreover, the wet weather has prompted the local slugs and snails to mount a full-on attack of chewing. The garlic and fennel are too strongly-flavoured, but the runner beans and lettuces have survived a major hit, some of the pea plants are just hanging on, and a tray of coriander seedlings was completely destroyed, not a leaf left. Last night I went out twice, armed with scissors, and killed about eight slugs and five snails, stabbing the snails thoroughly and snipping the slugs in half. Well, it’s better for the rest of the garden than poison, and it definitely kills them before they can eat any more.
coriander, lettuce, parsley, pea, pest, rain, runner bean, slug, snail, spring, weather
Posted in Garden Diary, The Old Garden In Bristol on Wednesday, April 25th 2012 (11.06 PM).
The runner bean seedlings, having reached several inches in height, have gone into the ground. I’m quietly pleased with them. Despite what I said at the time, I wasn’t entirely sure how well the seeds we had saved from the last few bean plants would turn out, as some of them didn’t look to be in wonderful condition. Nevertheless, all of the runner beans we have sowed so far seem to have germinated happily; the green bean success rate is about 60%, which isn’t too bad either.
Last night, when the runner beans were planted out, was positively balmy. I woke up to a rainstorm, and had to rescue the next batch of pea seedlings from complete drowning. Still, at least the beans will have been watered in well.
green bean, planting, planting out, runner bean, seed saving, weather
Posted in Decorative, Photobloggery, The Old Garden In Bristol on Sunday, April 22nd 2012 (11.52 AM).
A month ago, I posted a photo of a rather lonely solitary rosemary flower, as our small bush was just starting to come into flower. Ever since, as blossom erupted up and down each branch of the rosemary plant, I’ve been trying to make a better photo of it. None of the photos I’ve taken, though, has really managed to properly capture the beautiful deep violet-blue of its petals. In all of them, even those taken in the brightest sunlight, the colour seems rather pale and washed-out compared to what I can see myself outside in the garden. The local honeybees are loving the rosemary, too. Last year it was rare to see a honeybee at Symbolic Towers; I assumed there weren’t any hives nearby. There still aren’t many to be seen, but they are now regular visitors – whereas so far this year bumblebees have been a relatively rare sight.
Still, I have pushed on and tried to get the rosemary petals on-screen, before the flowers all turn to seed. Here’s my best attempt:
Not my best photo, but it gives at least an impression of the deep, strong colour I can see with my eyes. In the foreground, you can see the flower stalks some of the chives are sending up; and in the background the feathery foliage of one of the fennel plants.
blossom, chives, fennel, flowering, photography, rosemary
Posted in Garden Diary, Practicalities, The Old Garden In Bristol on Wednesday, April 18th 2012 (10.20 PM).
After being lazy for far too long, this week I have finally managed to get our second batch of potatoes into the ground. Another potato bin, the same as the first, was acquired from a certain Swedish-Dutch furniture giant; its base was thoroughly perforated; and I delved into the cupboard under the stairs to find the bag of Red Duke Of York seed potatoes we bought from the Riverside over a month ago now. Unfortunately, I discovered a bit of a problem.
Some authorities on potatoes, you may already know, suggest chitting your tubers before planting. Leave them in a suitable spot, undisturbed, to get to work growing shoots, to give them a bit of a head start when they get in the ground. Other authorities say they’ve found chitting more trouble than it’s worth, because the chitted shoots are rather too prone to damage and can easily break off, leaving a potato with no more eyes and no more chance of growth. All of these authorities say that: if you do chit, plant the tubers when the shoots are about a couple of inches long.
Well, with our second batch of potatoes for this year we didn’t get any choice in the matter. Going under the stairs to find them, I discovered that they had managed to thoroughly chit themselves, all around each other and through the sides of the bag they were in, to a good six or seven inch length. Getting plantable potatoes out of the bag, without breaking the shoots off was an incredibly delicate job; and I hate to think how much I damaged them when backfilling their planting holes and firming them in. Still, most of my earthing up has already effectively been done, I suppose. It remains to be seen if any potatoes will result.
Nevertheless, the first batch of potatoes is doing well, with a good showing of richly-coloured dark maroon-green leaves coming up from at least two of the tubers. The coriander seeds I mentioned in the last post have germinated well, after about 10 days on the windowsill; and the runner beans I sowed at the same time are now all a good few inches in height. It will be tempting, if we get a warm Sunday in the next few weeks, to get my tripod out and try doing a time-lapse video of the runner bean vines coiling their way up their poles.
bean, chitting, coriander, planting, potato, runner bean, sowing
Posted in Experimentation, Garden Diary, Planning, The Old Garden In Bristol on Saturday, April 7th 2012 (9.44 PM).
The long Easter weekend: time to catch up on the planting schedule, and get some digging done. In the past couple of weeks, we have:
- Planted more peas.
- Planted green beans and runner beans, to germinate on the windowsill
- Planted some coriander to grow from seed
It does feel as if I should be doing an awful lot more, given the season and the warming of the weather. It doesn’t help that Symbolic Towers has, literally, nothing more than a single windowsill for plant germination, and despite last week’s warm spell the ground still isn’t warm enough for outdoor plants to be moving very quickly.
The potatoes are springing up, though, with lovely dark red foliage. Unfortunately only two of the tubers seem to have grown, so I slyly slipped another into the depths of the container at the start of this week. No sign of it coming up yet; but it means that the earthing-up has become rather uneven, the soil inside the container now having a mountainous slope to it.
The first of the seeds we saved last autumn have been planted. Of a batch of six green beans, only one came up: it has been planted outside, with poles to climb up, and is looking a little lonely. Hopefully the next batch of green beans – put under plastic to germinate this time – will have a greater success rate. At least the bamboo poles give the garden some height, something that has been missing since last year’s batch of beans was finally cut down last November. The second batch of peas has now been planted out too; the first are a tangled mass of interlocking tendrils quickly climbing up each other’s arms.
What will be coming next? Well, there are still more potatoes to plant. Moreover, with the drier weather I’ve been able to restart work on digging up the back bed. I think I mentioned that project back when this blog first started: basically, as the walled bed at the back of the garden was full of broken glass and bindweed roots, we decided to dig it all out completely and sift through all the earth; I didn’t fancy, some time in the future, to plunge my fingers into the ground without thinking and stab them on a pointy shard. It has taken a while, but the end of the digging-up project is starting to come into sight; and when it does, maybe next month, we will have an awful lot more growing space to play with. So much, in fact, I’m not entirely sure what we will do with it all. Maybe it’s time I started looking into perennial vegetables that don’t mind a slightly shady spot.
back bed, coriander, green bean, pea, potato, runner bean, sowing, sowing plan, spring
Posted in Garden Diary, Photobloggery, The Old Garden In Bristol on Thursday, March 22nd 2012 (10.09 PM).
Back in January, I mentioned that all the rosemary in Southville seemed to be blooming. I said at the time that our own rosemary bush seemed to be slowly coming into bud: two months later, it is starting to flower. On Sunday, I noticed one solitary bloom:
Today, there are rather more: I will have to try to get a less lonely-looking shot.
Yesterday, I spotted that the peas sown last Saturday, and the radish seeds sown back on the 11th, are both starting to poke themselves above the ground now. Looking back, I apparently didn’t mention the radishes when I planted them. Last year we grew several batches from a variety packet called “Rainbow Mixed”: they were good for science experiments but not much else, as almost all the plants we grew produced lots of foliage but hardly any root. From a box of radishes, we would get maybe one or two which had roots worth eating. This year, then, I’ve picked a different variety, a German type called “Ostergruß Rosa”, sold in this country under the Eden Project’s brand name. Supposedly they should turn out with long, French Breakfast-style roots. We shall have to wait and see.
blossom, flowering, pea, radish, rosemary
Posted in Experimentation, Garden Diary, Retrospective, The Old Garden In Bristol on Saturday, March 17th 2012 (3.59 PM).
A bit nippy out in the garden today: most certainly not as springlike as other days, with dark clouds massing overhead. Not at all like the warm, insect-filled garden of last weekend. Still, I did the things I meant to do: replanted the pea seedlings in their final location, sowed more peas to germinate on the windowsill, scattered a few “surprise” annual flower seeds in spare corners, and retreated to the sofa before the rain broke.
The pea seedlings have, like last year, gone in a box to stand on the garden wall. I should have transplanted them earlier: they were getting rather stuck in their tiny modules. The next batch of peas will start their hardening-up rather earlier, so they can be transplanted outside rather earlier too. The fennel I repotted last week is looking nicely at home, plenty of feathery new growth coming from the heart of both plants. The sweet peas are not so happy, still looking rather listless and floppy, so I have given them a bit more scaffolding to climb up: horizontal strings wrapped around their cane pyramid.
I said last time that I would explain a bit more about the fennel, and why we decided to get some. It is, essentially, to make up for last year. We tried to grow dill last year, and it was a bit of a failure.
If you look at a packet of dill seeds, you see a rather idealised picture: a big pot with a big dill plant inside it, leaves pouring down like a waterfall. Of course, if you’re growing dill for food, that’s what you need, because you need a good bunch of the individual fronds to put in your gravadlax. However, trying to grow dill from seed, that wasn’t what we got at all. The first plants we sowed in modules and tried to pot on: that failed entirely. The second plants we sowed in their final location; they put out a few leaves, then immediately bolted to a few feet high and flowered. Hardly any leaves at all, not even enough to make a single meal out of. The flower heads are pretty: finely-divided cadmium-yellow umbels; but, to be honest, I like eating dill too much to be satisfied with that. Why did it happen? I suspect the pot we put them in was rather too shallow, and the plants’ roots felt rather too cramped for comfort.
Now, in all the books I’ve read, it says: “don’t grow dill and fennel together”. They might give a reason, too, but if they have I haven’t absorbed it, come away only with the idea that they don’t work well together for some reason. I picture the real explanation being like primary school parents’ evening: “honestly, we love little Fennel, and he’s fine on his own, but when him and Dill get together they do tend to egg each other on. Mrs Anderson still can’t bear the sight of pencil shavings, and it was four months ago now…” Anyway, whatever the reason is, as we were trying to grow dill last year, we thought that fennel must be avoided at all costs. As I’m now completely exasperated with trying to get dill to grow, this year it is the fennel’s turn. We don’t have room for more than a couple of bulbs, so we won’t get more than a single side dish from it at the end of the season – fennel gratin is delicious, by the way. I’m more interested to see if its leaves can be used like dill, or if they will end up as purely structural plants for the summer – hopefully they will give the garden a more delicate sense of height than things-up-canes can provide.
dill, fennel, pea, sweet pea
Posted in Garden Diary, Photobloggery, The Old Garden In Bristol on Monday, March 5th 2012 (7.23 PM).
The peas planted last weekend were showing the first signs of poking up above the soil five days later, on Friday. By yesterday, the seedlings appeared to be coming on well.
Those peas are the ones we sowed for planting out in the garden later; there is no sign of the variety we sowed for pea shoots yet. There is also no sign, apart from a little ground disturbance, of the seeds I sowed outdoors. Of course, the peas, inside on the kitchen windowsill, have something of an advantage. Other things are doing well, though. I said just over a week ago that the first shoots of chives had started to appear. They have been coming on fast: getting on for a couple of inches, they are now big enough to photograph.
chives, pea, seedling, spring, sprouting
Posted in Experimentation, Garden Diary, The Old Garden In Bristol on Wednesday, February 29th 2012 (5.51 PM).
In the last post, I mentioned that although the rocket is in bloom already, there weren’t any hoverflies about yet. The very next day, I saw the first I’ve seen this year. Orange and black, it had gone before I had chance to grab the camera. It was warm in Sunday’s sunshine, and I could occasionally also hear bumblebees nearby – presumably queens looking for a nesting spot. The only one I saw was a good twenty feet away, not quite close enough to attempt an identification.
I was in the garden, because I’d decided that, with the weather being so warm, it was about time I started getting some seeds in the ground. Don’t want to leave it too late, after all: last year, because of when we started, we didn’t exactly grow the mixture of things we wanted. So Sunday was spent clearing compost out of all the pots which had had last year’s annuals in, and sowing a very few new seeds. In one pot: a mixture of calendulas and lettuce. A bit of an experimental mixture, and I’m not at all sure I have given them enough space to get along. Indoors, on the kitchen window sill: peas, germinating inside to avoid tempting the local wildlife. Peas are damn tasty, after all.
calendula, hoverfly, lettuce, little gem, marigold, pea, sowing, spring, wildlife
