Plant fair

Our haul from today

More paper pots

Just more pots...

2012 Bean sowing

So - a few weeks back I sowed:
Cranberry CFB
Lablab beans
and some Moonlight and White Lady runners - got 1 Moonlight and 3 White Lady runners to germinate - out of new packets. Big wow.

All the cranberry and lab lab ones came up. Bearing in mind these are self saved by other gardeners - and not even guaranteed fresh - this makes me even more keen to stick to swapped seed.

Anyway - today's sowings are
all 6 of my Hopi Yellow - these have been put into vermiculite in a plastic bag and will be put into the airing cupboard to try and encourage them to germinate - I have no idea how old these are but I suspect 10 years at least. Fingers crossed. 

Flavert - one of my favourite DFB - I am growing quite a few so have put them into a sprouter and will remove and plant up as each germinates. All my own fresh seed from last year.

Into pots/modules/root trainers have gone:
CFB -
Cranberry Lilac
Trionfo Violetto
Purple King
Veitch's
Kentucky Wonder
Coco bianco

DFB -
Minodor
Dapple Grey
Flavert from another year's batch
Black Valentine
Canadian Wonder
Anasazi
Coco De Paimpol

Bush -
Italian Rose
Scarlet Beauty
Vermont Appaloosa
Blue Jay
Littlefield's Special

And 2 off the wall ones:
Walawi Red Bean - originally from Zambia
Mystery bean 

I'll do another batch in a week or two - it's about the space and timing the beans to be in the plot around the time when they are not going to be affected by wind burn...which can put them back weeks.

Tar Heel Beans - these I am still trying to get to germinate - although my good chum has managed it I am due to try again in a few weeks.

Tar Heel Beans

Taking Candy from a Dog - Video and Book

I've not written this - but a good chum has...


It's been out a while but a new video accompanies it so I'm just posting a link to that.

Taking Candy from a Dog

It's mesmerizing and brilliant.

the book is available from blackheathbooks

Washout - paper pots

Well, I'd love to post something interesting but it's been such a washout few weeks, with very little going on that I have nothing.

Well, apart from paper pots. If I made one pot last week I made 100.

Which basically means, that's all I did last week with all the classes that I joined.

So - paper pots. There are loads of designs but I've found that the best one is this:

Take a sheet of A4 paper. One that is for the scrap box, naturally.

Have it on the desk or table in front of you - portrait style

fold in half - the bottom comes up to meet the top.

 Then fold in half again, like a book.

 Half open up and bring the crease of the fold down to meet the table to make a triangle/arrow

Like this.

 Then flip the paper

 Do the same again with the other crease

 And you have an arrow with folds visible.

 You need to refold the triangle so that no folds are visible, which means turning the page like a book on one half - flipping it and turning the other page like a book.

You should have flat paper on both sides

 Then - and there are various methods of doing this but the simplest is: Fold the right 1/3 over to the middle, and then the left over to the middle leaving the middle strip.
Like so:

 And so:

Flip over and do the same again.

If you now fold the top flaps down, and into your pot, and open the inside up you have a paper pot.

You can either fill it immediately - like so [with seeds or plants]

Or you can make a larger pot by folding less to the middle and store all your pots 'flatpack' style until you are ready to use them.

Hugelkultur

If you don't know what this is - then perhaps have a quick read of this link  http://www.permaculture.co.uk/readers-solutions/small-scale-hugelkultur-raised-beds

So, we had some spare old wood and this part of the plot is at the boundary with the neighbour who has put spiky trees right up to the boundary [why we don't know but anyhow]...it spikes us every time we walk up our path so I wanted to do some work on making at least one into a permaculture bed. Putting 2 and two together - I opted for a Hugelkultur style bed.

I dug the soil out of this bed [strip by strip] and put the old wood underneath. The wood had come from some stuff they were chucking away [well, were going to burn] at Ryton last year, and stuff from our decking at home that had rotted and wouldn't take screws [I originally wanted to use the bits to make 2 raised beds] so under this soil is, basically, rotting wood. I have put the clay soil back on top of the wood, and used home made compost on top of that. The crops that are going in here are mainly ones that can be furtled and some left insitu to grow back next year. So, Yacon, potato onions, and Egyptian walking onions are in first. I'll nab some Jerusalem Artichokes, and I'll plant it up with some perennial herbs as well and we shall see how it fares. I've put 3 potatoes in as well, as they were found in the compost heap and had already started sprouting.

Photos of the plot

These are about 4-5 beetroots that grew from old HSL seed last year [Dobbie's Purple] and were the biggest beetroots I've ever seen.  Size of a football - so I left a few over the winter and one, my lottie neighbour wanted as he kept ogling them and wants to save the seed from them - you can see his in the top right on the next plot. So, I've built a frame round them and will let all of them flower and go to seed. We shall see later in the year just how much seed these will give us.




 Elderflowers at the back of our plot - last year the council cut this bush back without us knowing so we lost out on the flowers or berries so fingers crossed they keep off this year.

Gertrude Franck bed - leeks and onions in, and lettuce and swede just waiting to go in. 














 My first completed netting - this was 20 loops wide [using a ruler as a guide] and once untied, will reach to the ground over my Munty frame and the climbing French beans will hopefully clamber up later in the year. Can't wait!

 My Munty frame in the second bed, and a vertical squash frame in the first one. This top bed is where the contaminated manure was stashed and the soil underneath still isn't right so we are using it as a composting bed this year and we shall see what grows. Hence, I'm putting squashes in there as they should get a fair amount of nutrients from the decomposing compost - all we will have to do is to keep it well watered this summer.






These are netted peas; about 35 plants in there. They are mainly Goldensweet Mangetout and I'll put a taller cane in and bigger nets to keep the dreaded pea moth out.