Lavendon Garden

Yey! My seeds have arrived

2009-02-15T18:33:00.003Z

All the seeds I ordered for this years planting have arrived from Suttons seeds, I also bought a few bulbs off the market last week. It was a bit of a perilous drive to the Post Office to pick up the parcel because of the snowy, icey roads. I just wish that the weather would warm up and all the snow would melt away so I can get started planting stuff. Next year I think I need to look at heating the greenhouse.

Snow

2009-02-08T19:10:00.005Z

If you live in the UK then you'll know it's been snowing. I think I read somewhere that we haven't this much snow for 16 years or so and it's brought havoc on the roads and trains The garden has been covered in a covering about six or seven inches deep so there hasn't been much activity going on out there - besides it's been a bit cold outside for gardening anyway. I did get some time to go out and make a snowman although I have to admit he's not very good.

Chitting Potato time again

2009-01-30T11:35:00.005Z

Last weekend I was out and about at a local nursery and bought my Potatoes for the coming season. I plumped for the trusty King Edward, I think we did Maris Piper last year. I love growing Potatoes as we always seem to manage to grow loads of them. Perhaps the soil here is well suited to growing them who knows.

Anyway they're out on a tray in the kitchen window chitting away as we speak so hopefully in a few weeks time I'll have loads of green shoots. Apparently you have to look for the biggest eye and face that towards the light.

Lavendon Garden Compost

2009-01-18T19:33:00.004Z

I opened the compost heap today in order to fill the raised beds and I was thrilled to bits with what I found - a stack of rich, earthy compost! All the effort I put in last year has been well worth it. This is by far the best compost I've ever made so I thought I'd share a couple of things I've learnt.

1. Make sure that you make the bits you put in as small as possible. Shed wood and mow leaves etc to make the bits small. They rot down better.

2. Put in equal amounts of grass clippings and shredded paper. This is tough if you have a big garden but the paper really helps stop the clippings from going sour and makes them break down quicker.

3. Leave it alone. Many places tell you to turn your heap regularly but I've found best results when you just pile new stuff on top and leave the bottom alone.

4. Finally, let a bit of moisture in - dry heaps don't compost so well.

I left mine for 12 months but you should be able to make usable compost in as little as 12 weeks.

Weekend Project Pt. 2: Raised Beds, finishing up

2009-01-18T18:15:00.010Z

Picking up from yesterday, I finished off the raised beds today. I didn't get into the garden until the afternoon because of a poorly timed downpour and started off by finishing off the last bit of weeding, then I finished the last two beds with their layer of compost and cardboard.

Once the cardboard was down I put a good amount of Lavendon Garden Compost on top and then added a bale of shop bought compost to each along with half a bag of rotted manure filling the beds to the top.

The photo above shows Sporran posing with the finished beds. The area still looks like a bit of a tip and needs some serious tidying up but that will have to wait until next weekend because I ran out of time again today.

All in all I'm very pleased with the final result - not a bad investment and hopefully a future of great veggies await us.

Weekend Project Pt. 1: Raised Beds

2009-01-17T17:42:00.001Z

Wow, today's been a busy day. After all the tidying up i've been doing in the garden I thought it was about time for a new project so this morning I decided to make some raised beds ahead of the new growing season.

I've read that raised beds make growing veggies easier and I even think I've seen Monty making them on TV. The good news is that they can be constructed over poor, unsuitable or heavy soils like the stuff in my garden and filled with better quality topsoil and compost. Other advantages include improved drainage, warmer soil (i.e more veg), less digging (always a good thing) and if you make them a sensible size they make getting at your veggies easier.

I started by getting some gravel boards from the local builders merchants. I was thinking about using something a little more substantial than gravel boards but didn't like the thought of what preservatives might be in railway sleepers, couldn't find any scaffold planks locally and everything else was a little too expensive. The boards I managed to get are fine but perhaps not as deep as I would have liked (145mm).

Each frame was constructed with the gravel boards and some 2x2 to make strong corner joins. I extended the length of the 2x2 so that I could hammer it into the ground for extra stability. Not that I really expected things to move about too much when filled with soil and veg.

The first thing I did was dig over the old plot on top of which the beds are going to sit and removed as many weeds as I could. I put down some weed suppressing membrane between the beds and then I dug in a bit of Lavendon Garden™ garden compost just to give anything deep rooted a little extra treat.

Just before the daylight ran out I started to put down a layer of cardboard to suppress any weeds that exist in the soil.

The idea is that this will rot down after a while and hopefully after any weeds have long expired. I'll finish this off tomorrow.

I forgot to protect my pots

2009-01-11T16:38:00.003Z

I learnt an important lesson this weekend - you have to protect your terracotta pots as well as the plants that are in them. The super cold weather we've had the last few days has caused many of my patio pots to crack and shatter, even in the greenhouse (which is currently unheated) I guess most people know this but I got caught out.

It's even colder this weekend

2009-01-10T21:00:00.005Z

This weekend the weather has been bitter. After several failed attempts at getting myself outside this morning I eventually made it into the garden around lunchtime. Usually the garden in winter is a bit like getting into the sea, it looks freezing but it's lovely once you get in. Unfortunately even with all my layers I struggled to keep warm and my wellies didn't really provide much warmth, my feet were freezing! I managed to do a bit more tidying up and tried to dig over a bit of frozen ground before giving up and retreating back inside. Hopefully tomorrow will be a little warmer but the weather forecast doesn't look promising.

update: I just read that i shouldn't be digging over frozen earth anyway as it has the effect of moving the really cold stuff to the bottom making it take longer for the soil to warm up in spring. Who'd have thunk?

Rhubarb, Rhubarb, Rhubarb

2009-01-06T20:48:00.000Z

Those who read this blog regularly will know that Rhubarb is my favourite edible plant in the Garden and the first sprouts are starting the rise up out of the crowns at this time of year.

A tip I read is that if you want to have super sweet stems in March and April cover them with a bucket or if you're a little more posh than me you can buy terracotta forcing Jars and make it a 'feature' of the garden. Covering them up like this gives them protection from the elements and also forces the stems into long thin pink tender shoots that are far nicer to eat than the more fibrous stuff you get if you leave the plant to it's own devices.

It's flipping freezing

2009-01-05T20:40:00.002Z

Quite literally, the temperature here in Lavendon has taken a bit of a nose dive over the last couple of days with temperatures tonight due to fall to perhaps as low as -10C! I've already been caught out and woke to find everything in the greenhouse Sunday morning frozen solid - It's all in the kitchen now thawing out and hopefully coming back to life, much to my wife's frustration.

Happy New Year

2009-01-02T16:36:00.002Z

Hello, Happy New Year! Long time no speak - this is becoming the normal opening sentence around here but sorry I didn't post much during the last quarter of 2008. Unfortunately for the the garden my day job took over towards the end of the year and work commitments meant that I had very little time for the garden, let alone time for writing this blog. As a result both suffered quite badly and are in need of a little attention.

The good news is that I have seen sense and my new years resolution this year is to make sure that I don't neglect things in the garden, I've put in too much hard work so far to let it all go to waste. Also believe it or not too many people visit here to let me let all this hard work go to waste either. Besides this blog, like the garden is a labour of love so I can't let it go to pot, can I?

So starting the year out in the right way I spent the afternoon outside weeding over the beds. If you go by what you read there's not much going on in the garden over winter but in my garden the weeds never stop growing. For all the trouble I have growing plants, I never seem to have a problem growing weeds. They do my head in! Anyway 50% of the beds are now weeded and I plan to finish the rest tomorrow, that leaves me with the last big task before spring which is to make a set of raised beds for the vegetable garden. Having been watching Gardeners World on telly they seem to be the preferred way to go so I thought we'd give them a go this year. If you follow this blog then you'll know that we've managed to grow tomatoes and potatoes so far with no problem but everything else hasn't really come to much. Raised beds are my master plan to solve this.

As for the non edibles, I think we have a good base in the garden now on which to build, the hard work was done last year, this year should be mainly about planting and filling in spaces in the beds. I'm really looking forward to it.

Anyway, here's to 2009!

Turf down. gardens merged.

2008-10-28T09:00:00.002Z

I'm not sure how many readers of this site remember but last year we purchased some extra land to extend the garden. Until now the garden has looked very much like two distinct spaces stuck together with a muddy patch where fences used to be. That is until now. A few days ago we got in some expert help to come an lay a not insubstantial (30-40 rolls) of turf to make the spaces one. It looks great. They got it much more level than I ever would and there was enough turf left over for me to perform some emergency patching of some of the more weed and moss invested areas of the garden. I can't wait till next summer now walking i the garden in my bare feet. There's no way I'm doing it now, firstly because I'm not allowed to walk on it for a few more weeks yet and secondly we had the first frost of winter this morning and it's flipping freezing.

Green Manure

2008-10-19T20:39:00.004Z

I've been reading lots about Green Manure these last few weeks but have never really taken much time to find out what it is or what it does? So I spent a little time this evening mugging up on what it's all about. Essentially it's growing nitrogen fixing crops in bulk that you wouldn't really eat, then early in spring you dig the whole lot back into the soil, the final goal is much improved soil ready for another years planting.

I'm going to give it a try. I think I'm also going to see if one of the local stables can spare some hay/poo mix to dig in. We've used the same patch for the last couple of years without putting much back so I think this winter is the time to re-energise it.

Pumpkintastic

2008-10-19T20:30:00.003Z

We picked our two Pumpkins today and have brought them into the house so they can sweeten up. Here's a picture of my wife Julia looking very proud. As you can see one is a little bigger than the other. At least one will fit in the Microwave. Yum!

Can you spot my new red bird house? I've just noticed it's in the picture.

Arrrgh Blight

2008-09-16T14:32:00.004Z

We've been away for a little while and returned home to find our Tomatoes savaged by blight. I've salvaged what I can and picked off the remaining green ones to turn into something useful. There's plenty of green tomato recipes out there. This seems to happen every year.

Burning Garden Waste

2008-08-25T18:19:00.002Z

I'm never quite sure how I feel about burning things in the garden. There's the neighbours to think about but also the environment. The thing is, there's only so many times you can drive up the tidy tip in a day before you go mad. Today I decided to fire up the incinerator to get rid of a few bits of dry branches that have been littering the garden for a while. Of course it worked great but was a little smokey and I now have some ash to scatter among the roses.

An epic find

2008-08-24T10:30:00.002Z

I was back out in the garden again yesterday after a bit of a hiatus due to prior commitments and work clearing out the rubbish tip that is the far end of the garden. After feeling a little like Prince Charming having hacked through many years of brambles and weeds I found what appears to be an old compost heap created by whoever owned the garden before us and possibly even before them. So far i've shifted a one tonne bag worth of really good quality compost out of the old heap and there's at least that much there again. What a great find.

The main motivation of clearing the end of the garden is that there's a covered seating area down there that we've so far not been able to get near because of the brambles and nettles. Now we've got near it, it's a little rotten around the edges but nothing that can't be fixed and it could also do with a paint but it'll be lovely when it's finished.

If you're wondering why it's been so quiet on the blog lately

2008-07-27T10:24:00.002Z

It's not because I haven't been out in the garden lately, it's because I have been out enjoying the garden. The weather has been so fantastic of late that I have simply been sitting out and enjoying the product of my labour with my feet up.

Most of the flowers are in full bloom and the scent is lovely, the vegetables are moving along nicely and it looks like this year will be the first time I get a good crop of Sweetcorn. The Tomatoes are ripening, the squashes are getting fatter and I've also been nurturing a Melon plant that I picked up from the local nursery - I have very high hopes for that.

I love this time of year.

Rhubarb

2008-07-27T10:19:00.002Z

I could quite honestly eat Rhubarb until it comes out of my ears (now that paints an interesting picture doesn't it?). It's an amazing plant and at this time of year is coming into it's own in our garden. Which means Rhubarb in everything.

I've been experimenting with using it in drinks the last few days and when I've perfected my recipe I'll post it up here in the next day or so.

Not very ha-pea

2008-07-06T17:17:00.002Z

This year our peas haven't turned out too well. Having read on various other garden blogs about bumper harvests and too many peas to eat, so far this year we've had two pods. Yep just two pods. They were delicious but far from what we'd been expecting. I'm not sure what we've done wrong. Perhaps we didn't prepare the ground enough or kept them wet enough over the last month of warm weather. Bit gutted really. Oh well there's still time to try again.

The lavender is coming on fine

2008-06-19T08:29:00.005Z

I've been having a go at growing some Lavender from seed to add a bit of scent to the garden. They're coming along nicely as you can see from the picture above. I think i'll give them a few more weeks before I plant them out though.

Lavendon is allotment crazy

2008-06-10T14:30:00.003Z

This post is for a bit of a limited audience but shows that the trend of increased take up of allotment space in the UK isn't just restricted to inner city areas.

I attended the Lavendon Parish council meeting last night and one of the agenda items was the possible expansion of the allotment site at the edge of the village to accommodate more plots. I'm really pleased to see that there's so much interest from local people in growing their own. I'm also trying to see if there's a way we can get some community compost up to the site or some other supply of horse poo to ensure the veggies grow big and strong.

If anyone in the local area can help with this then please do drop me a mail.

Out in the garden

2008-05-31T16:59:00.004Z

I've spent the day today out in the garden cutting back the jungle of grass and hedges and as summer is just around the corner I thought I'd post a few pictures from around the garden.

First up is Harry and his hair which has just gone to seed.

Then there's the Honeysuckle which has come into flower for the first time this year.

Sporran and Poppy enjoying the garden.

There's a rose - that has terrible black spot that I can't get rid of.

The small shed that's being devoured by the bush (I don't know what it is).

A view up the garden- I just mowed the lawn.

And one of the hanging baskets I've planted that's coming along nicely.

Monty Don

2008-05-22T19:22:00.002Z

I've just read with horror on the BBC website that my favourite Gardeners World presenter of all time Monty Don has suffered a minor stroke and will be stepping down from presenting the show full time. I have been wondering why he hasn't been on the show the last few weeks.

I'm sure he will never read this but I wish him and his family all the best and look forward to seeing him back on my Telly very soon.

What can you make with 20 quid and a few bits of old wood?

2008-05-11T19:20:00.004Z

Well probably lots of things but today in the sunshine I made a planter from the old wood, filled it with compost and planted some bedding plants, a trailing ivy and a hydrangea in it (£20). Looks lovely.