Ready .... Get Set ..... Grow

Well it's almost that time of year again. It's almost planting time. Today, while I was at the garden centre looking for some garden vouchers for my Mum for Mother's day, I came across some tomato plants and I began to get excited. I love growing tomatoes. Nothing tastes like a home-grown tomato. Shop bought tomatoes never seem to taste the same and there is nothing like the luscious smell of tomatoes on the vine, a sort of rich, earthy smell that for me, is everything summer should be. In fact I love growing veg full stop. Any kind of veg. It never fails to amaze me that you stick these tiny seeds in some soil, water them and give them some sunshine and up pops teeny tiny plants that turn into food. Amazing!

A couple of years ago, in true nerdy scientist fashion, I did a few experiments by planting some of my veg using Biodynamic methods, with some interesting results. (You can read about it here and here). I Definitely had a better crop by planting biodynamically but, last year, because I had much less time on my hands, due to my market commitments, I went back to my tried and tested "bung 'em in the ground and cross your fingers" method which, quite frankly, works almost as well and is a lot less faffing. This year, I think it will probably be a bit of a combination of the two but on a much, much bigger scale. I'm going to be planting much more this year, in the hope of filling my freezer and cupboards with things from the garden.

Well, to cut a long story short ...... I just couldn't quite stop myself from buying some tomato plants. They were lovely, strong, vigorous plants and at 99p each .... well .... how could I resist.

I had £8.00 in my purse so obviously, I bought 8. 

A Fence, A Flower Bed, Some Veg And An Electric Cable

Well it’s been a while since my last blog post and I have a lot of catching up to do. I built a fence, dug a flower bed, panted some more veg, painted my gate posts and almost electrocuted myself ……. but more about that later. Firstly, a bit of an update on my biodynamics experiment with my garlic. As you might remember, a few weeks ago, I planted 14 cloves of garlic. Seven of these cloves were planted in accordance with biodynamic principles on the correct planting day for planting root vegetables. The other seven were planted on a day which biodynamic principles suggest should be used for planting fruits. The theory being that the garlic planted on the correct day should and be more abundant and produce a bigger crop than the ones that were planted on a day not meant for planting garlic. As you can see from the photos, there doesn’t seem to be very much difference in the size of the plants. A couple of cloves in both boxes didn’t grow at all and there seems to be equal amounts of growth in each box. I’m still keeping an open mind until I can harvest the garlic to see if the yields show any significant difference but I suspect that I will find that there is little difference in growth between the two boxes. There are several reasons I can think of that could account for this, however, I will save my theories for after I have had a chance to look at the crop.Right, let’s get down to business. What else have I been up to? I have planted more veg, I managed to get tomatoes, courgettes, cucumbers, peas, mange tout, beetroot, sweet peppers and a whole host of other yummy vegetables planted over the last couple of weeks. Most of them have been started off in the raised bed which I covered with the polythene sheeting …. Now known as my “polybed” and they all seem to be growing nicely. I also planted some sweet peas, some triffid like bulb things that I bought from a local shop last year and didn’t want to waste and I bought several perennial cottage garden plants to put in the new flower bed I created in front of the new fence I built.

As for the fence, it’s to keep my three dogs out of the veg patch because they absolutely love digging up my veg and think it’s hilarious to run around the garden with a leek or a cabbage in their mouth laughing at my feeble attempts to retrieve said plants. Having never built a fence before it was a real baptism of fire but even though I say it myself I think I did a nice job. I even used “Postcrete” to fix in the posts rather than just bashing them into the ground and crossing my fingers – although a note on this. After making the decision to cement the posts into the ground, I bought a bag of postcrete from Mole Valley Farmers to give it a go as I’d never used anything like that before. I dug a hole, filled it with water as directed, poured on the Postcrete and hey presto 5 minutes later a nice solid upright post. Fantastic stuff!! After I had used all of the first bag of Postcrete I decided to nip off to Homebase and get another couple of bags to finish off the fence, only to discover that Homebase don’t stock Postcrete, however, they do stock “Postfix . I was assured by the sales assistant that it was exactly the same product just with a different name, and as I didn’t want to wait until the following Monday to get some from Mole Valley, I bought 2 bags and set off home to carry on building my fence. Having already completed one fence post and now considering myself somewhat of an expert on all things post/concrete related, I dug the hole, poured in the water and poured on the postfix as directed. An HOUR later…… all I had was a wobbly, wonky fence post that was never going to support the fence panels despite the fact that the panels were not particularly heavy. To say I was rather grumpy was a bit of an understatement so I loaded the unopened bag and the half used bag back into the car and set off to Homebase. To be fair, and to their credit, Homebase were wonderful and refunded the cost of BOTH bags of Postfix without a moment’s hesitation even though one bag had been half used. So ….. note to self …….Buying a cheaper alternative to Postcrete is a waste of time and money and it’s worth sepnding the extra 50p, or whatever it was, per bag to get the real deal.

I put the fence far enough back from the patio for me to dig a nice flower border in front of it to plant some lovely cottage garden flowers up against the new fence and this is how I came to almost electrocute myself! I was happily digging away, thrusting the spade down into the soil to strip of the turf and dig over the soil ready to plant lots of lovely cottage garden plants in front of the fence and I kept finding bits of yellow plastic with black writing on. Thinking that the guy who converted the house back in the early 80’s, who was the living embodiment of a cowboy builder, had just put plastic bags down to suppress the weeds rather than digging them out, I carried on in blissful ignorance. Half way down the border, after finding more plastic and unearthing several big lumps of slate placed in a straight line, I had a sudden epiphany. Grabbing the pieces of plastic, I took a closer look and after piecing together all the plastic I was able to make out the following letters. DAN__R O_ ELECTR_______! Roughly translated …….. DANGER OF ELECTROCUTION!!! It suddenly dawned on me that the cable for the electric pump that brings the water up from the well and into the water tanks that supply the water for the seven properties in the area, was directly under the slate in the flower bed that I was digging with vigorous abandonment. It was more by luck more than judgement I had managed to avoid hacking through it with my spade, cutting off the water supply and killing myself …….. Phew

Beware ..... Low Flying Bags of Compost

Well it finally happened....the top soil and compost arrived for my raised beds yesterday ..... all two tonnes of it. It was delivered by two very nice gentlemen in a large lorry with a crane type arm thingy, who managed to get the compost over my fence and onto the lawn. This was a huge bonus because otherwise I would have had to wheel the barrows full of compost miles to get it to the raised beds. Ok, that's a slight exaggeration, its only a couple of hundred yards, however, last week I discovered my wheelbarrow tyres were flat and my attempt to inflate them resulted in one of them becoming even flatter because the pump didn't fit and the air came out of the tyre instead of going in. This has resulted in the wheelbarrow steering off to the left all the time, almost going round in circles, making pushing a barrow-full of earth a herculean task. Anyhow, today, my flat-tyred wheelbarrow and I spent a couple of hours filling two of the raised beds with a mix of compost and top soil. With hindsight, I could probably have got away with just ordering one bag of compost and not bothered with the topsoil, which, despite the Dumpy Bag Man's assurances that it was decent quality topsoil, and despite inspecting one of the bags in the depot yesterday, was full of stones which I had to take out by hand because my garden sieve has mysteriously vanished (I suspect Nargles!). On the plus side, I now have a huge supply of compost/soil mix for doing other things in the garden and I'm sure with a bit of creative thinking I can find something to do with it. Finally, as today is a root day on the biodynamics calendar, I planted some shallots in one of my newly filled raised beds. Happy Days.

The Great Biodynamics Experiment Begins ........

Well, the time has finlly come to start my biodynamics experiment..... it's so exciting :-) For the record and before I start, I would just like to say that I'm not endorsing Jamie Oliver products, they were on special offer at my local garden center and I'm too much of a scrooge to pass up a bargain. I have also been collecting the wooden fruit crates for a few weeks now and had intended to use them as containers to grow things like salad leaves and strawberries, however, they turned out to be the perfect containers to try out these experiments. I realise that this might seem like an awful lot of trouble to got to just to grow some veg but I have been reading about biodynamics and there definitely seems to be something in it. Even the National Trust have started growing flowers and vegetables using biodynamic principles so if it's good enough for them it probably should be good enough for me and worth looking into further. The experiment part is purely selfish and having spent 4 years at uni studying environmental science and sustainable environmental management, the chance to do a little experiment satisfies my inner geek :-) . According to the calendar in my book "Gardening and Planting by the Moon 2012", today is apparently a fruit day and not a good day to be planting garlic, so today I will be planting some garlic. According to the calendar, tomorrow is a root day and ideal for planting garlic, so again, ....... I will be planting some garlic. The idea is that I will plant one lot of garlic today and one lot tomorrow to see which grows the best. I will be using compost from the same bag, garlic from the same batch and identical containers in the form of fruit crates from my local fruit and veg shop. I have intentionally opted for planting the non garlic day before the garlic day so any differences in growth can't be put down to the non-garlic day being after the garlic day and therefore having less time to grow (well it makes sense in my head even if it sounds nuts on paper) I will be doing this with various seeds throughout the year and I will be photographing the boxes each week and posting them here on my blog.

UPDATE: Yesterday I planted box number 2 of the garlic experiment. Yesterday was a root day so, in theory, it should mean that the garlic planted yesterday thrives better than the garlic I planted the day before, which was planted on a fruit day. I have been taking the boxes outside every morning so they get plenty of sunlight and rain and bringing them back inside in the evening so they aren't outside in the frost, so basically, watch this space ...........

Biodynamics

Right well here comes post number 2. I know it's taken a while to do this second post but hopefully now I will be able to update the blog on a regular basis. Recently, I have been reading a a book that I bought myself with one of my Christmas vouchers called Gardening and Planting by the Moon 2012. I was curious after reading an article in the Guardian about The National Trust giving biodynamics a go so after doing some research on the subject and chatting to a few people, I have decided to give it a go. Being a bit of a geek, (according to my daughters, although I can't see it myself) I have devised a bit of an experiment to see if it has any noticeable effect on the veg I plant. I have been collecting wooden fruit crates from my local greengrocers and I am going to fill 3 identical boxes with compost from the same compost bag. Then I'm going to use seeds from the same packet to plant the seeds. Box 1 will be planted on a day which corresponds to a recommended planting day for that particular veg, box 2 will be planted on a day when it says not to plant any plants at all and as a control, I'm going to plant box number 3 on any old day. It seems a bit complicated but from the reviews I have read and the planting by the moon book, I figure it can't do any harm and if it increases the yield of my veg this year, then I'm all for it. I will be posting a weekly photograph of the boxes so you can see for yourselves.