growing things, the garden project

Replanning the herb garden

I took advantage of a brief sunny period mid-week to go out and rearrange the herb patch.

Sadly I don’t have a very good before photo, but this one from this time last year is a reasonable representation:

Herbs in pots against a fence

This is what it looks like now:

Herbs in pots, in different configuration (see text)

Left to right: strawberry tower (transplanted the strawberries this morning); slab stack with empty pot (for basil), oregano, 2 lavender cuttings, empty pot, another lower empty pot, & a big pot of sage; bay tree at the back; another slab stack with parsley, chives, empty pot, and mint lower down; and a thyme trough at the front.

I moved the concrete slabs very slightly so they’re right back against the fence, and reorientated a couple of lower ones to provide an extra ledge for a plant pot, to make more use of the vertical space. I also repotted the oregano and bay into bigger pots, and the thyme into a shallow trough. I’ve since added a few more empty pots, for a total of 9.

My wanted herb list is:

  • Basil (lots)
  • Oregano (lots — will take a couple of root divisions now it’s in that larger pot, although this is not the ideal time for that)
  • Thyme (want another couple of plants)
  • Sage (will take cutting in the spring to fill up that big pot)
  • Chives
  • Winter savoury
  • Mint — will probably take cuttings for another pot to go at the other side of the patio, as well
  • Parsley (lots, which is fine as it has self-seeded EVERYWHERE)
  • Coriander
  • Dill
  • Strawberries (OK, not actually a herb)
  • Bay
  • Rosemary — over the other side of the garden, in the ground
  • Lavender — also planted on the other side, in the ground

With nine empty pots to fill, I make that: basil x 2, another oregano, possibly another parsley, dill x 1, winter savoury x 2 (it’s hard to buy), coriander x 1, and one spare pot in case something else takes my fancy. I’m tempted to try ginger, although it’s not cold-hardy. Any other culinary herbs you think I’m missing out on?

growing things, the garden project

Shallow growing

In the course of planning both back & front gardens, I need a list of things that will grow in shallow (6-9″) containers, as I have quite a lot of them. Herewith the results of my research thus far.

Greens:

  • Rocket
  • Lettuce generally
  • Mustard greens?
  • Peas – not 6″, apparently ok in 9″
  • Beans – not 6″, apparently ok in 9″

Other veg:

  • Tomatoes – not 6″, apparently ok in 9″
  • Carrots – not 6″, apparently ok in 9″

Fruit:

  • Strawberries

Flowers:

  • Marigolds
  • Nasturtiums
  • Pansies
  • Poppies

And some things which in my experience don’t do so well:

  • Chard (probably because it’s secretly a root).
  • Parsnips, roots generally.

I’ve had trouble with peas and beans in containers before, but it’s possible they were a bit shy of 9″, so I’ll give it another try. Unfortunately I think the majority of my containers are less than 9″ deep so planting is going to be a bit restricted. My inclination is to plant in the ground in the back garden wherever at all possible (perhaps taking a few more paving slabs up), and to keep the containers for the front balcony and porch). I will return to this at the end of the season with my findings.

Any other suggestions? I haven’t got anything particularly out of the ordinary here, nor indeed anything perennial except the pansies. I’m considering looking into the Plants for a Future database or something similar. On the other hand, time is getting on so I might just try some annuals out for this year.

growing things, the garden project

Garden Diary 25.08.2012

Planted:

  • Basil.
  • Leaf coriander.

Harvested:

  • Courgettes.
  • Very tiny baby carrots.
  • Salad leaves.

Other:

  • Discovered that three of my blackcurrant bush cuttings may have taken!
  • Snails ate many of the chard seedlings; but it looks like one or two have survived.
  • Ordered some autumn/winter seeds.

To do:

  • Thin out lettuce some more.
  • Dig/set in border of long west bed properly.
  • Transplant courgette plants which I think are overcrowded.
growing things, the garden project

Fitting a water butt

If you grow plants and have access to a gutter downpipe, it’s well worth finding the space and time for a water butt. Rainwater is better for your plants than tap water*; and of course you help conserve water as well.

Water butt against fence

For small spaces you can get slimline water butts; we have room for a 250l one, and it’s worked out very well. This weekend was the first time this year I’ve needed to fill the watering can from the tap. I did put off fitting it for ages, but in fact it was an easier job than I had feared.

You’ll need a downpipe diverter, and a hacksaw to chop through the downpipe. The diverter kit will have detailed instructions, but basically you cut through the drainpipe at a height just below the top of the water butt. You then connect diverter and water butt with a piece of tubing, and when the water in the butt reaches the level of the drainpipe, the water will flow back into the drainpipe and down the drain. (Here’s a basic explanation of the physics of how water finds its own level; imagine the drainpipe, which is ‘bottomless’, as one of the tubes, and the water butt as the other, with the tubing connecting them.)

A note: when measuring the height of your water butt, it is VERY IMPORTANT to place the water butt high enough off the ground that you can get a watering can in under its tap. We used spare paving slabs; you can also get a purpose-built plastic stand.

Once you’ve cut the drainpipe and fitted the diverter and its tube, that’s it — you’re done, and your water butt is ready to collect water the next time it rains.

The only problem we’ve found so far is that the angle between drainpipe and water butt means that our tubing has a couple of kinks in it that tend to gather gunk & allow algae to grow. This means that it needs to be cleaned out occasionally to keep the water flowing. We’ve just added gaffer tape to reduce the amount of light and thus hopefully also the algae.

Drainpipe diverter and gaffer-taped tube to water butt

Next job: fitting a smaller one on the front balcony. I need to check this with the neighbours first, though, as we share that drainpipe.

* If you can’t use rainwater for watering, when possible it’s a good idea to let tap water sit for 24 hrs before using it on your plants, to allow the chlorine to offgas.

the garden project

The Garden Project: one year in

It’s now just over a year since we moved in to our new house and I started working on the garden.

Unfortunately I don’t have a photo of what it looked like when we moved in. However, the first things we did were to decide which side the grass would be and which side the raised beds would be. Here’s what it looked like after I’d put in the first raised bed and a couple of polystyrene containers, and we’d started taking up paving to put the grass in.

Before that, the whole thing was paving slabs or brick all over, so it was already looking much greener.

Once that experimental grass section proved successful, we got up the paving slabs and the surprise! concrete underneath (thanks to some very hard work from Pete and doop), and got the rest of the grass and wildflower seed down.

With the addition of the herbs and tomatoes in pots from our old balcony, it was looking quite good by October:

(Note also the compost heap at the bottom of the garden by the rose tree, built from the bricks we’d taken up from next to the fence.)

The winter-veg bed did well through the autumn. Over the winter, we put in an apple tree, some raspberries from the allotment, and I built another 3 raised beds from pallets.

I also finished a small shed, also from reconstructed pallets, in February while 38 wks pregnant. (This may have been a form of nesting; 600l of compost for the remaining raised beds also arrived two days before the baby did after a last-minute order.)

And over the spring I planted salad leaves, tomatoes, carrots, turnips, peas and beans, courgettes, more raspberries, rhubarb, and some flowers. In June, it was all doing rather well.

And a year on, it looks like this.

Not bad going, I think.

the garden project

The Garden Project: August update

Suddenly there is sunshine, after what felt like weeks and weeks of rain and grey skies. Here’s a quick roundup of things in the garden:

  • Fruit:
    • Two apples on the tree (I took a couple off when they first appeared, to reduce the load on the tree in its first year[0]).
    • A handful of raspberries, and the autumn raspberries flowering.
    • A handful of strawberries from three troughs.
    • Two rhubarb crowns transplanted from the allotment are doing well after wilting heavily at first.
  • Salad veg:
    • The bronze arrow-head lettuce has gone spectacularly to seed, with flower heads that are several feet tall. I’m hoping it’ll self-seed cleanly, but I’m not sure if there’s anything else around that crosses with it.
    • The rocket jungle, though extensive, is getting a bit too peppery as it too goes to seed. I may hoick some of the plants up as there really is a lot of it. It’s also self-seeded into the gaps between the paving slabs.
    • The misc lettuce still cropping happily in the salad bed.
  • Other veg:
    • The courgettes have started cropping and we’ve eaten the first couple.
    • The chard hasn’t really germinated terribly well. There are a couple of plants but I was hoping for more. Intending to replant for an autumn/winter crop.
    • No sign at all of the pak choi. Again, I’ll try replanting.
    • We had a reasonable crop of peas but those have gone now.
    • The tomatoes are growing away happily. The ones in the self-watering containers are doing noticeably better than the others.
    • The turnips doing well and we’ve already eaten the first row. Intending to plant another couple of rows for a late-summer crop.
    • There are plenty of carrots but they’re not growing all that fast. I’ve always struggled with carrots!
    • Very few beets germinated from the row I planted. Given the close relationship between beetroot and chard and the poor germination rates for both, I’m wondering if the conditions were just bad for these plants. (Alternatively, I may have had old seed as I’ve been using up seed from older packets.)

Things to plant in the next month:

  • Turnips.
  • Chard.
  • Pak choi.
  • Perhaps some winter cabbage or lettuce?
  • Rocket, except I won’t need to deliberately plant that as it’s happily planting itself.

[0] We bought it as a 3-yr-old tree; if it were actually a maiden I’d have removed all of the fruit in its first year.

the garden project

Garden update

Despite the erratic weather, things in the garden are moving on happily. A quick list (no photos this time, may try to add some tomorrow):

  • Apples on the apple tree! Research suggests that as this is a 3-yr-old tree, I should thin the apples a little but don’t need to remove them all. So am hoping for at least one apple from the tree this year.
  • Tomatoes now planted out. Two in a polystyrene tub, two in the back of one of the raised beds, three in self-watering containers, and I will see which do best. My bet is on the SWCs. They’re all up against a west-facing fence so should get plenty of sun.
  • The broad beans have all come out now. A middling harvest; the ones in the raised beds did fine (although hard to get at the ones at the back for harvesting), but the ones in the polystyrene tubs did quite badly. I think they really need more space for their roots.
  • Peas are growing away merrily and have just started to flower.
  • Turnips also doing very well; thinned out last week and nibbled on a few of the thinnings raw.
  • Rocket heading rapidly to seed, so very very peppery.
  • Lettuces doing great and I really must eat more of them for my lunches!
  • Nearly none of the beets or chard have come up. I am wondering if the seeds were past it? Will get new seeds to plant for chard to overwinter, anyway.
  • Courgettes flowering but not yet any female flowers, only male ones. That quite often happens initially, so I’m happy to contain myself in patience.

I have a spare half-bed that I’m not sure what to do with; and a squash in a small pot that badly needs to go down to the allotment as there’s no room for it to do well in the garden.

growing things, the garden project

Flowers: permaculture and beauty

Permaculture isn’t only about the practical; or rather, “practical” covers more than you might think. Permaculture is all about sustainability, and that includes creating environments which are sustainable for humans in respect to all their needs.

A garden needn’t just be about food to be practical, sustaining, and sustainable; it can also be about beauty, or fun, or rest. Of course, food plants can also be beautiful (rainbow chard is one excellent example; or the little blue flowers that appeared on my rosemary bush in early spring). But the beauty in non-edible plants means that they’re also a worthwhile addition to the garden, simply for the joy of looking at them. And a garden you want to spend time in is invariably a more productive garden.

Which is to say that I have a bunch of flowers in our garden now, along the western fence by the rosemary and the raspberries. The first to go in, last autumn, were winter pansies. Pansies are my favourite flower, and their January blooms cheered me up no end. More recently I put in some forget-me-nots, which are very practical flowers in that they are self-seeding, but easy to pull out, so low maintenance in both directions. As mentioned in the peas and beans post, there are also now a few pots of sweet peas to make the patio smell lovely when they flower. And finally, a few evening primroses in with the pansies, because my Mum had some spares and it would have been a shame to waste them. (Actually, all the flowers were spares from my Mum. Thank you!).

Winter pansies and raspberries against a wooden fence
Pansies and raspberries (and some purple wild flowers that I don’t know the name of) earlier in the spring

the garden project

Peas and beans

I planted most of my broad beans last November/December, in two of the raised beds. One lot were planted in the polyculture winter veg bed, and the second lot in the bed next to it as a block on their own. Both sets, particularly the larger block, are doing very well now, and the flowers are starting to turn into small beans. A few more beans, planted at the same time in a polystyrene box, are a bit less vigorous — perhaps because their roots are more shallow? I’ve also planted a second batch in early March in another polystyrene box and those have just begun to emerge. With luck I’ll get a second later crop from them.

Broad beans taking up half of a raised bed, in front of a fence
The broad bean jungle

In further legume news, I planted some snow peas at the back of the broad bean block, thinking that they could use the beans as a support to grow up and around. However, the beans are so jungly that I can’t see much of the peas, so that may not have been such a smart move. On the other hand, I may find lots of happy peas when I finally get to them. I’ll venture into the bean jungle to investigate when I start harvesting beans.

Hopefully the spring pea plantings, in two more polystyrene boxes (one by the west fence, one south of the raised beds), will be more straightforwardly successful. So far they’re looking good, and I’ll soon need to find some sticks and/or string for them to grow up.

Finally, I have some sweet pea seedlings from my mum in pots on the patio, which may not be food-productive, but will hopefully make it even nicer to sit there once they get going (and if we ever see the sun again…).