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Allotment/garden thread 2013
Allotment/garden thread 2013
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Wow!
Superb, Petrus. |
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Tommy Toes
27 Aug 13 01:12 Joined: 20 Apr 04 | Topic/replies: 43,537 | Blogger: Tommy Toes's blog Blimey Petrus, you're a veritable 'market gardener'! You must have enough stuff there to fill a shop! Very well done to you. Cheers Tommy...to be honest we're still learning...I use a lot of garlic for cooking and it pretty much grows itself with minimal interference and the bugs don't much care for it either so that's a good thing Never tried potatoes before...just bought a bag and bunged 'em in alongside the tomatoes. The cherry toms came as a result on one lowly little plant about 3 inches tall that I bunged into a raised bed last summer...it grew to Giant Hogweed proportions so we harvested some seeds and I cultivated those this year along with some seeds from Beefsteak tomatoes. We've been picking them the last few weeks and there's still loads left. A bunch of celery and a load of green and red peppers got harvested earlier tonight and got amalgamated with some onions and tomatoes and some spices that will be cooked tomorrow (all chopped up fine) and put into jars. I really enjoyed all of the planting and growing stuff...I'm working on some cracking compost that will be going into all of my growing beds which should really improve the soil quality so hoping for good things next year  |
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Well, if you're 'a newbie' to it all, it's even more impressive, Petrus.
Seriously - very well done in producing such a good crop, of all sorts. You really must have a knack for it. Good luck in future plantings. |
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Thx Tommy...I'm definitely hooked so it's going to be an ongoing project starting with the planting of the garlic crop later in the year...I'll take plenty of pics
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Great stuff, Petrus.
As I've mentioned before, I'm no gardener/grower but I really enjoy these sorts of threads. I really enjoy reading about people growing their own fruit and veg (and seeing the photos). It just seems so 'proper'! |
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NL
you missed this thread. |
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No, SF, he didn't.
Perrrrlease! |
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Well he stuck it everywhere else, even in the pub.
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He did in here!
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Blame Fishy, he said he missed this thread.
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NL
you missed this thread. Prat. |
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If there is an award for vegetable photographer of betfair, it must surely go to Petrus Romanus.
Cheers, a spectacular effort. I really like the way you can see the effort that has gone into the garlic crop, from putting down the straw to ahem 'cupping' the finished product. |
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bongo -
sorry to spoil the party - but my spuds had tops on hitting the 4 to 5 foot mark this year - Cara was the variety.. Petrus Romanus great pics - good to see a great harvest from all ur endeavors - thanks for posting |
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Lovely clean potatoes Bongo and considering what you have to work with, a real success. The last time I tried to grow Kerrs Pink, the slugs ate most of them.
You are right about potatoes being a more efficient producer of starch than cereal. A quarter of my allotment provides all the spuds we need until April. If I tried the same for wheat then would probably need three allotments to grow it. Although potatoes are intensively grown worldwide they are prone to serious disease. In Britain commercial crops are sprayed I think every two weeks during the growing season. This would be too great a cost for subsistence farmers to bear and they really need strains with better resistance to blight in particular, to help reduce this cost. There are organisations researching this line and varieties with improved blight resistance are available now (I grow Sarpo Mira and will hopefully be able to show you the difference)but more needs to be done as blight itself is evolving to become more virulent. |
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Thanks for the pics Petrus R, those Japanese beetles look like a serious infestation. Have never seen them here, thank goodness, only a matter of time though I suspect.
The "bad" garlic looks like a fungal rot, bad news if it is. Do you know what is causing it? In recent years we have seen a pest called allium leaf miner become established in the UK. The adults lay the eggs on onion/garlic leaves and the grubs burrow down to the bulbs to pupate. They don't do much damage themselves but it allows in organisms which cause the outer layers to rot. Could this be the problem? |
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Evening chaps and thank you for the kind comments. The **** beetles are a yearly thing here...NOBODY escapes them unfortunately. The two garlic bulbs pictured showing a damaged one alonside a good one were only 6 inches apart in the ground which I failed to mention in the picture comments. I think that particular variety (the damaged one - Susan Delafield) just didn't tolerate the conditions this year. I really don't think it's a bug thing as only one of the varieties suffered, the other one (Northern Quebec) was fine.
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Good morning Petrus. It's good news that the garlic problem is not fungal, at least you know which variety to grow next year. Your outdoor tomatoes are ripening well in the pics, mine are just starting to turn red now.
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Foinavon I have more tomatoes than I know what to do with...it's been another blistering week here and more have ripened on the vine. That said I'm getting a bit sad that the growing is all but done...the toms and a few head of celery are all that is left to harvest...the leaves are starting to turn on the trees and before you know it we'll be knee deep in snow for 3 months...god I hate winter
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A friend of mine who used to live in Cleveland told me about the sudden snowfalls when the wind blows off the lakes. One moment it's fine, next you're waist deep in snow.
Still have a couple of months of reasonable weather ahead provided nothing extra-ordinary happens and am looking forward to harvesting leeks, winter squash and various root crops which all make good soup as well as roasted veg to accompany roast meats. I like to fry up excess tomatoes for breakfast with eggs and bacon and my wife makes chutneys, any remaining are given to friends and neighbours. |
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My poor old mum spending the autumn cooking jar after jar of tomato chutney and slicing up huge piles of runner beans for salting to keep through the winter.
"I'm bloody sick o' this. I don't care if I never see another bleedin' tomato or runner bean as long as I soddn' live ..." No way of giving them away, as everybody around us grew their own and, in any case, with my dad being Ukrainian and so familiar with hunger, there's no way he would have let her anyway. I know I'm 52 and that's old enough, but sometimes I think back to my childhood in the '60s and I feel like a time traveller. There was a whole lost world of almost subsistence living which never experienced the swinging sixties or the white heat of technology. Every garden had an apple tree and half the lawn dug over, just leaving a strip long enough to kick a football or bowl a cricket ball. The flower beds had tomatoes growing between every rose bush and the self-built wood and glass "lean-tos" were choc-a-bloc with ripening fruit by Sept./Oct. Without a fridge, produce was spiced and vinegared (e.g. chutney) or salted, like runner beans, to keep over winter. I keep meaning to salt a jar of runner beans one day, just to recall that taste. |
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I had to throw the stuff out I froze from when I last owned my plot and that was well over a year ago
. Gluttony of stuff which is why I said I could grow all I need in about 60SqM.One thing I notice is that stuff keeps for ages compared to supermarket bought goods. Potatoes keep for months but shop bought ones grow eyes and turn green after a week. I only pickled a little, I made a runner bean chutney but there's only so much of it you can eat. What is salting? I've heard of salting fish and meat but never heard of it to preserve veg. The growing season never ends and there's certain veg you can grow all year round. Autumn and Winter veg coming into season soon, plenty of brassica's and quick growing veg. Anyone any idea's what to do with Rhubarb? I've a potted plant that needs harvesting but I don't want to make a tart. I'd love a couple of raised beds that was close to my home. I'm not asking for much |
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Rhubarb crumble n custard
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I'm not a big Rhubarb lover but would like to do something with it that I could freeze or preserve, Rhubarb wine maybe?
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Salting beans, as I remember it: keep and wash all large glass jars you collect - used to be pickled cucumber jars, but mayo jars would probably be more common these days.
Layer of coarse salt in the bottom of the jar. Cut the ends off each runner bean, slice them and remove the stringy bits. Layer of these runner beans into the jar, on top of the salt. Another layer of salt, another layer of beans etc. until you reach the top. Then weigh the lot down with a smaller jar, e.g. a jam jar, filled with water. The salt will draw the water out of the beans the way it does if you leave a packet of salt in its carton and it becomes soggy. Once you've got an obvious solution of salty water for the beans to soak in, then put the top on the jar and they'll keep for months. Soak the beans in water before using to get rid of the salty taste. |
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isn't it a bit of a waste of time now with freezers being available?
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I'm not advocating it, B-B. Just remembering it. With a bit of childhood nostalgia. I'd like to taste salted runner beans again the same way I'd like to walk into a seaside newsagent and pick up a Beano Summer Special - just once would be fine. So much else would come flooding back.
Of course freezers are better, simply so you don't have to go through the drudgery my mum did. It's one example of how access to cheap energy is the key to improving the lives of poor people everywhere, and why I've become so exasperated with comfortable environmentalists and green activists who want to curtail it. |
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Screaming, your posts remind me of helping my dad on his allotment in the '50s. At this time of year crates of potatoes would be stacked in the outhouse for making chips during the winter and in midwinter we would pick Brussels sprouts glazed with frost with frozen fingers on a Sunday morning. Food was valued and nothing was wasted, so different to these times of relative plenty.
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Ovalman,
Some people make rhubarb wine but I think it's a dying skill in these days of inexpensive wines in supermarkets. I like stewed rhubarb in season and always save some in small plastic pots in the freezer. Each pot contains enough for four servings and once defrosted will last a few days in the fridge. The posh word for it is "compote" and I've seen jars of rhubarb compote in garden centre shops selling for eye watering prices. |
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Forgot to mention raised beds.
A quick and cheap way of making these is to collect those jumbo builders bags which are used to deliver sand and gravel then thrown away. Fill them with soil and compost. Good for growing carrots and salad veg. |
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I brew a bit but all beer and it's been ages since I done any wine.
I'm very restricted at my house for growing. I've a few pots with things like my rhubarb but I couldn't put a raised bed. I've been looking at guerilla gardening but don't think I'd try it. I like the idea though and if lots of people were doing it then I'd do it also. The council give out free recycling bags, they are smaller versions of those builders bags you're on about. I've grew XMas potatoes in them, not a good crop but enough for Xmas and Boxing day. I'll maybe try a few bags next year. Envious of you guys |
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Sorry to hear you've no space for gardening Ovalman. Perhaps you should join our resident guerrilla gardener Bongo as there seems to be room to spare there. I use those large blue plastic woven bags that Ikea sell for 40p at checkout for carrying stuff around the garden instead of buying overpriced trugs. I think these could serve as small growing bags if a few holes were punched in the bottom. Bigger than pots so hold more compost but wouldn't take up much space and are rot proof.
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I've been lucky this year in the sense that very few people have damaged or nicked any of the crops beyond what was visible within 5 metres of the road. One apple tree has been pinched, one onion nicked and one potato plant in the last fortnight has been pulled upwards by a curious teenager looking at what was growing underneath. It wasn't chips so the plant has been left at a sort of 45o angle with a couple of tiddly tubers showing on the surface and the rest untouched.
Best tips on guerrilla growing is look on your council web-site for planning permissions that have lapsed and for grade 11 listed buildings - anything within half a mile is best as it's a walkable distance carrying a fork and bucket of water for hot periods ( early July this year for example ). Check it out now ( late August ) for the spot where there are MOST nettle and thistles and put some kind of marker brick in the middle. Wait for the clocks to go back, and when time allows, start lifting the top soil, then lifting the subsoil and then replacing with the top soil at the bottm so the top three inches ends up about 9-12 inches down. Spuds are an easy first season crop, but if the planted area is shielded by nettles then hardly anyone will notice them or bother them. |
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Thanks for the nostalgia sfb, the freezer has changed the western world's food beyond recognition. Hard to credit that less than a century ago lawns were rare.
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I took delivery today of my secret weapon for next year, a truck load of chicken sh!t that's about a month's worth of crap from roughly 40 birds...they are bedded on wood shavings so it's a mixture of the sh!te plus the shavings. My only worry is that the wood shaving might raise the acidity levels a bit to much...any experts out there care to comment?
I will mix the crap with my compost heap (mainly grass clippings and some peelings plus all of the tops from garlic and pots and other veg that has been put through the mower blades a couple of times). I'm *hoping* to add this amalgamation to the soil before it freezes so a good couple of months to go yet. |
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I think you are doing the right thing mixing it in with your compost heap. Wouldn't spread it on the garden until it has mellowed a bit.
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If the chicken droppings are recent, I definitely wouldn't apply them this year - if they're anything like horse manure, you'll need to wait until at least next autumn for them to break down sufficiently to apply, or they'll burn your crops. I'd be surprised if they broke down enough during the cold of a Canadian winter even to be usable by the spring, despite the heat of a compost heap. You'll need the warmth of next summer to do its work.
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any jobs this w/e lads
gonna get me spuds up [topped them two weeks back to 'allegedly' harden the skins up for storage].. here |
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I dug some of my spuds today.
Strange lot this year, only 3 or 4 per plant but they are the size of a London brick  |
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Dug the spuds a couple of weeks ago and limed the soil. Now that we have a bit of moisture in the ground (more on the way tomorrow apparently) will break down the clods and rake it level in preparation for planting sets of Japanese onions and garlic cloves.
Lots of tidying up to do and the soft fruit bushes need pruning. Collecting plenty of raspberries at the moment (Autumn gold). They are very good this year. The Jewish New Year was earlier this month, the gardening New year starts about now as we clear up the old and begin to prepare for the new. |