Category: Gardening

  • Storing and organizing seeds for the garden

    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).

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    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.)

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  • Repurposing, Reusing

    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.

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    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.

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    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…

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  • The Tomato Problem

    The Tomato Problem

    So I’m sitting down already and trying to get a handle on what seeds I need to order for next year – and what wood I need to buy to build some projects over the winter.

    Basically I’m trying to make out garden as intensive as possible for a small space. I’m interested in what I can achieve with container gardening (everything must be removable because it’s a rental property).

    Instead of buying grow bags each year I’m going to start recycling my compost through a wormery, which provides the problem of containers to grow tomatoes in (because I’m hopefully no longer just going to be buying grow bags). I had looked at buying cheap long tom pots, but they don’t look very nice for your back garden. So I’m considering making wooden boxes about the size of a grow bag instead.

    Traditional wisdom says that you can grow two or three tomato plants in a grow bag. I’m wondering about intensively planting my tomatoes to take advantage of the sunny courtyard that we have.

    So this is how our courtyard garden has developed this year:

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    And a better look at the tomatoes against the wall:

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    I mean it’s fine. We’ve got 14 tomato plants growing in that section around the brick wall and the shed wall. I’ll be honest, I got bored of splitting the grow bags (plus I think Adam was getting fed up with going to Homebase and lugging them back indoors) so the ones against the shed just have three plants to a flat grow bag. I suspect they won’t do as well (not only because I planted them out late).

    It’s the wasted space that bothers me really. Here:

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    Elsewhere in the garden I have smaller bush type tomato plants that never really grow more than 3ft hight. It strikes me that as long as the plants all had enough room for roots you could grow the bush tomatoes in the spaces between the cordon tomatoes where the bottom leaves have been removed. Like this:

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    If I built five grow-boxes that were deep enough to contain the roots for four plants, I could lay them out like this:

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    And that would mean I could fit potentially 24 plants into the same space that I currently have just 14 in. That’s a 70% increase in yield for that space. And we really like tomatoes.

     

  • Viola Syrup

    Viola Syrup

    5g of viola petals (10g before separating from green stems)

    1 cup boiling water

    1 cup sugar

     

    Put petals in bowl. Cover with boiling water. Leave to steep for several hours or overnight. Strain liquid. Place bowl of liquid over saucepan of boiling water. Add sugar. Stir until dissolved. Bottle.

    Makes 1.5 cups (Approx 370ml).

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  • Mint & Basil Cuttings

    Mint & Basil Cuttings

    Apparently you can propagate mint and basil by just sticking them in jars of water.

    So that’s what I’ve done today.

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  • 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.

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    CM-150531-6828webAnd 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.

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    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:

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  • Food for your face

    Food for your face

    I have this problem. I pick at my skin compulsively. Disgusting, right? Apparently it’s called dermatillomania, I’ve been doing it since I was in my early teens. My biggest problem area for it is the pores on my face – my cheeks, nose, and chin.

    I’ve been taking some time recently to try and fix stuff in my life that’s broken, and this one has come to the front recently. Since getting a big rash above one of my eyes – not related to the picking – I’ve been looking for solutions. Ultrabland skin cleanser from Lush actually saw the rash disappear in just two days. It’s like expensive little miracle cleanser! But what with all this growing stuff in the garden, I figured I’d see what I could do for my face as well as my stomach.

    The first thing I tried was toner – to use after the skin cleanser from Lush. Rosemary and mint steeped in a cup of water, strained, and then two tablespoons of cider vinegar added. It works! It’s very kind to your skin, doesn’t leave it tight and dry, and the mint sauce smell disappears after just a few minutes. It’s gentle enough that I can pop up to the bathroom if my skin is getting a bit greasy during the day and use it. Next time though, it needs a dark bottle. Looks a bit like a jar of piss sitting on the shelf…

    Today I got a bit more brave. I put the spice grinding mill on the food processor to work. You see I found this recipe on a blog where the author has a similar problem to myself. The mask is supposed to close up your pores so I thought I’d give it a go.

    I dumped one tablespoon of oats into the food processor and processed the oats to get a fineish powder. Then I added some fresh rosemary from the garden for it’s antiseptic properties and processed it again. I emptied it into a bowl, added a splash of olive oil and then enough honey to make it thick. As you can see, I’m very technical in my approach to cooking and cosmetic making.

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    Looks… sludgy.

    Honestly, give it a go. You sort of smush it all over your face and it’s half way between a mask and a scrub. I left it on for about 15 mins, it’s incredibly gentle so I guess could be left on longer. I don’t think I’ve ever felt my face feel so lovely and soft. It doesn’t feel quite as clean as using the Ultrabland (perhaps I should have used it first?) but it’s a fraction of the price and I know exactly what’s in it.

    I’m hoping that when I sit down to have a pick at my face I can force myself to get up and make something like this in the kitchen instead. Then by the time it’s sat on my face for 10 minutes hopefully the urge to pick away will have passed and in time I can get out of the habit altogether.

  • The plants, they need me.

    The plants, they need me.

    OR: How my garden lifts my melancholia.

    There’s a thing I’ve noticed, it’s that human beings need to be needed. Generally. I mean, not all humans. Over the last few years I’ve weaned myself off being needed by other people. My parents don’t need me, my friends (hopefully) don’t need me, and my two partners certainly don’t need me. It’s a very freeing place to be and it means you can direct your energies into making yourself happy, rather than feeling the pressure to make someone else happy.

    Of course that’s what solo-poly and relationship anarchy is all about really, putting yourself first while being mindful of the feelings of others. I’m a huge advocate of reading up on these two styles of relationship. They aren’t for everyone wholesale, but you might find small parts that you want to take and enact in your own life. Relationship anarchy is as much about being loving and caring towards your friends as it is about sexual relationships.

    But anyway, that’s beside the point. It’s my rough theory that humans need to be needed. Or they certainly usually want to be needed. In some way. But I orchestrated my removal from the ‘normal’ human structure of humans needing other humans – so where do I get my desire to be needed from now?

    I’ve been reading up on how gardening can help beat depression recently. I don’t suffer from depression, but I am a very melancholic person by nature. Sometimes that manifests itself in a way that is similar to depression. I struggle to do basic tasks like cooking for myself, keeping things clean and tidy and I just get into a slump where I don’t want to do anything including hobbies that I love. Worst of all, it affects my freelance work. I know when I’m struggling and there’s nothing really I can do to get out of that cycle.

    But for the last month – roughly since I came back from Paris – Adam and I have started keeping a garden. We don’t have much garden, about 35 square meters in total I guess with walls around it. It’s basically a small Victorian kitchen garden. Truth be told Adam isn’t that interested in actually doing the garden, but he seems interested in watching me do the garden and he’s very interested in the food that comes out of it.

    Well, this is what it looks like so far.

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    2015-05-16 19.04.20I know, it’s not much to look at. And that horrible shed needs the gutter replacing and the walls repainted. or I might just do away with the whole thing and look at some Modern shed designs to replace it instead. But anyway…

    It’s frustrating to know that you need to help yourself, but you don’t know how to help yourself. There is always ‘good’ advice available like ‘why don’t you just get on with what you need to do?’ or ‘how about you go for a run?’ but believe me, if it was that simple then I wouldn’t have this problem. And it doesn’t help to tell me those things either particularly. In fact, it just reminds me how shit I’m being – and that’s not helpful to anyone.

    Having a vegetable garden is, in many ways, a big decision. I mean, you can’t just plant your seeds and then leave them to grow. It doesn’t work like that. But if you’re putting any commitment into vegetable gardening as a hobby, then that’s what it is – a commitment. The plants, they need you. If you don’t pay them attention, then they will die. I mean sure, that’s not as bad as your dog dying if you don’t give it any attention – it’s a lot less serious than that. But the simple act of watering your plants daily is something that is easily incorporated into a regular routine and gives some semblance of worth to the daily grind.

    And if you want to make sure that your plants don’t die, then you need to keep them away from the pests. Without even realizing it, some plants can attract insects, while others can keep bugs away. And if they find their way into your home, they may never leave. That happened to a friend of mine once. She planted an assortment of different plants and leaves and not long after they started to blossom into the beautiful creations they are, she noticed that her house was swarmed with bugs. It was a good job she contacted a professional pest control company like https://www.pestcontrolexperts.com/ as they were able to get rid of them as quickly as they made an appearance. Luckily, her pants and flowers were unscathed but this just goes to show what can happen if you don’t give them the proper attention they deserve.

    The best thing about the garden is the way that working on it when you’re feeling good feels like storing help away for when things get bad. Sowing seeds, potting them on and planting them out is storing away good feelings for later. Being able to think back about being more motivated when you’ve got no motivation at all is surprisingly helpful when you sit down and see what you’re surrounding with – the results of your earlier hard work.

    Gardens are very sensual (I said sensual… not sexual…) because they fill so many senses at once. Sight, sound, touch, smell and taste. If one of your senses isn’t working so well because you’re in a slump it feels like you can kickstart it by being somewhere that appeals to the other senses. That’s basically what I’m doing with that seating area in the picture above. It’s slowly becoming surrounded by plants that not only look beautiful, but give off scent and they can almost all be eaten. There’s something quite rewarding about taking a pot of hot water, in my Stump teapot for preference to that coffee table and then picking herbs and flowers from within arms reach to put straight into the pot – mixing combinations at will for an amazing pot of tea. It’s become my preferred way to chill out now if writers block is setting in.

    Rachel Kelly wrote an article in the Telegraph in 2014 that basically says alot of the things that I feel. Your plants need you, but they only need you in small, manageable tasks. Pulling out some weeds in a bed. Potting on a few seedlings. Watering the pots. All these things are so easily accomplished when you break them down into tiny little parts. And once you start it feels easier to keep on going – and before you know it you’ve been quite productive actually.

    At this point I don’t really care if anything fruits. I know I might get blight on my tomatoes that will wipe out a good chunk of the harvest. I know I might lose my beans to the birds that we also encourage into the garden. I know that my Southern European herbs are currently crying because we just seem to have rain every day at the moment. But somehow it doesn’t really seem to matter.

    Although the produce I do manage to get will increase the healing effect that my garden has. For the work doesn’t stop when you pick the vegetables and bring them into the kitchen. Then there is preserving to be done. Jams to be made, chutneys to simmer, and cordials to bottle. These things can’t wait, they have to be done. And I find that one of the best ways to get out of a slump. Having things that need to be done.

    It’s good. Life is good.

  • Basil & Mint & Seeds

    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.

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    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.

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    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?

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