29th March "Grow your own" newcomers welcome here

[TalkinPeece]

In light of lots of posts on lots of other threads I thought I'd start one for those who are looking at their gardens in a whole new light this spring.

Rule One of starting to grow your own
do not be over ambitious
A couple of growbags and pots at the start will give better results than trying to dig up the whole garden

Rule Two of starting to grow your own
grow stuff that will actually cope with your conditions
Look at where the sun shines on your garden at different times of day and what access to water you have

Rule three of starting to grow your own
grow what you will enjoy eating fresh from the garden
as the crops will be smaller but tastier

Rule Four of starting to grow your own
prepare to develop an obsession with the weather forecast

HOWEVER
Tomatoes against a wall of the house are easy in most of the UK
Herbs in small pots on windowsills are easy in most places
Lettuce / salad greens can work in pots, tubs or even hanging baskets
Spinach can be seeded soon and every few weeks from then on to keep you in greens for months
Baby carrots are quick fun and easy to grow in a tub
Beetroot ditto
Dwarf french beans later in the year are well worth growing even in a tiny garden

If we assume that the biggest newcomer plot is 2m by 1m (or 8 feet by 4 feet in old money)

How much yummy veg can Mumsnetters produce?

That looks more like a cold frame than a greenhouse per se. Useful nevertheless I don't have a cold frame, so have been having to harden off my dahlias, various peas and beans and half-hardy annuals by taking them in and out of the greenhouse (rather than just opening/lifting up the glass panels by degrees and shutting them at night).

Not sure if TiP will be allowed back - she's been deemed to be not the sort of person who is welcome on MN - but who knows? Maybe MNHQ can be encouraged to see all the positives of what she has contributed

Very sad about TIP. User there is a chance it’s woodlice eating your strawberries, they are a PITA. If yo7 can get some straw under them it can help a bit and stops them rotting on the soil. Lettuce doesn’t like warm temperatures much and I’d worry it might get a bit hot under the glass, even if propped open but it could be fine I guess.

Tomato plants.

If all side shoots and flowers and tip of plant have been removed will it ever recover?

So you’re left with the main stem and leaves ? If so then it will probably grow a new shoot from the top , had this happen in older plants. But if fairly little and even if not I might be tempted to get another and use the original as a back up plant.

Happy days here, my sole surviving comfrey plant is back again this year and flowering, I have an old bottle and am going to make comfrey tea ti feed my as yet non existent tomato plants.

Correct. Main stem and leaves left. It is quite big and got pruned by over enthusiastic child. I will leave it for a bit and see if anything grows back.

Probably fine then, fingers crossed.

PostNotInHaste
Happy days here, my sole surviving comfrey plant is back again this year and flowering, I have an old bottle and am going to make comfrey tea ti feed my as yet non existent tomato plants

That's weird - I grew comfrey decades ago and it took over the garden, but I eventually managed to get rid of it. Then this year bought seeds to sow for green manure - not yet sown - and last week noticed there is a very tall healthy looking white comfrey born again next to my stone bench at the end of the garden. Where did it come from? In ancient Herbals it was supposed to be a plant that healed all ills... d'you think the reappearance is trying to tell us something?

Hi Ruby, I've planted some cut and come again lettuce in a rectangular pot. Fingers crossed it grows!

Difficult to be crossed with kids when they're trying to be sweet! And maybe they'll develop an interest for gardening!

Thanks prettybird, I'll see if I can make good use of it! I've sowed some lettuce and am keeping it near the house where it won't get scorched.

Thanks for the tips Post!

Big news re the strawberries. Since the warm couple of days we've had, the munching has stopped. I'm down there every day furtively lifting the strawberries up and it's all looking good - all the berries are intact!

A white comfrey sounds lovely, but how strange it just appeared. Mine were bocking 14 cuttings that got slugged beforevthey had a chance really .

Good news on the strawberries user.

Hello again, it’s @chocolateandabook2019 here, but I’ve now name changed due to a reduction in my hours, bringing my working days down to three instead of three and a half.
Fabulous! 😄😄. It doesn’t start until after I come back from my hols, so only two weeks now to go.

I now have two grow bags for my tomatoes (bushy windowsill type Vilma) which I’m going to put in next weekend, and I have bought a strawberry planter (one of those bags with pockets things) for my three strawberry plants, and any tomato plants left over.

That should be fine for the ten days we are away, plus I’ve bought some water retaining granules.
I hope they’ll be ok.

Today I 'harvested' some actual spinach. I could have done without the fruit-fly looking creatures that I drowned during washing but it felt quite nice to eat something I've grown.
The birds eat everything off our fruit trees unfortunately.

I've been busy sowing mixed cut-and-come-again lettuce in one pot and rocket in another. Then the neighbours gave me some young butter lettuce plants, which I popped into leftover pots, as well as a bag of seeds, so hopefully we'll be covered for lettuce for the foreseeable .
The neighbours got their butter lettuce seeds from someone in our village, which I think is really nice, and if I'm not mistaken we already have one in our garden which has gone to seed. I wasn't sure what it was until now...
Then we have what I think is another type of lettuce growing in the veg patch, I need to ID it.
So plenty of lettuce to be getting on with.

We've also been using mint leaves from the garden in green tea and chilling it for a refreshing drink.

Hope everyone's gardening is going well!

We're just back from a week's holiday - outside plants are doing well thanks to the torrential rain, indoors ones have been neglected - I think my waterer forgot them

We have actual strawberries growing now though, just trying to persuade a very keen DTS2 now to pick and eat them whilst they're still green!!

I'm feeling very smug that I've had at least 5 lovely large green salads from the garden over the last couple of weeks.

Am going to need to grow some more lettuce based salad as dh is not so keen on mizuna/rocket based mixes (personally, I love them )

Have my second batch of radishes coming up. Must sow a 3rd row.

Just very proud of my Tumbling Tom, which has lots of flowers and more than a dozen green tomatoes now.

Is there something I should be doing, like pruning off lower leaves? I'm using tomato feed, not sure if I need to do anything else.

No tomatoes here yet Seedlip but the strawberries are coming along well! Plus some raspberries are starting to appear. My DTs are fascinated now there's something to actually see on the plants!

It turns out that the rocket wasn't a good idea, at least not in the summer. Over the past 24-36 hours it has been decimated by what I think are vine weevils - grey/brown teardrop-shaped things about 3 mm long (I'm in NE France). I don't know whether last week's heatwave (up to 38°) played a role.
The butter lettuce is now bolting - fair enough - but at least seems to be resistant to pests. I didn't get to eat much of it before it bolted because the neighbour kept giving me hers
I'll wait until the cooler months for the lettuce, now and maybe avoid rocket altogether.
Hopefully the raspberries will be OK!

What is bolting? I guess that's happend to my spinach, it started flowering and the leaves are now more pointy. I still had some in my milkshake.
Did anyone else's strawberries rapture from the rain? We managed to get about 10. :-)
I'll definitely have some peas soon and might be able to pick some courgettes next week.

Tomatoes are weird, they're over 1m tall but no fruit yet.

Bolting is when the plant gets stressed for whatever reason (usually lack of water) so decides it needs to flower so that its progeny can survive

I've just pulled out a whole load of spinach plants which had bolted - but I'll plant some more as it's quick growing.

My mizuna and other brassica based salad leaves (including some cima di rapa) also bolted.

Pictures of harvests: soft fruit (to be fair, picked over 2 days), together with my cornflowers from my "cutting" bed and nasturtiums from my brassica bed (sacrificial plants that so far haven't been munched by anything ) and, what I'm most pleased with, my first cucumber ; green salad leaves, some onions that had already keeled over and my 3 pathetic and tiny non cloved garlic (out of about 10 cloves planted ); and my purple podded peas, podded, with a few of their pods - came to about 100g, which I've blanched and put in the freezer

Meant to post that on the Allotment (etc) thread - but it's also good here

Amazing prettybird, very impressive and inspiring!

The tomatoes on my Tumbling Tom have ripened now, can't wait to try them.

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