Be Excellent To Each Other

Have you tried putting a good layer of brown materials on top and leaving it for a week?

Is it a lidded ‘dalek’ type, or open?

I will look at a good layer of brown material... is that cardboard?

It is a dalek one. a little black one

I keep wanting to spray mine silver and stick a plunger to its side

Yep, brown cardboard boxes (torn up into small pieces), or if you ever have Amazon packaging the rough brown paper that they use as padding is even better. Scrunch it into balls to allow air in.

Straw, woodchop, well broken branches also work (though wood breaks down slower) and a lot of people use scrunched newspaper though I’m always a bit weary because of ink… though apparently the use of problematic inks has long since passed, but for some reason I always avoid it.

1/3 of the stuff in your compost bin should be ‘brown’ materials, which aids the breakdown and stops it turning into smelly slurry. I also have a composting enzyme that you add a little to a watering can of water to wet the pile.

Grass is an odd one in that if you add the fresh clippings it is green, but if you wait for it to dry and turn brown it is brown.

I realise that I’ve just said that green is green and brown is brown, but you know what I mean

Cheers, I will do that with the paper in the amazon boxes. I will look at compost enzyme.

and Brown grass


Thanks for the tips

This is the one we use, but there are plenty of others available https://evengreener.com/be-green-500ml- ... r-biot5010

Thanks Mimi xx

Grew some tomatoes

Totally distracted by the rocky road.

It is a protein shake. Very very nom nom

They look like perfectly perfect tomatoes, Kov!

I haven’t posted any of our later veg. We have had more tomatoes than is necessary for a family to have in a lifetime or more, but we were lucky as blight hit a week or so ago, so I harvested any tomatoes not affect Ted and ripened them in the front porch, and they all came out great. My freezer now has more pasta sauce and passata than you’d believe, but we use a lot of it, so that’s fine, and you really can taste the difference to an incredible degree.

Today we went out for some carrots for a carrot cake and I said we’d pull up a parsnip or two. I picked a spot in the mass of leaves and started pulling and my goodness, parsnips put up a fight! Eventually managed to free this thing. It’s 998g (2.2lb)

wow that is huge...

That's a magnificent parsnip

WOAH!

Looking at the ‘shoulders’ of the rest they all look to be about the same, and I sowed so many. Haha! At least they store well in the ground and can stay there for the frosts (which sweetens them). Then I’ll pull them and prep them for freezing, otherwise I’ll never get them out once the ground freezes proper.

I’m absolutely chuffed to bits with what we’ve done in the garden today. On the right side of the far end of the garden we had three pallet collar beds (each 1x1.2m). They’ve been amazing this year, and I’d say the only downsides were that I wanted more raised beds (we do have more on the left side of the garden, but I wanted more still… I’ve got the bug), and it was difficult mowing between them.

The other day it struck me that if we could pull the pins from the hinges we could swing the 1m sides out to join them together. We could have just moved them so that they sat end to end, but this would then gain us the 1m sides, giving us another 2m to grow in. We did it today, and I love it. There is 4.4m single height and 1.2m double height and it’s great. I want to do the same with the ones on the left in a few weeks, too.

Oh fab - great idea!

I bought some of the pallet collars in the end but with the dog and everything else haven't gotten round to even putting soil in mine yet. The dog is a digger too (exactly as feared) so I need to come up with some sort of chicken wire lid solution, or something like that. I also have them stacked three-high for now. Definitely want to get back into it properly next year, have missed pottering about in the garden.

It’s really easy to do. You can knock the pins in the hinges through with a hammer and something long and thin then just join the hinges of two collars together with the same pin.

We don’t have a digging dog, but we do have a fox and badgers that like a good dig around. They tend to leave things alone once there are established plants inside, but until then it’s dig city,

I use those, after your recommendation.

Might put another layer on next year.

Depending on how your space is they can look great ‘stepped’ (so a 2 deep with a one deep in front of it ,touching, or even a 3, 2, 1 step. Depending on where the sun hits it can be very practical, too, so that crops in the higher beds at the back get more chance of sun. I’ll see if I can find an example of what I’m poorly explaining.

I think I get what you mean, put a smaller frame on the larger frame, to have different heights.

That kind of thing. You can either use a smaller one on top of a larger one (as long as one of the dimensions matches) but also a double behind a single, like this:

Cool.. I will have a think for next year.

Is there an app to help to plan the growing stuff..

One of the best sites I’ve found by way of planning timings, etc, is here: https://www.gardenfocused.co.uk/adjust-dates-uk.php

You pop in your town and it will adjust all of the frost dates and relative planting/sowing times to coincide with your local conditions. Then you can read in detail about each crop type and even select all those you are interested in growing and print out an annual calendar of all the things you could be doing, week by week.

I also use the veggie garden planner app that lets you plan things bed by bed. It gives you all of the relative spacing for your crops and also pant relationships (so which plants make good or bad neighbours, therefore minimising pest and disease risk and highlighting beneficial crop neighbours). There is a very small fee to unlock the rest of the vegetable crops in the app, but I’d say it was very much worth it. https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/veggie-ga ... 1329927332

Sounds very useful! Thanks Mimi - will investigate.

I need to start planning what to put in now to get spring colour.

Coming to the end of most of the summer veg now. The pepper plants and chillies are all still heaving with fruits, and they are super. The biggest fruits are still on the plant, and only ripening now. A few smaller ones like this one I picked for tea yesterday, but they taste fab. I’ve also got some absolutely giant bell peppers.

Sweetcorn wasn’t a huge success.they were tasty, but incompletely formed and the kernels were not in perfect rows. It was so rainy this year that most of the pollen had washed away by the time the female flowers emerged. Better luck next year.

Beds are still full of parsnips and onions. There are some giant parsnips. They are not easy to get out of the ground by any means!

Tomatoes were perhaps the only upset this year. We got billions, which is great, but like most folk this year we got blight. To be expected with the rain and warmth, but we had to chop down the plants in the end. And ripen some off in the porch. We got six or so huge harvests, and a few smaller ones. I now have a freezer full of passata and pasta sauce. About 80 jars worth. Too many tomatoes really, but they were so tasty. Would just have been nice to see them all glowing in the garden a bit longer.

Excellent first season Mimi! Love the photos too - really colourful.

My veg plot is missing in action. I probably should have read more on how to grow carrots before stuffing them in and hoping for the best. Think I'll do beans next year.

Thanks, Kern. It has been a good few months, despite the weather. I just plonked some carrot seeds in a line, but they did take a little while to grow. Maybe your seedlings were picked out by birds? I have five distinct varieties of carrots to grow next year. They were Darwin’s favourite crop to grow and eat, so we are going to have fun with those and also with sunflowers as he wants to grow all different types of sunflowers next year.

Oh, and we also took the pin out of the corner hinges of the three beds in a row and joined them together to make a long bed for more growing space AND to make it easier to mow. I’m going to do the same with the beds on the other side of the garden once I have pulled all of the parsnips and onions.

Looks like a phenomenal haul, Mimi. Can you do anything with blighted tomatoes?

Yeah, we ate and cooked them all. Luckily I caught them before the fruits themselves were affected. It tends to hit the plant stems first, and then the leaves, a good while before it hits the actual fruits. In the photo of the three ‘trays’ of tomatoes side by side, those fruits were all removed from the blight-hit plants, and ripened in the porch before cooking and were all perfect.

Wow, what a great harvest!
Think i've only done hanging baskets in our garden this year with being tied up with other jobs. Looking forward to getting back to the garden next year, don't think we'll be doing veg (in-laws have that covered for us!) but need to sort out the plants and tidy the neglected bits up.

I have sown and transplanted 48 winter bulb onions, 21 shallots and 24 garlic today, and I really enjoyed doing it. Hopefully I’ll get a few nice things from there next year.

We pulled up some parsnips today, and some onions (which I’ve placed out to dry the outer skins). Remind me not to sow so baby parsnips next year please.

Most of my summer flowers are long gone, but the Autumnal pinks are out!

I'm really pleased with how well this gardening experiment of mine has gone this year. Now for the spring bulbs!

Winter beds, surely?

I planted my spring bulbs yesterday. 6kg of daffodils. The squirrels then tried to dig up 6kg of daffodils. We’ve laid some wire mesh over them weighed with bricks for a few days until the ground settles down again and hopefully hardens off a little.

I put some pansies in the pms yet over a few of the bulbs and planted the rest of the pansies in the borders.

What are those happy pink things, Kern?

Asters (novi-belgi to be precise). And yes, very happy pink things.

They look lovely, and really abundant and healthy. What bulbs have you chosen?

Ordered some orange crocuses and deep purple tulips but they've not arrived yet.

I've got a lot of cutting back to do!

I found quince windfalls today. I didn’t know we had a quince thing out there.

I bought a bulb planter and had fun making holes in my lawn and stuffing tulip bulbs in them yesterday. I thought that having them come up through the turf would add variety to my garden rather than just having everything neatly boxed.

I spent a few hours on all fours digging up these big weedy things from the lawn. And then later that afternoon, a friend brought round a much better tool that would have allowed us to do it all from a standing position

I don't think I took any pictures which was a shame, but it was very satisfying, at first, pulling up a big 'crown' of weeds the size of a dinner plate.

There's a ton of gardening stuff we want to try and tackle but time and money are limiting factors at the moment (they both just seem to trickle away so easily!)



Sounds pretty, but what about when you need to mow the lawn and they are up?

Kill them. Mwah hah hah hah haaaaahhhhh.......

I get to put it off for another month.

In which case you're cultivating a meadow. Excellent.

Is it to0 early to be excited about trying to grow stuff.

I am looking out of my window in and can see my raised beds.

I am thinking about getting a mini greenhouse so I can grow more

Is there a good app to tell you when to plant things?

Don't know about apps, but realseeds are doing a post for each month -
https://www.instagram.com/realseeds/