The Frantic Gardeners’ Blog

well, SB wants to try out goats milk first. but if she likes it, she thinks we probably have room for at least one if not 2 goats, we could milk them and get most of our own milk. Not quite enough for BB as she drinks so much. Of course we wouldn’t need a cow as well, just one animal type will do. and anyway, we don’t have room for a cow. and they would only give us blue milk, with all the fat still in, and we need green or red. hmm, yes, a goat would be good.

we don’t really want bees, although we have some, because they might sting. daddy could get the honey, but maybe we won’t bother as we don’t use enough.

chortle chortle chortle on my behalf! we are raising a smallholder. possibly a good career path.

For those planning to garden with toddlers, a word of advice - or several!

1. sow more than you need. When they help you pot on our plant out, there are a fair few casualties. Better just to be cheerful and have spares.

2. always have some pea or bean seeds for them to be busy planting anywhere if you have something a bit more delicate to do.

3. make sure your structures are really strong, and if something looks like a corridor, don’t plant along it, or excited feet will trample them down.

4. it is going to take way longer to do anything. for example I planted out 6 beans, and then DD2 required a hug for nearly an hour before being distracted by her trike. After 4 more beans, DD1 wanted to twine flowers in my hair.

5. Smile. growing is to instill a love for the land in them as well. me being uptight wont achieve that. I can always nip ou and fill in gaps. If its fiddly to sow and grow its best to wait until they are doing something else, or leave it out altogether

Yesterday was a fairly relaxed day. We spent lots of it in the garden, looking at the seeds sprouting, the flowers, and organising SB’s flower and veg beds by the playhouse. Hide and seek and lots of swinging! We need more of Merry’s cardboard boxes for the veg patch! I did some weeding though.
We also sowed some more seeds - our cucurbits [butternut squash, another squash, pumpkin and courgette], finished the packet of mangetout and also the fennel [which might not germinate as such an old packet! All the last lot of peas sown have germinated, and the spring onions. The broad beans are outside in open greenhouse to acclimatise before being planted.

Today, we have sowed the sweetcorn - including some bicolour from kirsty and some self supporting peas. i need to pot up the toms - anyone needing toms passing this way…

chris has done a grand job on sorting out this years propagatory - time to sow some seeds! bit late with peppers already - oops.

well, the peas did bite the dust while we were away - pretty much all of them - sigh! Weeds rampant [hmm, could be a heraldic badge for us] anyway, a stab at weeding and tidying up a bit. the apple trees are also all totally infested with a number of different aphid varieties - hosed them all off. They each have a couple of fruitlets. Also, the minarettes have had a good soaking, as this years trees and been a bit dry. One strawberry plant has died, the rest going strong and fruitlets appearing.

We are harvesting broadbeans and some wok brok at the mo [though not much of that] and made my husband laugh with my excitement at one asparagus pea! I am amazed at how well the lettuces are doing, as in leeds the slugs decimated them overnight.

It seems to me that our biggest problem here is weeds. They really are hugely rampant. you hoe and every millimeter sprouts again. instantly. never seen anything quite like it. not helped by us being frantic rather than leisurely gardeners.

I think over the winter we may bed down as it were, with manure and cardboard on top, only removing to plant. If we have the finances, i will plant through that gardening brown paper and mulch with whatever on top, to try and minimize things. if not, will just go for spaced row planting, as opposed to my equidistant, as will be FAR easier to hoe!

how those weeds grow!

Under cover

only a minimum of sowing today - the replacement courgettes [gold rush], mixed lettuce and sweet fennel. Lots of watering in the propagatory and the greenhouse. Such a hot day that the temp in the conservatory reached above our scale [50C] help!! all windows/doors opened. It will get cooler in there when the grape vine leaves come out.

the runner beans and sweet peas have germinated, but not the climbing french beans.

Fruit

Our fruit trees have all come to life with leaf buds - no flowers, but that was expected for their first year. The grape vine has leaves and shoots all over the place. We can spot some not alive branches to be cut out. The training is not traditional - well the vine is> 100 years old. I’ve been looking up grape vine pruning and training, so we will try and get things going a bit. We’re not entirely sure what kind of grape we have - it has seeds, its green, and it gets sweeter the longer it is left on the vine, and was OK at Xmas. Our patio nectarine in a pot has some flowers. Lets see how it does.

The Veg Plot

Weeds continue to grow apace! I hoed the broad beans, garlic and half the onions. Chris and I between us dug over and weeded the area for the mangetout peas whilst BB slept and SB did some maths. The carrot lines are so runover with weeds that TBH, I can hardly see what is there, even the radish isn’t helping.

the asparagus hasn’t made an appearance yet though, and i haven’t managed to plant the potatoes- must do that!!

Weeds here are a MUCH huger problem that in our Leeds raised beds. hundreds germinate all over the place. The ground must be one massive weed seed collection. We are contemplating our mulching and growing through paper options for those things that are suitable.

The rest!

Well, we finally did some sorting of the pond, so that looks much better. Grass needs a cut and the flower borders are weed borders!

?

so not a lot of gardening. Work went crazy [and still is] and the little beans [our kids] weren’t so well, SB in particular.

Today though, I was sooooo stresdsed by the time i returned from work, only cuddles with the girls and contact with the soil [and soon a glass of red wine] would do.

So on the veg plot front, the planted broad beans seem to be doing well. the mangetout are pretty much acclimatised, but since we are expecting a cooler bit at the end of the week, perhaps I’ll plant them out at the weekend. the weeds have also got going. SO now I’m debating whether a quick weed as i can’t see any carrot seedlings, though may decimate the radishes [but they were only in the drill for it to show up more quickly…].

on the fruit plot, the buds are coming on nicely, but not all our minarettes are planted - we had better get our skates on!

So into the propagatory. I potted up the rest of the tomatoes today. The potted aubergines are coming on nicely, and the peppers [though they aren’t ready yet for potting on. Sweetcorn germination has been overall poor - roughly 1/4 only. Was older seed, and have some this years for sowing next. Maybe should try chitting it? but not sure - maybe do an ‘experiment’ with my daughter. Speaking of experiments, the sunflowers in the large home made propagator germinated more quickly and better than those in a cheap electric one. the sprink onions have germinated well, and the leeks are just starting. The second sowing of artichokes also not germinating well. HMM! The caulis all came up, and all the salad leaves have. soon think of pricking them out to grow on. I always grow sacrifical spares, but when the time comes, my heart isn’t hard enough to not just ‘let them have a go!’
Amazingly, some of the asparagus seeds collected from the garden are also germinating - I had thought that would be a dead loss.

Today I sowed the cucurbits - I know, a bit early, but the conservatory is doing such a good job as a propagatory that I think its worth a show. So I sowed courgette gold rush, Squash Festival, and pumpkin Mars. i also sowed a tray of rootrainers with sweetcorn minipop - you know the one you are supposed to microwave to get popcorn. Should be nice.

No camera on me today - wil try and remedy that!

i think we will definitely try the North American 3 sisters thing with beans, sweetcorn and squashes and see how it goes. Probably in what will be half of the fruit bed next year.

where I write anything particularly interesting!

i potted up a couple of the tomatoes, and generally fiddled about watering and moving the seedlings in the propagators

After lunch eldeder daughter wanted to use the egg shells to grow cress in - no cress, so they now have basil. I didn’t supervise/help at all, and she quite happily got it all done, watered and ready for the propagator.

She said she wanted to take a ‘window picture’ so here is one by her of me potting up toms.

Next weeks jobs are sowing rest of onion sets, finishing planting the fruit trees, getting the stuff ready for planting peas out, and a flower bed in front of conservatory - not much then!

We are long overdue a gardening blog, and i guess we will do a number of rambling posts to set the scene!

The impetus for this is that we have started on our first full year of growing in our new garden, having moved from solid clay leeds, to sand over gravel in cambs!

The garden we have taken over was previously cultivated, but had got quite weedy and ramshackle - particularly around the edges. The main weedy culprits being nettles, docks and ever present brambles, with a good coating of ivy.

Here are a few photo’s and snips of words from a home-ed blog we keep to quickly get us up to date!