Sacrificial crops

I've had a garden ramble over at my place.

tea!!!

Potatoes!!!!!!!!!

we have onions!!!

garden update....

Potatoes, salad leaves and tomatoes all doing well. Some of the beans and peas have been eaten (slugs/snails) garlic, shallots still o.k...

Had a disaster though.... it was really windy here last night and this morning the mini greenhouse has lost its cover and contents (shelves.... trays with seedlings) I have found the 3 pumpkins plant but not the peppers or tomatoes :0)

this looks interesting :0)

no digging

growing....

a bit of sun and rain :0)

potatoes in pots (and salad leaves)

Building A Bog Garden

First we roughed out the shaped with a hose. We decided to put it on the lawn edge so it gets sun and partial shade.


Muchus digging by dh not me later we have a hole.


Into the hole we put a underlay and a liner and then poke holes in them both with a garden fork so slow drainage will occur or it will end up a pond the first time it rains. Then we put in a good layer of perlite to help keep water in the bog.


Next we shovelled all the soil back, soaked it with rainwater ( do not use tap water unless it is going to be left to stand for week as the chemicals in tap water are bad for the plants.) and trimmed back the liner and put a layer of turf on the edge upside down to hide it. Then I planted it. I put in Irises, Ragged Robin, Meadow sweet, Hemp Agrimony, Scullcap, Pink Purslane, Penny Royal, Marsh Marigold and Hostas when they arrive. It looks a mess but give it time. I am hoping when it grows up it will attract frogs, toads, newts and dragonflies.

Some garden happenings....

A busy garden day today.
We caught a cream spotted ladybird & had a quick look at the little fellow. Then we headed off to the garden centre to buy an apple tree.



Underneath we planted Yarrow, Wood Anemone & White Campion.
We also planted Borage (in a pot, as it is quite an invasive plant) Thumbelina Carrots & Sunflowers. We also planted some potatoes I had been chitting for a while.









We later caught a Peacock butterfly which has reminded me to chop some fresh orange & leave on a bird feeder in the garden to attract butterflies.



All this has been recorded in E's garden notebook - our current project. We have had a lovely day. Chilled, but hard work.
I am off to make dinner: Cheesy cauliflower pasta. & then enjoy a relaxed evening knitting socks :)
Have a great day.

strimming already

well I've looked at mine, decided i need to get the strimmer out already, felt overwhelmed, went back inside. . . . . . . :-/

I Have Pallets

Yaay. I have pallets. Dh bought cement and it came on them. Bug house here we come:)

garden update....

dug a patch and planted shallots today.  :0)

started to dig

out a small patch for sweetcorn :0)

Finally Got The Plants In

I will post piccies if and when the grow to be anything worth photographing. It took 3 of us the best part of Sunday to put them all in and I still have herbs, veg and annuals to grow from seed. Hopefully the mini green house will be removed from the back room to the garden tomorrow:) We have been lucky with some great weather so dh is cracking on with the rabbit run while he can make concrete.

smells like spring spirit....

We have been outside alot today :0)

I've mangaged to kill off the lettuce that looked a bit weedy - I'll just start again.

Peppers, tomates, peas, beans, garlic and soft fruit all looks o.k

lots of tidying up in the garden done :0)

Our Bughouse

This is what it's meant to look like

This is how ours looks so far

We've got a couple of plant pots on the top now and we've started filling pots with bamboo to put inside but it's going to take a lot of bamboo and I want to put up my runner bean canes first and then see how many canes I have left to break up.

We've got house bricks with holes in around the bottom of the bughouse so we're getting there slowly. I'll keep you updated

A Rainbow Garden

Hello everyone
Im Lynn Im married & have two girls whom i homeschool in Lancashire.
Here is a post from my blog, that I wrote last October. I hope you enjoy it.



Planting a Rainbow by Lois Ehlert

Here is the review from Amazon.com:
From School Library Journal
PreSchool-Grade 1 Planting a Rainbow , a companion to Ehlert's Growing Vegetable Soup (HBJ, 1987), is a dazzling celebration of the colorful variety in a flower garden and the cyclical excitement of gardening. A young child relates in ten simple sentences the yearly cycle and process of planning, planting, and picking flowers in a garden. Mother and child plant bulbs in fall, order seeds from catalogs in winter, eagerly anticipate the first shoots of spring, select seedlings in summer, ``and watch the rainbow grow,'' reveling in the opulence of color. The power of this book lies in the glowing brilliance and bold abstraction of the double-page collages. Ehlert combines simple, stylized shapes of flat, high intensity color into abstract yet readily identifiable images of plants and flowers while clearly and colorfully labeling each plant on an adjacent garden marker. Children will especially delight in the six pages of varying width depicting all the flowers of each color of the rainbow. A celebration of the garden, the power of shape and color, and the harmony of text and image in a picture book. Pamela Miller Ness, The Fenn School, Concord, Mass.

This is a really beautiful book, that we read in late summer. Today, we began our own rainbow garden.
Here are the bulbs we planted:
Red: Greigu Tulips
Orange: Tulip Orange Emperor
Yellow: Narcissi Red Devon
Green: Double snowdrops, Galanthus nivalis flore Pleno
Blue: Striped Squills, Puschkinia Libanotica
Indigo/Violet: English Bluebells

& here is my rather wet helper..

Hello

Hi to everyone, I'm Elaine and I have two children, Katie (12) and Ben (9) with hubby Paul (+ two cats and a visiting one, rabbit, two hens, two rats and two fish)!

I'm pretty new to the veggie gardening thing but started with growing tomatoes, runners and potatoes (in pots) about three years ago in our old house. Since our move a couple of years ago, we've got a much bigger garden and my lovely neighbour offered to clear a patch ready for me to expand my veg growing. Last year I was chuffed to have grown onions, spring onions, leeks, garlic, dwarf beans, carrots, potatoes and cabbages. My unsuccessful crop of the year was sweetcorn which I think I planted too late and in too shady a section. We are still pulling the leeks from last year's crop and have garlic already in the ground for harvesting later in the year. The children are chiting seed potatoes which they received free from the Potato Council (schools "Grow your own potatoes").

I've also sown some over-winter onions which are looking alittle sad I must say! Over the last couple of days I've sown peas, mixed salad leaves, spring onions and chilli which are all sitting on my conservatory kitchen windowsills - really need a greenhouse!

As I am enjoying the veg growing so much, and the rest of the family pitch in too (and certainly enjoy eating the rewards) we're aiming to clear another patch for next year and fill in an unused swimming pool ready for some apple trees, raspberries and other goodies that take our fancy.

Looking forward to reading everyone's gardening adventures and picking up lots of new tips.

Mini Greenhouse

Woo hoo our "mini" greenhouse came today, a £29.99 bargain from http://www.wilkinsonplus.com/. A small box arrived so I was stunned when dh put the frame

together and I saw how big it really is. It is a good 6 foot high at its apex and has a metal frame and 6 wide shelves that are built into the frame with mesh metal shelves that fit on. It also has guy ropes to anchor it down ( a must here and even then dh will need to put a baton on the back and attach it to a wall) and a breathable plastic cover with a roll up door. I will post piccies once it is finished and in place.

Hi From Me Too

Hi,
I'm Bridget,
I love gardening and for the past few years we have grown our own veg. I have five children aged between 2 yrs and 11 yrs, so I have got quite a few " helpers!"
This year we have extended our veg plot and we've put a fence around it to keep the dogs off it. I'm all for organic farming but certain manure is better than others, if you get my drift!!
We are starting to build a bug house, which apparently helps with the natural cycle of the garden, one insect eating another, which should keep greenfly and blackfly to a minimum, it should also encourage bees and birds into the garden, I have some pictures and will try and post them over the next couple of days.
That's all from me, got to get on with some school work!

container gardening

I'm using these and these for potatoes, jersulum artichoke and salad/veggies.

feel free..

to add any links that you think are relevant/interesting to the sidebar.

Hi From Me

I am Ruth and I moved to our house 15 months ago. It is in a very windy, coastal location with all the challenges of extreme weather and salt laden air. Last year we grew veg - mainly Spring Greens, Kale, herbs, lettuce, beetroot, radishes and tomatoes ( which never rippened.) We have 8 rabbits that ate everything. They are no longer free range and the plan is to start gardening again this week. I am getting a mini greenhouse from Wilkinson to grow herb and veg seeds in and we have a raised bed dh built from sleepers for growing veg and herbs. I use grow bags along a sunny wall for tomatoes and a herb wheel dh built by the back door for herbs. I grow herbs for the kitchen, rabbits and medicinal purposes.

I want to grow a windbreak of trees along the back wall to keep the howling wind out and the view of passing trains. Conifers are the fastest but not the prettiest. Any ideas welcome:)

I love flowers too and have a raised bed for clematis and perennials. It is empty at the moment due to the rabbits eating it all but I am starting to re-stock soon and want to grow some flowers from seed for it. I am also growing flowers G can use for her floristry. Along with all of this I want to grow flowers that attract bees as they are struggling to survive at the moment and shrubs birds can hide in. We get a lot of wildlife in the garden but I think more would come in if the conditions were right. I am thinking about a bog garden and log piles.

Hello

Hi Folks, I'm Claire, a keen but relatively new gardener with a fascination for 'resilience' - something I always thought of as a bit of a permaculture buzz word but now take quite seriously, possibly due to change in personal circumstances and the downturn of the economy in general. Continually find myself asking how I can best use the land I own to create something useful (edible etc).

My plans for this year are detailed roughly here although since the time I made that post things have changed in so far as the people who own my low maintenance patch have decided to put raised beds in. This will be my first time working with raised beds. I think they do waste some space but for situation such as this where mice, moles and rabbits are a big issue the space loss is offset.

Today saw the base and frame of my greenhouse completed. Next weekend we should get all the glass in - very exciting. I'm a bit disappointed that the greenhouse isn't already up. I find it's so hard to harden things off properly when you grow them in the house. I have in the past often ended up with straggly seedlings. Beggars can't be choosers though. We got the greenhouse through a Time Exchange and it didn't come with instructions.

We keep hens and I'm forever toying with the idea of bees. Have been on a bee keeping course but there seem to be more disadvantages than advantages for that one right now.

I'm running a workshop for one of our local community groups about hen keeping later this month. I'm very nervous about it as I've not done this before.

Oh, what else? I made my first living willow structure last year and it is still there and very much alive. Made a new smaller structure last week. Another gardening interest.

I'm going to a talk about permaculture at the beginning of April.

Look forward to hearing about what other folks get up to on their patch.

hello

I'm Amanda, I love to grow our own food, I'm a novice gardener, I've been growing bits and bobs on a very low scale for a while now.  Last year lots of tomatoes, corgettes, peppers, salad leaves, strawberries, blueberries, blackberries and apples.  The year before that mostly potatoes and tomatoes, blackberries and apples.  Currently we've planted potatoes (1st earlies), we have tomatoe and lettuce seedlings on the window sils (sp) and quite a few packets of seeds to start off.