The first garden purchases of 2019.

 

Hoping for another sizzling chilli year.

“But it’s only the 4th of January”, you may well be thinking, but when it comes to chillis and peppers, you really can’t start too early, especially when you consider that it can take several weeks for chilli seeds to germinate, or the fact that realistically there is only a short ripening window. No, the sooner you start chilli and sweet pepper seeds off the better in my humble opinion. My tomatoes won’t be that long behind either but they’re a bit trickier, as they have tendency to legginess (is that a word?) if kept in the house too long BUT I will struggle to get them ripe before the end of the growing season, if sown too late.

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August End Garden Update

It’s almost September but the garden looks like June.

It’s hard to believe that August is nearly over and we will soon be entering the last Summer month. Already there is a definite nip in the air, so much so that I can no longer leave the greenhouse doors and windows ajar overnight but there is finally stuff happening in the garden, possibly a little too late in some cases. Yesterday afternoon I took a walk around the vegetable patch, phone in hand to record some of what is growing in the beds and in the greenhouses.

The giant, the mini and the just plain weird!

Gerberas in a tin

During last autumn (or Fall for the Americans amongst us), Mud and I added manure and a thick layer of mulch to the vegetable beds, with a view to enriching them. For the most part, the beds had been rested for a year and with the addition of enriching materials, I had anticipated the healthiest of healthy plants, thriving on the nutrient rich soil. Unfortunately, things haven’t worked out quite like I’d planned.

Out to the greenhouse

No room at this inn ……

With the warm and sunny weather continuing throughout this week and the seedlings in the propagators quickly outgrowing their nursery conditions, I made the decision to start moving the plants into the greenhouse and have been steadily potting them on, one tray at a time, and already the larger greenhouse is almost full. Mud has informed me more than once that we will no doubt find ourselves in the midst of another freezing cold spell in a day or two but, as Middle Mudlet was happy to point out, that’s what horticultural fleece is for and we have enough to provide protection for everything in the greenhouses.

Seed to seedlings – a new variety

Atlantic Giant seedlings

It’s been a while since I did a seed to seedling post because, knowing my soil and space limitations, I tend to grow pretty much the same sort of thing. This year however, we’re growing a variety new to Mudville, the Asparagus Pea, and so I’ll be plotting their progress throughout the year and hopefully we’ll have a wonderful new vegetable to try in a few months time.

Seeds, seedlings and a tin of Red Roses

I fell for the ‘Scardy Cat’ label

Every year there comes a point where every available windowsill in the house is home to seeds and/or seedlings because I need to get on with this years crops but it is far too cold to be setting seed in the greenhouses and if I wait any longer then many of the vegetables won’t be ready before the growing season comes to an end.

It’s growing season again!!!

King Edwards make the best roast potatoes

Okay, when I say ‘It’s growing season again’, I don’t mean that you’ve all done a ‘Rip Van Winkle’ and hibernated the rest of your Winter or Summer (depending on where abouts in the world you live) away. No, what I mean is that with the Christmas decorations fast becoming a dim and distant memory and January passing by at a quite alarming rate of knots, I now have the windowsill space to place propagators and the knowledge that officially, our Spring is, along with Greenhouse washing and bed preparation only a matter of weeks away (sorry Sarah) which means that, if I want to stand any chance of harvesting ripe tomatoes, chillis or sweet peppers by the end of the summer, I need to get the seeds sown now!

So, this morning I trundled down to the greenhouses and pulled out three propagator trays, lids and seed tray inners, the potting station and garden labels before, much to the dismay of the array of birds who have been spending vast swathes of time at the feeders, setting about washing and rinsing them outside, before stacking them in front of the Rayburn to dry.

We are growing 5 varieties of chilli this year, including an interesting looking ‘Hot Curry’ chilli which I’ve never grown before but then, to be honest, out of the others, I’ve only ever grown ‘Patio Sizzle’ before which is a hot little chilli in its’ own right. The remaining varieties are: a hot ‘Paper Lantern’; a very hot ‘Tobasco’; and a hot ‘Jalapeno’.

Middle Mudlet helped me choose the Tomato varieties for this year. We settled on three and we haven’t grown any of them before either. One ‘Craigella’ produces a salad sized tomato, we have a mix of baby plum tomatoes called ‘Rainbow Mix’ and a cherry variety called ‘Sweet Baby’.

The final vegetable seeds for sowing today are two varieties of sweet pepper. I’ve never had much success growing sweet peppers but we use loads of them in cooking, the Mudlets like taking them to school to use for a mid morning snack and they are not exactly cheap to buy and, more often than not, are not in the best of condition well before their ‘use by’ or ‘best before’ dates. So we’re giving them another go but this year, as well as the usual ‘Worldbeater’ variety which produces what I would call a standard looking and sized sweet pepper, we’re also going to try and grow a smaller variety called ‘Mini Red’.

I mentioned back in the Summer/Autumn, that Middle Mudlet had asked for her own patch of garden this year and so she has helped me choose the seeds for this season:

We have 5 varieties from the pumpkin/winter squash family and these are:

• Winter squash ‘High Sugar Mix’ which is a favourite of mine and contains a mix of four sweet dumpling squash varieties which are ‘Harlequin’, ‘Celebration’, ‘Table Star’ and ‘Sweet Lightning’. The thing about this mix is that you have no idea whatsoever which seeds you have until the fruits start to develop but it is really exciting to see them start to grow, and their different colours add a bit more interest to the vegetable patch;
• Butternut ‘Butterfly’ which was one of the few things I tried to grow last year but to no avail. These are the left over seeds and as this was a gift from one of the Mudlets, I am going to try again this year and, with the beds manured and mulched to within an inch of their lives last Autumn, I’m hoping for a bit more success this year;
• One of Middle Mudlets choices was the Winter Squash ‘Honey Bear’ and I’m sure her decision had nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that the teddy bear she has had from being a newborn is also called Honey Bear. This squash has a dark green skin with a bright orange flesh;
• She also chose the ‘Atlantic Giant’ pumpkin seeds and we are really looking forward to seeing how these do and if we can actually grow a giant pumpkin for Halloween; and
• We also have the smaller pumpkin ‘Baby Bear’ which is described as a culinary pumpkin.

Beans and peas are also on the growing agenda for this season. We have two beans but could really do with a third and two types of peas:

• The runner bean ‘Enorma’ will grace the back fence this year;
• Climbing bean ‘Blauhilde’ was another of Middle Mudlet choices having been drawn to the thought of purple bean pods decorating the garden;
• She also fell for the unusual looking ‘Asparagus’ pea which is a variety I had never heard off before, never mind seen, eaten or grown. It looks amazing on the packet and I’m as excited as she is to see if we can grow them and find out what they taste like; and
• One of the mainstays of our garden is ‘Oregon Sugar Pod’ mangetout which is a prolific and tasty favourite of us all. The Mudlets often have these as snacks for school and can get quite impatient waiting for the first pods to reach munching size.

The last of the seeds Mudlet and I chose for this year are an interesting mix:

• Carrot ‘Cosmic Purple’ which was the one seed that Middle Mudlet really, really wanted to grow:
• Another of Middle Mudlets choices is cabbage ‘Minicole’. We don’t usually grow cabbage due to the space required but this is variety can be grown quite close together and can stand ready for cutting for up to four months and so I was happy to give it a go:
• We were both intrigued by the ‘Little Warpath’ lettuce which is described on the packet as the smallest iceberg;
• ‘Mixed Salad Leaves’ are another mainstay of our growing season and so will be sown along with the icebergs and both varieties will be sown at regular intervals to ensure a ready supply of salad leaves;
• Middle Mudlet chose these ‘French breakfast’ radish seeds to try as well. Radish is a crop I’ve never been able to master and have read and followed the advice of numerous bloggers and magazines, all to no avail. Fingers crossed that 2018 will prove to be the year that we crack radish growing; and
• A growing season in Mudville is never complete without sunflowers and we have the ‘Giant Single’ variety for this year.

We still need to get parsnip seeds for this year and another variety of carrot, as well as the green beans but other than that we’re good to go, having bought a bag of approximately 26 King Edward seed potatoes a couple of weeks ago. With the propagators washed and dried, it’s time to get the first of this years seeds sown and then the waiting game for the first sight of seedlings begins.

 

 

And so it begins

We need it to start turning orange now

Wow! Where has this year gone? It only seems 5 minutes since I was planning what I was going to plant in the school garden, agreed to help in the local community garden and took the decision to back off from blogging for a while to allow my mojo to heal and rejuvenate. As for my own garden, it has had the year off to replenish the depleted nutrients which have resulted from several seasons of year on year growing and in spite of zealous digging in of fertilisers. My beds are currently buried under a generous layer of farmhouse manure and freshly mulched hedge clippings, ready for the autumn/winter weather and local population of worms to work their magic, breaking it down into the much needed, aforementioned nutrients. With any luck growing season 2018 is going to be a good one.

Halloween – shockingly quiet

Marshmallow spiders – my kind of arachnid

By the time the younger Mudlets and I left the house to go trick or treating this Halloween, it had been dark for just over an hour and yet we had only had one set of callers. This was great news for the girls who were delighted at the prospect of loads of left over sweets, not to mention my marshmallow spiders but not so good for Mud, who wasn’t looking forward to the prospect of hoards of trick or treaters calling after we had left.

Who dunnit?

The second of our two pumpkins is now almost completely orange

A couple of weekends ago I spent about 7 hours across two days, in my vegetable gardening clearing away, pruning, digging up and planting, untangling bean vines from bamboo structures interwoven with garden wire or garden twine. I hoisted, shifted and dragged bags of compost, spent and unused growbags, pots, tubs, house bricks and windblown branches from one place to another. By the end of the weekend I could feel with the usual gentle reprimand from muscles not used to so much activity and treated myself to a long, hot soak in the bath to placate them.