So, where to start!? Well, I'm not really interested in flower gardening, for one thing. If I'm going to put effort into something, I want a definite reward at the end - I want to eat what i tend to! With that in mind, it looks like we may get to eat at least one crop soonish: Potatoes!:
This pot of potatoes lives at the back of my official veg plot. It's actually the poorer of two pots. Here's the better of the two:
What has amazed me, is that all of the potatoes in the pots are just potatoes that we had at home for eating purposes and they started to sprout. I thought 'what the hey, give them a go' and stuck them in a little compost. They've gone bonkers as you can see! I am so pleased with them and look forward to nomming on the harvest. Thing is, I have no idea what type of potato they are and won't until they are harvested. I have a feeling that the smaller pot (the first one) has a new potato type - Tesco finest if my memory serves me. We'll see when they get pulled up!
Just to make sure we harvest 'something' we can eat, I bought seed potato sets from Thompsom & Morgan, planted them and prayed hard... they're coming along beautifully and I think they may yield good stuff too. In the foreground of the photo, you can just about make out my tiny salady type garden - here, I'll show you a closer shot:
This is a little selection of a row of mixed salad above a row of red lettuce. They're cut and come again varieties, but too small to cut yet. The row of mixed salad was only sown the other day and I'm so pleased at how quickly they've poked their heads through the soil.
A few more salady bits, you can see the line of mixed salad at the bottom, there's land cress there and I think you might be able to make out some weedy looking spinach... or maybe not - it's there though!
This wee bit of land looks a tad fallow, but honest, there's something in there. I planted out red onions a few days ago. They have yet to reassure me that they are alive, or indeed intending to do anything - but their brothers and sisters in the pot here seem to be poking their heads through:
See the long greeny looking shoot - a sign of hope surely! Of course, it could be that the red onions like the compost and are unimpressed with my soil - who would blame them? We'll see though - an interesting experiment if nothing else. The onions cost me nothing, they were given to me by a lady I went to collect some magazines from. The joy of freegle.Next to the pot here is the first of my 'garden workstations':
See the onion pot there on the left? I call this a workstation but really it's a way of keeping some mess together. I keep a rubbish bag (empty compost bag), my current bag of compost, and my plant pots here. The plant pots didn't cost me a penny either. I put a 'want' advert on freegle and got inundated with friendly folk who wanted to give me their plant pots :)
This crazy mint plant occupies the whole of this big terracota pot. It's brilliant to see it so rampant because I bought this poor sad mint plant from the fresh herbs section in the supermarket a couple of years ago. It was reduced to 75p, it was pot bound and trailing over the pot and onto the shelf. I wandered if it had a chance at all, but for 75p I thought I'd give it a whirl. Glad I did... There's nothing like minted new potatoes.
This is my main 'workstation' in the garden. It's right near the window to the room that the cat lives in, you can see the right hand window is open because she pretty much comes and goes as she pleases and we don't have a cat flap. The garden is pretty secure. You can see the mint plant in the bottom left corner :) it gets everywhere lol. The little fold out table used to hold the post in the hallway when we moved here but when A bought a more fitting period piece, I kidnapped this. It doesn't really matter if it rots away, it was in a state when I claimed it. You can see all my essentials here, and I'll admit I tidied up before i took this picture! There's a potato planter there, on the floor. I'm waiting for the next set of seed potatos so I can plant in time to harvest for Yule. There's a bag of vermiculite which I'll be using in the greenhouse when I get that under way. My trowel and mini stakes. My little blue watering can which used to hold just enough water when my mini greenhouse was full. It's fairly empty now... which is good in a way because at this time of year most things flourish in the ground - but is bad in a way because I should be using it to sow perpetual harvests and to incubate stuff. Through the window you should be able to see 3 brown boxes with address labels on - each box holds 100 bulbs of flowering plants. I've planted 200 already... I have to keep A happy somehow! Anyway, we'll wander over to the mini greenhouse now and you can see what it's holding for me:
This is very close up.. it's a tiny pepper chilli living in a dessert pot! We might eat chillis yet!
These tiny new plants were potted out today from their former cramped home. They are courgettes. I know they're very late but I'll keep them protected and when the greenhouse is up and running, I'll find them a home in there. I'm not expecting them to produce until next year now, but I'm really chuffed to have raised them this far from seed - and the root system on each one when I moved them was so impressive. I couldn't help talking to them and telling them all how happy i was with them all!
We might have carrots! These need spacing out into the earth now, but I'm a little bit scared to do it. I had two pots of carrots and this afternoon I decided to separate and pot on one of them. When I separated them out, they had tiny puny little root systems. I didn't think they'd make anything of themsleves so they went into the compost bin and the soil went onto the garden. I hope these have rooted a little better. If not, then I've learned my lesson - I should sow directly into the earth and thin them out from there, rather than trying to over coddle them and start them in a pot.Moving further up the garden, here's a much zoomed in upon picture of my tiny nasturtium. I didn't want to grow flowers at all, but I found out that this is edible....!
I'm impressed with this baby - because I grew it from seeds and only one out four germinated. I'll be keeping my eye on this one and praying for growth and health.
Chives, 2 strawberry plants and a blueberry plant. The chives were again another wilted sad thing from the supermarkets fresh herb selection. I have to give it a haircut regularly otherwise it gets really out of hand! The two strawberry plants look very sorry for themselves, but they were only planted on Saturday. They haven't quite recovered from shock I think. The blueberry plant is a thing of interest. It was another special offer from Thompson & Morgan - I only paid for postage. The lads here K and A like blueberries, and I like to grow edible stuffs... we'll see what happens!
This is my veg patch proper. Do you like my little scarecrow? Isn't she sweet?! OK, here we have tomatoes, radishes, dwarf beans, and runner beans. The runners have recently begun to literally run! I've have to replace their skewers with proper stakes.. here's a better picture:
Excuse the sunlight streaming into the picture... but it's gorgeous isn't it?! Any how, you can just about see two of the plants have gone crazy. Lets hope it yields beans! The next photo comes from the right of this section:
You can see a couple of rows of beetroot there and three tiny plants of lollo rosso. I have been so lucky with slugs so far - I haven't seen one despite nightly raids with my wind up torch and the lollo rosso remains untouched. I am impressed!Only a couple more photos, I promise!:
These are five tiny 'Cosmos' plants that I grew from seedlings... they are flowers *sigh* but I have to keep the husband shaped man happy.
Final photo for now - This is the place I planted the 1st 100 bulbs out of those 500 I mentioned earlier - and look! As much as I am unimpressed with flower growing, I am thrilled when anything decides to grow. It's fascinating that things just need dirt and a bit of water (and talking to and stroking) they do this - utterly fantastic.I hope you enjoyed my litte garden tour. Please bear in mind I haven't showed you the pile of dirt that needs sweeping up, of the pile of weeds that needs clearing up - the grass that needs cutting etc - I've showed you the good bits only. However, I've shown you the bit's we'll probably be revisiting over time.
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