All posts in category Vegetable Garden

Spring Seedlings

tomato seedlings

Early this morning I woke to sun streaming through the window, squinting my eyes to adjust to the light the warmth on my face felt good. I stood at the window for a while, taking in energy from the sun as I viewed our garden from above.

I made a mug of tea and checked on the seed trays (as you do). Tomato seedlings are growing strong and I could just make out signs of life pushing through the soil in the chilli tray. I’m pleased to have tomatoes and chillies on the grow but I will wait a couple of weeks at least before sowing anything else, the weather is set to turn colder.

A sullen wintry sky returned by early afternoon, along with the promise of heavy rain, gales and sleet for the weekend.

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by The Garden Smallholder on March 21, 2013  •  Permalink
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Posted by The Garden Smallholder on March 21, 2013

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Sowing Tomatoes and Chillies

sowing tomatoes and chillies

The first seeds of the year are tucked up in a warm light room in the house. We went for Tigerella tomatoes this year (a first for us) and Cayenne chillies which we’ve grown before and love. Tigerella tomatoes have striped skin hence their name and I’m particularly looking forward to using them in salads to add interest and colour. I have a thing for pretty salads, adding vibrant colours using edible flowers such as Viola. We’ve heard mixed reviews on the taste of Tigerella, some saying they’re bland but I guess we’ll judge that for ourselves. I have my eye on another variety of tomato called Black Krim, Seed Parade tempted me when I saw a photo of the fruits on their Facebook page. I might try Black Krim this year, if not then it’s going on my ever-growing list of things to try.

Rich is the chilli fan and head chef of our family, cooking with chillies regularly so we decided to grow as many plants as we have space for to save buying them so often. We went for Cayenne because they’re meant to be quicker to germinate than other chilli varieties (some taking up to a month or longer). Cayenne have the heat that Rich likes too, so it was an easy choice really.

Are you growing tomatoes or chillies this year?

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by The Garden Smallholder on March 11, 2013  •  Permalink
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Posted by The Garden Smallholder on March 11, 2013

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Chitting Potatoes at Last

chitting seed potatoes

I dragged myself away from cleaning the greenhouse yesterday and made my way to our local garden centre to buy seed potatoes and a few other things including onion sets. We’ve usually done this by now but if you’re a regular reader of our blog you’ll know we’ve been a tad busy lately with a house move. I decided to try a different main crop potato this season, a variety called Sante caught my eye. I almost changed my mind, tempted to grab a bag of faithful Desiree but I stayed strong, eventually swayed by the excellent disease and pest resistance that Sante offers. Anyway, it’s good to try something new.

Just out of curiosity, what do you do with the ‘tiddlers’? You know, the tiny seed potatoes often found at the bottom of the bag (unless you’re buying your seed potatoes loose and hand choose large seed). I have some old car tyres to stack and fill with compost just for our tiddlers, or I use large tubs. Of course there’s nothing wrong with planting them the usual way in the ground, I just like to use the smaller ones for container planting.

I’ve set the seed potatoes out to chit in large egg trays, our light and cool conservatory is perfect for this. Tomorrow I will be sowing tomatoes and chillies, the start of the new growing season is so exciting!

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by The Garden Smallholder on March 8, 2013  •  Permalink
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Posted by The Garden Smallholder on March 8, 2013

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My Love of Vintage Garden Tools

galvanised watering can

Being a hands on gardener I use lots of different gardening tools, many of them older than I am. Over the years I’ve slowly built up my own personal collection of vintage garden tools, old shabby tools that have stood the test of time. Timeless and stylishly beautiful, I love the idea that old garden tools can be loved, treasured or put to work all over again. There’s something quite special about grasping the wooden handle of an antique gardening fork or trowel, smooth to the touch from years of work gone by just feels ‘right’ somehow.

I have many vintage trowels, forks, onion hoes, secateurs and weed grubbers. I adore my collection of English galvanised watering cans, although rusty and a little battered in places most are still fit for the purpose intended. My stamped (makers mark era 1896 onwards) antique garden line and pin ensures rows are straight for planting, I often wonder if it was ever used in a Victorian kitchen garden. But, my most treasured tool has to be my vintage Brades garden fork. Lightweight, sharp and beautifully smooth with age, each time I push it into the soil it emanates quality.

garden line

IMG_0478bradesforkresized

I snoop around car boot sales, garage clearance sales and have a flutter on ebay for my finds, I’ve found some real bargains too. This year I stumbled across a shop on Etsy via Julie’s blog Suburban Veg Plot and bought a rather beautiful hand fork and trowel set. My set arrived beautifully packaged in brown paper and garden twine (perfect for gifting) along with a packet of in season veg seeds (lovely touch). So, if you’re wondering what to spend your Christmas gift money on I highly recommend Julie’s shop, Ember Gate http://www.etsy.com/shop/EmberGate, she has some wonderful pieces.

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by The Garden Smallholder on December 29, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by The Garden Smallholder on December 29, 2012

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Christmas Parsnips

digging up parsnips

I do love parsnips with my Christmas dinner, for me, it’s just not the same without them. The growing year wasn’t a successful one overall and despite germination setbacks due to cold, wet soils, once again my parsnips haven’t let me down. My spade and fork are at the ready, I can almost taste their sweet, earthy flavour already. Yum!

 

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by The Garden Smallholder on December 21, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Harvest, Vegetable Garden
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Posted by The Garden Smallholder on December 21, 2012

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Improving Soil in Our New Raised Beds

We’ve made a start on extending the vegetable garden, adding three 10 x 4 ft double height raised beds. After years of being part of a well-worn lawn, the soil would benefit from being improved with organic matter. We emptied most of the contents from one of the large pallet compost bins into a waiting wheelbarrow, the compost wasn’t quite ready but it was lovely all the same – just perfect for mulching and adding nutrients to the dry, hungry soil in our new beds.

One of our German Shepherd dogs certainly likes our compost, I guess she can smell rotting chicken poop. Eww.

I still find it amazing to see the contents of a compost bin change into earthy compost, we add lots of organic matter to our bins such as chicken manure mixed with straw, kitchen waste (vegetable peelings etc), used tea bags, coffee grounds, egg shells, cardboard, paper, green waste from the vegetable garden, grass clippings, nettle tops, comfrey leaves and horse manure from our village stables when we can get it.

Our bins are full of tiger worms, they’re perfect little composting machines. They adore kitchen scraps and if you watch your compost bin carefully you will see them surface to feed, starting the magical process.

The contents of our compost bin became darker and more like compost towards the bottom, we had to be really cautious with the spade and fork, lots of toads hide in and around our compost bins! I almost speared one by accident, just goes to show how careful you have to be. Now is a good time to empty your compost bins before creatures such as toads and hedgehogs start to look for places to hibernate over winter. Don’t empty them completely, leave some material in the bins for them.

Another magical ingredient for compost bins is leaves. The huge old oak provides these for free, they rot down faster than other leaves. We have a leaf bin too, taking longer to rot down but lovely as a mulch.

Isn’t it a magical, majestic tree? I think it’s wonderful, it makes me think of the green man or ‘The Oak King’. I love to listen to the wind whistling through the branches, at the moment it’s home to lots of nesting wood pigeons.

Plus, it helps to make this lovely stuff:

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by The Garden Smallholder on August 24, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by The Garden Smallholder on August 24, 2012

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Cutworms

I was admiring how well the onions were swelling the other day, suddenly I noticed some of the leaves had been chewed in a neat circular way. Something had completely sliced open the tips of the leaves (bulbs are fine), so I did a bit of investigating to see what it could be. It didn’t take long to find the culprits way down inside the hollow leaves, complete with lots of green poop. Nice.

After a bit of research it appears the podgy caterpillars I found inside my onion leaves are cutworms. Cutworms are the larvae of several species of night flying moths, they’re not actually worms at all. Apparently, they’re a common visitor to the vegetable garden but I’ve never noticed them before, I mean, they’re not exactly easy to miss.

They hide in soil or under leaf litter, feeding on crops and other plants at night (more common early in the year), often cutting young plants or seedlings straight down to ground level. I guess that’s how they get their rather cruel name. When alarmed they curl into a C-shape, my personal observation is they have very sticky feet, making them difficult to pick off plants. They’re large and meaty so I didn’t fancy squishing them (I’m useless at killing things anyway), they’d make a heck of a mess. I simply moved on the ones I found and did a bit of hoeing to see if I could spot any lurking in the soil.

Gardening organically and living where I do I’m always going to have the odd ‘pest’ problem here and there, that’s how it goes. I don’t use nasty chemical sprays, my preferred method of natural control will be to keep a close eye for more, picking them off if I see them, digging the onion bed over after harvesting to expose any I may have missed. Cutworms have many natural predators including wild birds, our chickens will scratch in the onion bed later on in the year too.

Cutworms, your days are numbered.

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by The Garden Smallholder on August 13, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Pests & Diseases, Vegetable Garden, Wildlife
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Posted by The Garden Smallholder on August 13, 2012

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Harvesting Garlic

I harvested garlic at my village allotment plot a few weeks ago, covered in rust the plants looked very sorry for themselves but the bulbs were a decent size. However, a quarter of the crop was lost to rot and a fungal disease. The time had come to harvest garlic in my veg garden, I checked the plants and noticed a touch of rust, although they looked better than my allotment garlic before pulling. I used my hand fork to ease the bulbs from the soil, I was pleased to pull larger bulbs with no sign of rot.

I drape garlic over the side of the raised bed after harvesting to allow earthworms to free themselves from the roots and drop back into the soil, before dark I gather all the bulbs up and put them inside the greenhouse in trays or on racks to dry for about a week. To store garlic I hang bulbs in nets (recycled from fruit punnets or satsuma nets), or plait the garlic bulbs together to form a bunch.

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by The Garden Smallholder on August 8, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by The Garden Smallholder on August 8, 2012

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Stumpy Sweetcorn

I wasn’t sure if I should bother planting the sweetcorn plants out this year. For months I nurtured and tended to them in the greenhouse; providing an extra layer of glass to increase the temperature for successful germination, covering with fleece whenever the temperature dropped ridiculously low, watering, hardening them off and whipping them in again quickly (before they blew across to my neighbour). All in all, it’s been a bit of a battle to keep them going.

Delaying planting longer than I would’ve liked, I decided to take the plunge and plant them out anyway, the worst that could happen would be instant death, rotting (drowning in the rain) or a slow wind beaten death. The sweetcorn battled through the rain, storms and gales that repeatedly battered most of the UK, despite my concerns. Although I spared the plants the worst of the weather, a combination of factors including lack of time in the ground and low light levels, unsurprisingly, contributed to their lack of height. I refer to them as ’stumpy’ (a little over 3 feet high).

Gardening, to me, is a continuous learning process. Much like a game. It’s all about planning each sown seed and enjoying the fruits of labour when it all comes together, but, in reality, each maneuver will face challenges. There will be success and failure, mother nature will work with you and against you, sometimes all at once. But that’s one of the reasons why I love growing my own food. I appreciate what’s on my dinner plate even more.

Plenty of cobs are forming on my stumpy, heroic sweetcorn. Some of them are a decent size too. I didn’t think it possible, but maybe, just maybe (fingers crossed), I’ll be biting into delicious sweetcorn cobs this year after all. And what a tough growing year it has been.

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by The Garden Smallholder on August 6, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by The Garden Smallholder on August 6, 2012

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Healing and Hoeing

I had some surgery to my right arm recently, nothing serious (I’ll be fine), but I do have strict instructions from my doctor not to do any lifting or anything strenuous. Brushing my teeth holding a toothbrush in my left hand is hilarious, it’s awkward and annoying not being able to use my right arm properly, not being able to do much in the garden is the most annoying of all.

Vintage onion hoe

I had a potter around yesterday, looking for things that I could do without over exerting myself. It didn’t take long to find a potential job, I spotted some weeds waving at me from the onion bed so I got to work on them using my onion hand hoe - in a left-handed-awkward-hoeing-motion, sort of way.

It felt good to be doing something again, once my stitches are out I can do a lot more. Yay!

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by The Garden Smallholder on August 5, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by The Garden Smallholder on August 5, 2012

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