The 2015 Allotment / Veg Patch Thread Part 2

[agoodbook]

the previous thread is just about full, - well done spotted so welcome to everyone interested in growing their own veg!

Previous thread is here
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/gardening/2282529-The-2015-Allotment-Veg-Patch-Thread-its-here?msgid=53650520

I've got seed for round courgette too! And 3 other courgette, (2 green, one yellow). And 2 patty pan squash, which are just alien courgette spaceships really, aren't they? I've not sown any of them yet.

In tomato news,I have just counted and post - cull, I have 36 seedlings. With another 8 seeds germinating, and another variety yet to sow. These are for my family, plus my sister and my dad will want a couple of plants too. Courgettes and tomatoes, plus other squash and beans are my very favourite veg.

After all my cucamelon braggadocio on thread 1, I've not actually sown any cucamelon seed this year. I've got my overwintered roots out of the shed and planted them, but I have yet to see any signs of life.

Good evening everyone. Its been extremely windy here today, but dry after rain first thing, so hope alternative your greenhouse repairs have gone well.
And hoping my nets and supports are holding their own down at the plot.
Tomorrow I am planning on direct sowing beetroot/parsnips and another row of peas. Can I get away with sowing swede as well-? thought May really.....
Will leave beans/cucumber/courgette and squash sowing for another week at least, maybe 2

Neep as I recall can go in reasonably early. White turnip, little and often as it grows in spaces between crops. They grow a lot of neep in the frozen north so it must be pretty hardy.

Courgettes, the main thing to remember with flat seeds is to plant them on their side. I put them in fibre pots in a bag on the cold windowsill but the heat from raeburn might bring them on? You'd have to move them when they sprout though and that might check them?
Never had any trouble with courgettes though. Other than ending up with too many!!

Thank you mink, I think my first job will be building defences against marauders, livestock and wildlife (mummy rabbit has already built one nest -dealt with by the terrier) and I don't want a repeat of the year the Sheep ate my peas.

Alternative your courses sound lovely, and the thought of swedes and flowers mixed together makes me smile for some reason. Already at the allotment site I have a rep for being 'one of them' due to my not glyphosphating everything and not sticking to straight lines, and not mowing under my tree. Swedes with flowers would blow people's mind.

I often get that! I tell them that swedes are related to cauliflowers and cauliflowers are flowers so there!

My next course this upcoming week is about 'going organic'. And when I did some research [with my other organic friends] about what the biggest issue about growing organically was - the resounding response was 'other people'. It's the main reason people fail at being organic, and what people really need is the evidence that it works. Which it does once you get your head round gardening differently and not being too precious about control.

When I first started growing organically with some ridiculous digs from other allotmenteers I would say 'It's a trial - I've done something slightly differently with that side and that side and looking at the difference'. And no say more.

Still no greenhouse repairs - too windy yesterday and on a wind warning today. Meep. Got loads of toms repotted into individual pots; and sowed lots of flowers, with more herbs [at least 150 bronze fennels for some back height in some beds] and cleaned the greenhouse glass on the outside.

Will sow a rather large batch of spring onions today I think, as my Long Red Florence onions are ready to go into a bed somewhere so will pop to the lottie later and get them in.

Just a couple of photos to show how I grow. I allow for 10% of everything I grow to be left for seed. In one, beetroot for seed, with potatoes and phacelia and poppies for the bees. In another - potatoes, marigolds, crimson clover and scorzonera flowering for some seed. In the background the lottie neighbour's rasps. I think a garden - although should mainly be edible - needs colour and lots of insects to pollinate everything. And - although the beetroot slower heads are not the most attractive - the scent from them is amazing.

Trying desperately to post image of my barren plot

Yahoo, managed it on the gazzillonth attempt, complete with marauders

tentacles that is so beautiful. I wish I had the organisation to get something so well thought out organised.

Our lot is organic. Although some people don't seem to realise slug pellets are not organic...and nor is weed killer!

Evening all,

A busy day of shopping, sowing and potting on today, plus popped up to the site to water my onion sets and check my rhubarb, which is only just emerging. Shopping was for seed compost, plant labels, plant food, other bits and bobs.

Potted on tomatoes, morning glory, sweetcorn today and sowed lettuce and cucamelons. i need to sort out my home herb garden, which is pots on the patio, many are looking a bit straggly and root bound, i think a clear out and replacement for some of them is due

i love seeing the photos, and agree with the comment about the mainly edible, but i love seeing flowers on other people's plots, lots had poppies last year, plus sweet peas, calendula and lavender. I think I'm going to put a line of chive plants somewhere, I love their flowers and love using them in food too.

I wish I had the organisation to get something so well thought out organised.

Organisation is the last thing I do! I just label the stuff I know I want to save from [if it is any good] and that isn't an F1 and the rest gets bunged in any old where. I keep a tin of random seeds of veg and flowers and just sow a few in spare spaces once the main early seedlings have gone in. Honest, just bung it in.

Hello!
well, I ended up this morning with doing some forking/weeding and finishing tidying away all the bits from the netting /fencing marathon. I was expecting rain, but that didn't come until the afternoon, and not much at that. Saw our weather was going to be cold tonight ( 0º -1º ) so made a management decision not to sow today - its warming up, so thought I would leave it a few more days .
So I came home, and pricked out cauliflower, cabbage and broccoli in my greenhouse, from my early 'optimistic" first sowing, sowed a first lot of lettuce in plugs.
Everyone grows flowers on our allotment site, and we have a beekeeper on there - but I plan to expand my flowers this year - I inherited a buddleia and 2 peonies and always grow sweetpeas and sunflowers. This year I have sown asters, and will also sow a seed packet of bee- friendly annuals that I was 'gifted'.
and organic! - my weed and pest control is me :) - I'm looked on with pity as slug pellets are being tossed thickly on plots either side of me !
Anyone grow globe artichokes - can I lift and move a small one before it gets too established? Its in totally the wrong place ( i was given it and bunged it in as a temporary measure without thinking!)

I had hours at the plot day, but I seemed to get bog-all done. I am amazing at pottering.

I was going to sow, but like agoodbook, thought I'd wait a bit longer for the warmer weather on its way. I picked more weeds put of my clay mountain of lumps that I'd put to one side when I was digging and they were too clarty to get the weeds out. Of course some are still to claggy, and other lumps are dried up. So that was a great plan. One of my fellow non-toxics on the plot said that when she did that, she resorted to whacking the lumps with a mallet to get the dried weed out and return the soil to the plot.,I didn't have a mallet but I might still do that. OOoh, I picked grpwing weeds out of my compost heap. Yes, even though I have been carting back my pernicious weeds and putting them in my home green bin collection that the council oops at high temps, I still have dandelions etc growing in my heap. Then, I noticed a load of grassy stuff (at the top) that I'd not put in there. So the weeds may be from previous person or could just be growing, but some arse has def put their rubbish in my heap. That's not on, right?

I cut back some brambles at the boundary, and I moved around my piles of stones, like an overgrown Makka Pakka. And then I took some rhubarb home.

poor spotted - life is rough sometimes. I had to have a very carefully stern word with my plot next door - they were throwing stuff on my compost heap ( they don't have one- far too manicured for that!) including brassica roots, holey potatoes and woody stuff that doesn't rot down. They thought I 'wouldn't mind" ! well, yes I did - they use chemicals , and I don't

Question for those of you with green houses;

we are thinking about getting one of these potting shed greenhouse.

However the only place for it in our garden would be against a north-east facing wall (so the window side also faces north), so it would not get much sun at all. Is this a silly idea? I want it as much to be a place to work in bad weather and store all my pots, tools etc as a greenhouse, but I would love to be able to grow stuff in there too. I'm guessing it would be more use for protecting tender stuff than things that really need the sun like tomatoes though. Any thoughts? Would all my seedlings be leggy and pale? At the moment we've got one of the portable tiny plastic ones west facing on the patio which is great for seedlings but not big enough to grow full size plants in (and too hot in the height of summer).

ooh- thats a tricky one WhoKnows - pretty shed :)
My kitchen window faces north west and I germinate some of my seedlings on it, but they do go leggy fairly quickly, and I move them round every day. But with the extra sloping window you may get better light, and not everything needs full sun- and if you could make the inside white ( a tip from an allotment book!) that would increase the light levels

and spotted - whats wrong with pottering?

i meant to get all sorts done today, as I have a fairly full on diary for the next two weeks, but I messed around instead and did things that could have been left for another day, but thats what i felt like doing!

Would it be useful as a cool house when your Mini greenhouse is too hot, and somwhere for tenderish perennials in winter?
I'm quite jealous but we're such a windy spot that it would blow away, my old neighbour had a glass greenhouse blow away and my (empty) oak barrel is about 500 yards from where it started.

violet - GQT's Eric Robson has a windy garden in the Lake District ( I think) and he and Bob Flowerdew both extol polytunnels for not blowing away.... :)

Argh!! The cars are all frosted over- hope the garden is okay!!!

yep - scrape off frost here too !

I managed to get my shed up on Saturday! It's a recycle job from the garden (I now have a shiny new one at home). It is about 10 years past its sell by date, so it's really a patch up job. It even has woodworm, which I didn't even realise could happen outdoors. But it survived the gales on Sunday (55mph gusts), so fingers crossed.

This means I can now plant my potatoes, because the greenhouse panels were resting where they need to go in! (My life for the last 6 months has felt like one of those puzzles where you have to make a picture by shifting around a lot of squares, and there is only one space 'spare'). I think I'm finally getting there.

New greenhouse (for home) comes next Monday woooooooop woooooooop!

My life for the last 6 months has felt like one of those puzzles where you have to make a picture by shifting around a lot of squares, and there is only one space 'spare'

Try getting a community garden from 8ft of weeds and overgrown with lots of buildings falling down, to a place of harmony and peace again! That's my life there in that sentence.

Courage mon brave - you'll get there! Even if it feels endless right now.

It's probably smaller than a community garden, but my 100m x 30m back garden was like that when I started here three years ago. It was a rental house and nothing had been done to the garden for years. There were four derelict sheds, presumably left over from the last owner-occupier, two of which were brick and asbestos, leylandii, huuuge brambles, and weeds that had been left to grow for about five years unheeded. As I cleared it, another nightmare emerged: loads of strange concrete paths, presumably from some kind of park-garden scheme from the 70s, laid lovingly over really deep hardcore. To get a blank canvas, DH and I had to pull out 8 x 8 tonne skips worth of concrete, shed and hardcore over what we came to call The Summer of Pain (I was working full time back then too, and I would literally go in to the office and hobble about). Then we dug in literally tonnes and tonnes of manure and compost to free up the clay soil. It was worth it all, though.

No frost here in Wiltshire but definitely a bit nippy! Love the pictures everybody's posted, must sort some out too.

DH has bought a load of feather-edge boards to repair the fence at the bottom of our garden and has decided the best place to store them is on my veggie patch. . They're where the beans need to go so he's got a few weeks as I have started mine in the greenhouse, but he has been warned! Shocking behaviour.

My joy at getting potatoes in may be short lived as I caught DDog2 digging them up and eating them yesterday. No idea how many she got. .

Not much "proper" gardening over the last few days, other than some tidying up, but I did get in and completely sort out my little shed at last. Also did a bit more on a little fence I'm making to keep the dogs off the veggie patch - I'm using my own bamboo to do it though and I don't want to cut any more down. I've got about 18 inches of fence left to do. Might have to buy some canes.

holly our garden was very similar. Four years on we still dig out random paving slabs / lumps of concrete.

Oh no! Naughty cupcakesdog! I had no idea they went for seed potatoes. Your DH sounds a lot like mine - though I have to say the 'I'll just put it here for a bit' thing gives me an excuse to say 'I need that ground now, so you'd better crack on with using it up'

I'm intrigued by the home-made bamboo fence - it sounds really pretty.

Maybe we should have a before/after thread for garden and allotment pics!!