Much Excitement In The Field.

Well, there was much excitement in the field last Monday with the arrival of this fabulous bundle of things. After a hernia-inducing 20 minutes lugging the whole lot through to the field because the delivery driver just dumped them in front of my house and legged it so he wouldn't have to help, I stood back and surveyed my poly tunnel bits. 

For years and years I have been saving up for a greenhouse and every time I manage to scrape together the money to buy one something comes along and I have to spend the money on something else. Not this time. This time I will be getting my indoor growing space and it's going to be epic. My poly tunnel arrived. It's HUGE! Well, the pieces are huge so I'm guessing the actual poly tunnel will be huge when it's finished. I'm thrilled to bits and I can't wait to try and get it put together, hopefully this weekend, weather permitting - although the forecast for the weekend is not looking promising, I'm still hopeful that we can at least get the frame put up. 

This is what it should look like, this is the photo from eBay, which is where we got it from. Our's is probably a bit smaller but not much. We fitted one of the hoops together and propped it in place and it's so big you could practically live in it!!

I have so many plans for planting things and making the inside look nice ..... I know that's a bit girly of me but nevertheless, I want it to look nice as well as being somewhere practical to grow things. I have bought a little gas camping stove and a whistling kettle so I can spend my days out there getting on with all sorts of growing and planting and harvesting ....... do I sound like a compete nutty loon about all this? It's probably because I'm hoping to be able to be so self sufficient that I can give up work and do it full time so I am very, very keen to make a go of it but I promise I will try and keep my nuttiness to a minimum :-) 

I harvested the last of my beetroot a couple of weeks ago and spent the morning boiling, peeling and pickling and I eventually ended up with 4 jars of delicious beetroot. A couple of jars of normal beetroot, one jar of a pinky coloured beetroot and some that looks a bit like pickled pears but which is, in fact, beetroot. I planted mixed colours by mistake this year, normally I just plant a variety called Boltardy but I have a feeling that the mixed colours were ones that I got free with a magazine and I'm guessing I thought it was a good idea to try something new. I won't be making that mistake next year. I also made the mistake of using pickling vinegar this year instead of distilled white vinegar because I couldn't get hold of any of the distilled stuff and the spices in the pickling vinegar are a bit strong for the delicate beetroot and completely overwhelms the lovely woody, earthy taste. Another one to chalk up to experience. It's been a very steep learning curve this year and I'm guessing the next year or two are going to be even steeper. Besides, my husband didn't even notice the difference so maybe it's just me. 

I also harvested my leeks last week and turned them into leek and potato soup for the freezer. I know it's too early and because they went in so late they were quite small but we needed the space to get the last two raised beds in place before we can start to fill them with compost over the next few months ready for next year. There will be six raised beds in all and although there is now at least four times more growing space than I had last year, I still don't think it's going to be enough. I guess we will just have to play it by ear and see how it goes. 

My gorgeous new preserving pan. Not only is it amazing for making jam but it's brilliant for making vast amounts of soup. It's like my very own cauldron .... I love it 😊 (I found the new emoji button thingy, how cool is that) 

Anyway, hopefully, by next week I can post some pictures of my new poly tunnel ...... weather permitting, so watch this space. 

Oh and one final thing. If anyone out there has any tips for growing in poly tunnels I would be very, very, extremely grateful. I have absolutely no clue where to start. 

Day One Without a Car

Well today is day one without a car and as the weather this morning was lovely and sunny, I decided to get on with potting on my veg plants. Yesterday, before the car's MOT expired, I topped up my compost supply and I was desperately hoping that the 6 bags of compost would be enough to re-pot all the veg I have been growing and also the veg plants I fetched from my friend at the market yesterday, which would also need potting on. 

Because of my knee problem, digging over the veg beds has been near impossible so, with raised bed planting not an option this year, I really needed to come up with a plan B. Luckily, I don't throw anything away and have a decent plant pot collection of all shapes and sizes so planting the various veg into a collection of big pots and tubs became the plan B. I also had another dilemma. My garden looks a lot like a field at the moment and I have a terrible slug problem so I wanted to avoid standing the pots on the lawn in order to keep them as far away from the buggers as possible. I also wanted to keep the pots on the patio so they're close by for watering a weeding and suchlike so in true wilderness, pioneering spirit, I built myself a bench from 2 old raised bed stood on top of each other with a couple of planks of wood across the top to stand the post on. I love it and I'm hoping that it does the job and keeps the slugs and snails off the plants. It also gives my back a bit of a rest too :-)

I also got a bit creative when I ran out of space on the bench for my tomato plants to go. Two of the plants were "Tumbling Toms Yellow" so I planted them into a couple of old red hanging basket pots that used to have strawberries in them and hung them onto 2 shepherds-crook-type posts which originally had hanging lanterns on them but which had gone missing several years ago ...... I told you I never throw anything away, I've had those hanging posts sitting in the shed for almost 5 years and I knew that eventually they would be useful for something :-)

I haven't missed the car today at all but I'm guessing that as time goes on and I run out of more things I'm going to start feeling it a lot more. I discovered this morning that I have run out of soft toy stuffing which I usually get from a shop about 7 miles away so I'm having to look on the internet for some and work out if it's more cost effective to order it that way or whether I should just bite the bullet and get a taxi on payday and stock up on all the stuff I need from that shop all in one go. Dilemma dilemma dilemma ......

Anyway, the potting on is done for now and in my little veg garden I now I have 3 different types of tomatoes, 2  squash plants, some French beans, some spinach, some sugar snap peas, some cut and come again lettuce, some courgette plants, an aubergine plant and a whole lot of herbs including basil, parsley, thyme and sage. Plenty to be going on with.

Veg Planting Frenzy

I always seem to be playing catch-up when it comes to gardening. Whether it's planting veg, sowing seeds or simply sorting out the garden, everyone always seems to be more organised than me and this year, despite all my good intentions, once again I'm way behind everyone else. I start out the year with the best of intentions but for some reason, things just pile up and I start to get into a mild state of panic. This escalates to total meltdown when, on a Friday evening, I watch gardener's World. Now don't get me wrong, I LOVE Gardener's World. I love seeing what Monty does in his beautiful garden, I have a note book to jot down any plant names that I like the look of and although I have massive greenhouse envy every time I see his new brick and wood greenhouse, I totally love the program. That is, until it gets to the bit where it tells you what jobs you should be doing in the garden at the weekend. At that point I get slightly hysterical as I try and figure out how on earth I'm going to fit it all in.

MangeTout

Cucumber Plants

Anyway, a few weeks ago I had a bit of a mini meltdown and decided that it was time to get organised. Now, I try to get everything in the house sorted before 8am (the 3 D's......... Dogs, Dishes and Dusting, well hoovering and tidying actually but that doesn't begin with D). This means I have a clear day to either sew and create stuff for the market or, if the weather is nice as it has been for the last few days, I can spend it in the garden. So far it's working well but as I said I'm still playing catch-up so today I was in full planting mode. At a car boot sale on Sunday, in addition to the wood I got to make the chicken run with, I got some massive black plastic pots for £1 each so I have planted leeks, mange tout, curly kale, salad leaves and runner beans into those pots and some cabbages, strawberries, beetroot and lettuce into some wooden veg crates, which my friend at the market who sells veg brings for me. So far, I'm really pleased with how things are going.

Courgette and more cucumber plants

Tomato Plants

The chicken run is almost finished and after I have shut them up for the night tonight, I will move the chicken house so it's in place at the in front of the new run. Still no eggs yet but as I said before, they are point of lay so hopefully any day now and the rest of today is going to be a massive garden tidy so ........ got to go got masses to do :-)

More stuff to plant

Garden Lovliness and the Start of my Favourite Time of Year

I had a lovely day in the garden yesterday. It was sunny with a gentle breeze and I pottered about to my hearts content. I planted my cucumbers into bigger pots and did the same to my courgettes. I also potted on my tomato plants, again into bigger pots and moved some of my other stuff around. I haven't found a spot for my rosa rugosa yet but I have discovered that it has some pretty mean thorns! Still, that should come in handy to keep the nasty neighbours at bay. I think I am going to plant it along the boundary fence that runs down the side of my house between my house and their driveway. It will look lovely when the flowers bloom and I will be able to see them from my kitchen window.

I'm very behind with my veg planting. Not only is my garden completely out of control at the moment but the weather down here has been so cold. Even yesterday morning, there was frost on the windscreen of my car when I went out at about 7.30am. This brings me to the other part of the title. My favourite time of the year ............. Car Boot Sale Season. For those of you who don't know, I am a bit of a carbootaholic. I love rummaging about to find a bargain and I love the atmosphere of the whole thing, particularly the mandatory Sunday morning bacon butty from the catering van ....... you can smell the deliciousness as soon as you get out of the car. So it was with great glee that a hopped out of bed at 6.30am yesterday morning to give the dogs a quick run in the field before setting off to my nearest car boot sale. It was the third one of the season and so far, I have bought some preserving jars for 50p, three fabulous brass wall lights for £4 which are destined to be sold on to a lady I know, a cut glass trinket pot with a cute little pointy lid for 20p, a china teacup and saucer for 50p which is destined to be made into a candle and some wonderful unmounted rubber stamps for £1 per pack. Quite a haul and quite a bargain. I was back home by about 9.30am and as I said in the post yesterday, I had to wait a while before I could start clattering around in the garden. Fingers crossed for some more fine days so I can try and get my garden under control again :-)

Anyway, here are some more pictures I snapped in my garden in the early morning sun. 

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

Compost Bin

Well, I am very happy to say that, rather than using the writing of this blog as an excuse not to go into the garden and do things, as I feared I might, it's actually spurring me on to go ahead and get things done, not least so I have something to actually blog about. For the last few weeks, I have been meaning to build myself a new compost bin because the plastic thing I have had for years and years, which sort of slots together at the corners, falls apart at the slightest gust of wind, scattering the compost all over the garden. Last year, I added upright fence planks to my front garden fencing, sort of like picket fencing, to make it look a bit more presentable than the post and rail fencing I had put up previously to keep the horrible neighbours out and to keep my lovely dogs in the garden safe and sound. I was going to paint them green so they kind of blended in with the surroundings and had already painted about 30 or so ready to put up around the part which is directly next to my neighbours property so I could get it done quickly one morning while they were out (trust me they are really the neighbours form hell!) Long story short ... I think I have changed my mind about the colour ......maybe .... I just can't decide! I'm now thinking pale blue or even cream, which has left me with the dilemma of what to do with the ones I have already painted. It's probably not possible to paint over the green wood stain, I'm too scrooge-like to throw them away and it seems a waste to burn them on my fire so on to plan B. The intention is to use some of the painted fence planks and some 2x2 to make a nice big solid compost bin so I don't have to waste all the grass clippings and kitchen compost. Today, as the weather has been lovely, I decided to give it a go. I spent a happy couple of hours hammering away using all the ready painted planks and basically making it up as I went along. The result ....... a roomy compost bin with a lift up front panel so I can just lift it out and tip the wheelbarrow in and I have to say ........ I am very proud of it :-) I did find a good couple of links on how to make a compost bin if you don't want to blunder about making it up as you go along.

http://www.gardenersworld.com/how-to/projects/basics/how-to-build-a-compost-bin/87.html

http://www.which.co.uk/documents/pdf/making-a-compost-bin-154004.pdf