Planning for planting potatoes
Two weeks today, I become a home owner again. Very exciting, although to be honest I think I’m more seat-edgey about getting space for deckchairs, and an old wooden-framed greenhouse than I am a two-storey home with central heating that I can actually turn on and off whenever I want, a fire and space for a separate washing machine and drier.
So today I took to the Grow Your Own Veg book in earnest, and am pleasantly surprised to see how much of the early planting season is left. Tomatoes, cucumbers, potatoes and sprouts are all still in reach, even if I don’t get planting for another six weeks. Lettuce, clearly some kind of Olympic veg, can be sown, germinate, sprout and be ready for eating in less than two weeks.
I was particularly interested to read that if you plant them in the right conditions and take care of them you can even grow new potatoes in the middle of winter - particularly if you put them in a barrel in the greenhouse, rather than out in the earth.
It’s an excellent book, all in all, as it’s very practical, and full of little hints, like growing geraniums or basil underneath your tomato plants to save them from whitefly. Nobody knows whether it’s because they can’t stand the smell of the basil and geraniums, or because they actually prefer them to the tomatoes themselves, but it apparently keeps your fruits safe without using chemicals.
Grow-bags coming through. Home-grown salads on the horizon.
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Our various salad crops are approaching readiness, and with 23 tomato plants of four different varieties to choose from we’re hoping for plenty to eat, and even more left over for another batch of chutney to see us through the winter.
An early morning picking session bagged us a bumper crop of beans, taking our total for the year so far well beyond what we produced in the whole of last summer, and it appears there are still more to come.
We had our first proper harvest at the weekend. Three types of beans: French, runner and broad. Not a huge amount of any variety, but enough to cook ourselves a three-bean risotto for dinner.
With summer in full swing, the plot was due some mid-season maintenance. We moved the tomatoes outdoors, built a climbing frame for the cucumbers and pulled an impressive number of weeds from the carrot runs.
The chickens’ future home arrived last week. Very exciting. Having got permission from the council’s environmental health people to keep chickens in the garden, it was great to finally have their home arrive, despite the missing bolts and the fact they’d tried delivering it a day too soon.
I’m about to launch myself back into the world of poultry and eggs, as I’ve put in an order for a coop. It won’t be here for another month, which gives me plenty of time to source my laying ladies, which have been named Margot, Gerry (Geraldine, not Gerald, natch) and Barbara even before they arrive.
This book delivers exactly what it says on the cover starting out with an extensive and balanced list of the pros and cons of keeping your own home flock. Right from the off it’s a realistic, if slim volume that’s not afraid to admit that chickens in the garden might not be right for you. If they are, though, then this is the only book you need.
This is what the 15 jars of our finished apple jelly looked like. They’re much darker than crab apple jelly, which is a light pink. The rich red brown of this batch is most likely down to the variety of apple we picked.
Chilis not only taste great - when used appropriately and in moderation - they look good, too. Growing as colourful fruits on small bushes, they make an attractive addition to a windowsill or conservatory or, if you have a suitably sunny spot outside, a pot in the garden. They’re also the perfect crop for the self-sufficientist without a garden of their own.
Self sufficiency doesn’t all have to be about growing your own vegetables, keeping chickens in the garden or screwing a solar panel to your roof. Sometimes it’s the smallest things that make the biggest difference.
My electricity supplier actually wants us to use less energy rather than more, with the help of a free energy monitor that tracks your usage and costs. Watching it change as you switch lights on and off is proving strangely addictive.