grow your own

Struggling to keep the potatoes under control

May 19, 2011
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I‘m still digging up potatoes from last year’s crop. They’re giving themselves away by starting to sprout, and shooting long stems and thick green leaves up through the soil. It’s a bit galling pulling them all up as they would have made good eaters if they hadn’t started shooting, and I can’t help wondering how [...]

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Eating the first lettuce of 2011

May 15, 2011
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We’ve just eaten the first of this year’s crops. Admittedly it was only lettuce, but we celebrated by pulling up three whole baby heads, dousing them with some dressing and eating them with half a lunchtime pizza each. Sadly no tomatoes to go with it yet.

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We’ve transplanted our tomatoes

May 10, 2011
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Already, our tomatoes were starting to look cramped in their little 9cm pots. It’s only a couple of weeks since we moved them from the kitchen windowsill out into the greenhouse, so I didn’t think we’d be doing this so quickly. Nonetheless today we transplanted nine of the finest specimens into the larger pots where [...]

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The artichokes are rising… and so are the errant potatoes

May 7, 2011
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We’re growing artichokes for the first time this year. Why? Because we had them when we were out for dinner a few months back and loved them. Neither of us had ever eaten them before, and we actually thought they were potatoes when they turned up. Not surprising, really. They looked like potatoes in the [...]

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Planting up this year’s spuds

May 4, 2010
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The plot is now covered by small white markers, picking out the spots where we have planted this year’s potato crop. We normally grow them in potato bags, but we have good reason for doing it differently this year…

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Time to start planting for 2010

January 25, 2010
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It’s time to start planting the seeds for this year’s vegetable crops, and the Royal Horticultural Society is lending a hand with a functional, useful guide to what you should plant, and when.

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