Fruit, Veg, Flowers and Slugs

I have been busy in the Greenhouse of late. The soil in the Greenhouse works harder than perhaps any other soil on my patch and I do from time to time take some out of the beds and replace with new compost; I pretty much exclusively grow Tomatoes in the Greenhouse and they are greedy plants. A job I do every year is replenish the soil. I have added a good helping of 'pot ash', actually ash I have saved from the Chimenea and Barbecue, Chicken Manure pellets and a good sprinkling of Blood, Fish and Bone. Each is added in turn and dug in adding all sorts of nutrients back into the soil. I leave for a week or so and then the Tomato seedlings are planted into their final growing places.  Suttons tempted me in with an email offer recently and I have another five  Tower Lily Pretty Woman  bulbs on their way to me as I write. It is a bit late to be planting Lily bulbs, those already in the White Border are around a foot tall, but at the special price of £2.99 for the five I could not r

  I have talked before about how you simply  can’t  rush Mother Nature and quite a lot on my plot is  somewhat behind  where I would expect it  to be by late April. In years gone by  I  have had Runner Beans and Peas quite well  established  on the Vegetable Patch by late March but this year  I  only got the  seedlings  planted out  over the Easter weekend ,  the cold nights dragging on into April . Law of the sod of course meant no sooner were the young seedlings out than we had a hail storm the next day and now, less than a week later, we have a yellow weather earning for high winds! The poor seedings are looking a bit bedraggled already but all being well will survive but the wind is whipping across the garden as I write; the bamboo screening down one side of the garden may well take off at some point!  The Cherry Tree in my garden is often in bloom in early  April  but the buds  have  remained fir mly shut  a nd  even now  the y  are only just beginning to  show signs of  open ing

It is that time of year when space in the Conservatory and on any sunny windowsill in the house is slowly but surely being taken up by things. I have the Potatoes currently chitting in the Conservatory sitting happily in old egg boxes for now until ready to plant, probably the second or third week of March. I often used the Cheltenham Festival as a guide for planting my spuds, horse racing being another love of mine, and the Monday of that week usually sees me planting spuds before the horse racing begins on the Tuesday.  This year I have chosen to try one of those 'kits' a number of the online sites offer. In the box delivered recently I have Charlotte , a tasty salad potato, Pentland Javelin, an early variety that will hopefully produce loads of small, tasty spuds, best simply boiled and Desiree which I am told is decent for chips and roasties. The kit comes complete with three thirty litre pots, which certainly look pretty solid,  and a bag of  Organic Potato Fertiliser. I

It says on the catch line of this blog that it is  chronicling my successes and failures as an amateur gardener on my plot in Essex on the veg patch and in the flower bed, well the first major failure has happened and the Limoncito and Black Cherry seedlings have all wilted and died. I think, despite being inside under cover, the lack of light and warmth over the last few days has done for them. With hindsight, a wonderful thing, I probably should have kept them on the windowsill of my back bedroom until stronger rather than moving them to the unheated Conservatory; I may also have made the classic error of overwatering.  It is annoying but most years something goes wrong, you can't get it right all the time and that is all part and parcel of gardening.  On the plus side, the Gigantomo and Beef Steak Tomato plants are growing by the day in the Greenhouse and strong and healthy - sometimes it is just bad timing, these seeds were of course sown earlier than the  Limoncito  and  Bl

There is an old saying regard Fools Spring and though still a bit early to consider it to be spring this weekend was a very good example. A nice day Saturday it was still bitterly cold at times, I was doing a little Pike fishing and can assure you it was woolly hat and thermal vest weather. Rain can overnight and Sunday was blustery and dull. The plan was for a bit of work in the garden but it was windy enough that with the wind chill I decided to retreat into the Potting Shed and Garage.  Two new lily bulbs were added to the white border, one in each corner, these being Tower Lily Pretty Woman , and all being well they will grow to six-feet plus with up to thirty blooms on each stem the blooms reaching up to 8 inches in size.  The first few seeds have been sown and are indoors on windowsills to keep them snug and warm until they germinate. Two varieties of Tomato were selected, the Gigantamo and the  Buffalo Steak being the ones chosen as I want to get them off and growing as early