Charlotte Sometimes

Tag: Gardening

Storing and organizing seeds for the garden

My name’s Charlotte… I’m a beginner gardener… and I have a seed habit.

I’m not afraid to admit it. I can’t help it. I go to garden centres and everything looks so good. And then I log onto the heirloom seed sellers websites and I can’t help myself. Suddenly I’m coming home from the garden centre with a bag stuffed with seeds, or I’ve got packages arriving in the mail.

I’ll be honest, it was starting to get a bit out of control.

I had to get things organised. I didn’t know what I’d planted, what I’d run out of, what I had left to plant, when I should plant it, or even what I owned. I went online and I ordered a load of gripseal bags, some silica gel sachets, and some wage slip envelopes.

Each seed pack gets popped into it’s own bag as soon as I buy it. Then it gets stored in the alphabetical section of my organiser (unless it’s for planting this year – in which case it gets put in one of the 1-12 monthly sections). The monthly sections are really good – it means that something like Pak Choi I can sow and then just move back into the next section to be used again next month.

When the seed packs are opened I put a sachet of silica gel in with them – or when I collect seed from something that I’ve grown (in the wage envelopes).

Oh, and they get a little front sheet with instructions for planting on them. The new and improved versions have a QR code on the front too, so that I can just snap the packet with my phone when I’m in the garden and bring up the appropriate page on my wiki for that plant.

My next step is laser cut plant markers with the same QR code on. (Nerd.)

July 17, 2015
Repurposing, Reusing

Starting a garden is expensive. There’s all the compost you have to buy and the pots, and the costs soon mount up. Plus there aren’t really many good solutions for small space and vertical gardening that don’t cost the absolute earth.

Since this year has been about experimentation I’ve been trying out some ideas I found online. See what works and then refine and improve the ideas for next year.

The ‘shoe holder’ plant wall is the one that I reckon has the most promise. It’s soon going to contain 16 lovely heads of cut and come again lettuces. It uses space on the door to an outdoor toilet that we use for storage. I can’t practically put pots in front of the door because of access and it doesn’t get much sun down there. But the front of the door higher up gets lots of sun.

And then there’s the runner beans and peas growing in milk bottles and juice cartons. Because they like sending their roots deep, right? Window boxes seem like a waste for growing peas and beans in, they’re not quite tall enough and always wastefully wide. Once they’ve started hanging onto the net they won’t fall over.

Lastly there’s the question of what to do with the endless amounts of fizzy water bottles that we generate. We go through a fair amount of this stuff and it seemed silly to keep throwing the bottles away.

So I found a guy who is working on sustainable methods of growing for third world countries, and came up with the vertical bottle growing method. The bottles become a greenhouse for each individual plant and also an irrigation method. I’m slowly adding to it a bottle at a time, but it does seem to be working. (Actually I have quite a few bottles stashed in the shed that I need to cut to shape… I should do that.)

They’re just tied to a drilled pallet, plenty of space to go…

July 14, 2015
Mint Syrup & Tea

To me, having a vegetable garden and eating fresh produce is only part of the equation. The real joy comes in the winter when you can head down to the cellar, pick up a bottle or jar, and then cook something wonderful that tastes fresh – as if you picked it that day.

I love preserving as much as I love growing things, so it’s only natural that two weeks ago I bulk ordered a load of jars and bottles so that I can save a good portion of the harvest for the winter. I’ve got plans for herb syrups, herb teas, herb alcohols, tomato pasta sauce, herb jellies, gherkins and all manner of frozen vegetables and herbs.

A few weeks ago I started by cutting back the mint plant and hanging it up to dry. It was an experiment really – was it better to freeze mint or dry it for tea? When I freeze herbs I stick them in an ice cube tray and then I can just pop one into the filter of my tea pot and pour hot water over it. These dried herbs I did by hanging them upside down in mesh bags in our exercise room upstairs.

It worked! The mint is beautiful – and you can keep the leaves as whole as possible. Not like those horrid tea bags (even the expensive ones) that just have dusty old bits of mint plant that have probably been in storage for a few years.

And then yesterday I noticed that the mint plant had started to get a bit enthusiastic again, so it cut it all down and made the Mint Syrup from Preserves: River Cottage Handbook No.2.

For future reference I’m leaving these pictures here. This is the mint plant before and after I’d harvested just about enough to make one 500ml bottle of syrup:

May 31, 2015
Basil & Mint & Seeds
So yesterday marked the first time we ate something from the garden that we’d grown ourselves. We harvested a few early Basil leaves from the windowsill that had grown from seed and proceeded to eat them with tomato and mozzarella in the most incredible olive bread from Waitrose. This stuff had whole fucking kalamata olives in it. And wasn’t that expensive either.

And then today I harvested a whole 45g of garden mint which has been hung up to dry. You traditionally gather them all by the stem with some twine or a rubber band and hang them with the leaves hanging downwards in order to dry, however I thought I’d try something different. A while ago, in an order to use less plastic, I picked up these these mesh bags made from nylon mesh. They’re meant for you to take them to the supermarket and use to buy loose fruit and veg instead of plastic bags. They actually weigh next to nothing, so they’re pretty good and don’t really add money onto the cost of the produce. These ones seem pretty good too and they’re a little bit cheaper.

I’m not into growing stuff to save money, but it’s certainly a curiosity. And along with the wiki, I figured I’d also spreadsheet out all our costs compared to how much we harvest.

I don’t expect there will be that much saving with the actual raw produce. For example above I harvested 45g of mint off my plant, which isn’t very much. To buy 70g of mint from Tesco it costs 70. So this is basically £1.04’s worth of Tesco mint. And then you consider the fact that all I did was replant an almost dead mint plant that I bought from Morrisons about a year ago and actually that’s pretty good. It’s essentially free.

This stuff is getting dried to go into a jar in the kitchen for mint tea during the winter. My favourite organic mint tea from Pukka costs £1.89 for twenty tea bags, which works out to £6.30 per 100g, including the tea bags. Now I reckon that this harvest would easily make twenty tea bags once dried, so processing adds even more value to the stuff growing in the garden.

The best thing about it? Still got this much of my mint plant left. All I did was thin it out. Thinning it out is good -more light and air can get to the younger growth and it’ll grow back even more vigourously.

Yesterday I also planted a few trays of seeds.
- Peas – both for growing and for eating as young pea shoots
- Runner Beans
- Dwarf Beans
- Gherkins – for pickling
- Butternut squash
- Parsnip
- Carrots
- Beetroot
- Radishes
I don’t like radishes that much. But you can grow them as a catch crop inbetween other rows – they’re ready to eat in 4-6 weeks. So we’ll eat some, but the rest I’m going to attempt to preserve. You can’t freeze them because they’re too watery and they’d turn to mush, but apparently you can pickle them.

How beautiful do these ones look?
May 10, 2015