Fruit, Veg, Flowers and Slugs

 At the start of the growing season 2025 there are many things to do on the vegetable patch and in the garden. For personal reasons I have been unable to update the Blog recently but I have been busy 'behind the scenes' and much has been going on.  For the last few weeks there has been little spare space on windowsills around my house with various seeds germinating here there and everywhere. Greyhound cabbages and Lancaster F1 leeks have been residing on the windowsill of the spare bedroom, four different tomato variaties were on the front room windowsill and the Scarlet Empire runner beans were threatening to take over the conservatory. Lavender cuttings and Agapanthus seedlings (seeds saved from one of my established plants) were also to be found in the conservatory. The Salvia cuttings I took last year from an established plant had been moved to the logstore at the bottom of the garden along with the Geranium cuttings in March ‘hardening off’ along with some Nasturtium seed...

The Christmas Potato experiment, for those of you that have been following developments, was a bit of a damp squib. A Christmas cracker with no crack, the Christmas present you smile about but really, did not want; a toilet roll dolly, a jar of wrinkle cream, comedy socks! I got a few spuds, but nowhere near enough for a festive feast as you can see from the photo; the Eskimo Carrots you will note from the picture have been a success again and they are on the list of seeds I am ordering for 2025. I think I probably sowed the seed potatoes too late. I will try again next year. Cheers 🍺

With the British weather really doing its worse of late there has been very little time or chance to actually get in the garden or on the vegetable plot to get anything done, other than checking fencing and clearing debris that has blown in! I will begin sowing seeds soon and over the next few weeks every spare inch in the conservatory and on windowsills around the house will be taken up with seed trays full of seedlings as ever in January and February. I do have another little project though that I will be working on in the potting shed out of the wind, rain and cold temperatures. There are, apparently, over 250 types of bee in the UK, there are twenty-four types of bumblebee alone, and they are incredibly important little creatures. Around 90% of UK bee species are solitary bees, a group that includes mason bees, mining bees and leaf-cutter bees amongst others. Solitary bees aren’t like honey bees that live in hives. As their name suggests, they make their nests on their own and lay ...

It has been a year of successes and failures on the plot in 2024, due in no small part to the ever-changing British weather. One thing that has occurred this growing season that I have never experienced before happened with my Strawberry plants. I cut back the foliage on my plants in early autumn after they had finished fruiting, and they grew back with a vengeance in the warm, wet weather we had through late September and October. I actually had Strawberries forming on the plants again in November! The first proper frost in late November appears to have done for them, no surprise, and I will now give the plants a second trim and a feed of chicken manure pellets to see them through the winter.  The Runner Bean bed has been thoroughly weeded, lightly dug over and a compost bin full of compost (around 220 litres) added to the soil along with two 50 litre bags of Farmyard manure. The bed was raked over and has been covered in tarpaulin, weighed down with bricks, to hopefully keep it i...

The autumn tidy is well underway on my plot with more and more bare soil becoming visible on the vegetable plot as crops are harvested and cleared and less and less blooms appearing across the flower beds. The leaves are beginning to fall from the Cherry tree and with the clocks having gone back a few days ago the nights are, of course, drawing in. The outdoor tomatoes are long since finished and those in the Greenhouse also now cleared away and composted replaced with the Agapanthus in pots that will overwinter under the cover of glass. With the relatively warm weather we had in September, and at times almost monsoon-like bouts of rain, the runner bean plants were still producing into October and I actually ate the last of the fresh picked beans in the first week of November. Those plants have also now been cleared and composted. An entire 'Dalek' bin of compost has been added to that bed. once it was weeded, with some manure to be added yet. The bed will then be left to rest ...

Sleigh bells ring, are you listening? In the lane snow is glistening………. By the time you read this dear reader Christmas will be but 15-weeks or so away. Aside from Bing Crosby on the radio, the goodwill to all men, family gatherings, presents under the tree and general feeling of joy that Yuletide brings, there is one thing that matters at Christmas time - a really good roast potato!  I am experimenting with growing potatoes for Christmas dinner this year, not as I would usually growing through the spring and summer harvesting in autumn and storing in hessian sacks until needed, but by planting in August to actually harvest in December. I have some Maris Piper seed potatoes, the best for roast spuds, and have thus far basically treated them exactly as I would if sowing in March, left them on a windowsill to chit for a few weeks before planting, except I sowed the tubers into 30-litre pots during the first week of August. I wouldn’t usually recommend growing main crop potatoes in p...