This is the week!

This week the sun has come out and somewhat un-coincidentally everything is starting to look a little brighter. All of the seedlings are really getting a move on and it will soon be time to move things on up to the plot!!

For the first time I was able to make use of the extended daylight hours yesterday because it was dry, sunny and warm until almost 7pm! It was lovely to be back up the plot and I am so glad that we started digging it over last Autumn, because if we hadn't we would be in a real mess now. Thankfully the head start has really paid off!

The plot is now almost completly dug over and ready for use. We have 3 compost bins full of compost to spread over the potato patch, and providing the weather stays dry, I'm hoping that Friday might well be Potato day!! At last!! I have previously said that we always liked to get them in on Good Friday, but this year there was still snow on the ground and the plot was just completly unworkable. The potatoes still cover the kitchen table but all have really healthy strong sprouts/eyes which will be a real benefit when they finally get in the ground!

It's also good to see signs of life already emerging on the plot without having to plant anything, the rhubarb is getting stronger each day and I love seeing the contrasting colours of the bright red stalks and succulent green leaves! Rhubarb is an allotment favourite, and I really don't know what an allotment would be without it. After all, it comes back every year without much need for love and attention!

Inside, the tomatoes that we sowed in the last week of February are now several inches tall, the chilli plants have also started to kick on this week which is great news.

There is so much positivity for gardeners to embrace in April and May and it is much needed after the extremly long winter we have endured. I still can't believe that in less than a fortneight I should really consider sowing runner beans and courgettes yet on the other hand the potatoes and onions still aren't in the ground yet! Madness!!

I'll be back down the plot tonight finishing off the potato bed, and if I have time I will plant out my 30 new strawberry plants and 7 bareroot gooseberry bushes. That may have to wait until tomorrow though, we'll see!

I really look forward to catching up with other blogs over the common days. It is very nice to see so many signs of life on my 'reading list'.

Have a good week!!
Martin

We're getting there...

I now don't feel quite as far behind as I was..

Sowing proceeded last week! It was very exciting and filled me with optimism.

 

You can probably tell I have no loyalty to one particular seed company!!

Things ARE growing though and that's a good start. The lettuce seedlings that I sowed last week are starting to come through. I've put them in my new mini greenhouse and they seem to be doing ok.

 

On the kitchen windowsill there are tomatoes and chillies. The tomatoes 'Roma' and 'Costaluto Fiorentino' are already up but the chillies aren't yet.

 

I'm growing these Italian varieties for a good reason. I've always grown the traditional salad tomatoes and although they are delicious, I like to use tomatoes in cooking. Roma is perfect for sauces and in ratatouille and the like. Then the Fiorentina are good for grilling and also for salads so they seem like a win win!

There are 3 different varieties of chillies. 'Tabasco' which I have grown before and 'Black Pearl' which I have not. There is also 'Big Banana' which I think might be a long banana shaped sweet pepper now that I think about it..

This years showings started off particularly badly. I was in the garden and I filled my seed tray with small pots which were sown in to. These were the tomato and chillies and I wanted to put them on the windowsill. As I was coming through the door with the tray the dog clocked on and thought it must be food and jumped up at the back of my legs and the tray landed on the floor..

 

Oops!!

Today I've been at it again - sowing that is, not making a mess!  I have been sowing Swiss chard to transplant later and also sowing my cabbages 'Golden Acre' and Kale 'Tuscano di Nero'.

The allotment is now more or less ready for action. The only bit which does need some attention is the top bit where the pumpkins were last year. It seems like couch grass enjoys congregating in this area and it is pretty rife! My idea is to get this part dug over in the evenings, after work next week. I'm then going to grow potatoes in this area because the couch grass won't like the constant disturbance of the 'earthing up' process. As soon as all of the potatoes are harvested in the autumn - the plan is to cover I over with black plastic to restrict light to the invasive weed and then come next spring the situation shouldn't be as bad as it currently is!

Anyway, it's raining today so that's not much use. Fingers crossed the weather makes up its mind and the sun shines bright in to the evenings!

Enjoy the rest of your weekend!!

Martin

The sweet taste of success...

Well here we have it. The first sweet taste in 2012 of homegrown sweetcorn..

It was absolutely delicious! We served with plenty of butter and I have to say it was a) the sweetest and b) the biggest I have ever grown it. It was simply perfect, and I can't wait to harvest plenty more of the coming weeks!

Today we also picked kale, cabbage, runner beans, borlotti beans, strawberries and raspberries. The beans and brassicas were taken to my grandparent's house and the strawberries and raspberries are waiting to be devoured as soon as I publish this post. Amy has been down to the allotment three times this week to pick strawberries and we have picked over 50 each time. We also have raspberries by the bucket load too...

 



 

You might already know if you have seen our live twitter feed on the right, but at the weekend we visited Ryton Organic Gardens near Coventry. We had scheduled to visit West Midland's Safari Park because we HAD some free tickets, emphasis on the HAD because as we about to step out the door we noticed that they expired the week before! Typical!

Anyway we ended up at Ryton. Amy had never been before and I hadn't been in a couple of years. I love the idea of growing heritage varieties and this is something they really promote. We obviously paid most attention to the vegetable growing side of things.

This would be idyllic wouldn't it...

They also had a greenhouse full of interesting tomatoes. This tomato really caught the eye. They didn't seem to form on 'trusses' like normal tomatoes do...

They were actually dangling on their own. They were absolutely huge and almost pepper like. Here is the placard with the variety name on...

The amount of tomatoes growing perfectly was very enviable. So many fellow bloggers (ourselves included) have reported about the widespread blight problem that we've had in this country this year. A real shame. For all of us who forgot what home grown tomatoes look like, here is a reminder...

 

 

Right, I'm now off to enjoy those strawberries and raspberries. Don't forget to follow us on twitter @ourgoodlifeblog ! I am slowly making it around everybody elses blogs leaving comments. Thanks again for reading. We hope you have a plentiful harvest this week! I have another blog post planned for later this week, so keep your eyes peeled.

 

Thanks,

 

Martin

A tour around the gardens at Fircroft.

Well you might have seen me mention my new job in several posts that I have made over the last couple of months. Anyway today I would like to formally introduce you to Fircroft College of Adult Education. I am currently working in the marketing department here and I am having a great time to say the least. Fircroft is set in the house and ground of the Cadbury Empire's former family home. Featuring the historic main building and 6 acres of beautiful gardens, it is a lovely environment to work in.

Today I have been on a walk around the gardens to bring you a small tour of the gardens here. Obviously we are coming to a bit of a halt in this year's growing season, so at the end I'll share some pictures of what the place looks like in the spring and summer seasons too.

From my perspective, the most interesting thing about the grounds at Fircroft is the kitchen garden and polytunnel. Seeing delicious veg being grown here all year round and then having the privilidge of eating it in the dining room is a pleasure. The majority of food at Fircroft is home-made and a lot of the vegetable's are home grown too. Today we have had runner beans in honey (sounds odd, but was delicious) and home grown sweetcorn to accompany our roast chicken.

Let's start at the orchard. There are a good mix of established apple and pear trees along with about 10 new trees which were planted alst year....

 here is the kitchen garden...

This is where all of the delicious vegetables we eat in the canteen come from....

Here's the polytunnel....

Only the other day it was full of tomatoes, but now it's just peppers and chillis left....

Here's a vegetable I don't want to see and if you've read some of our previous posts then you'll know why.......

Like all plots there is a lot of bare earth. Potatoes and onions are up and out of the ground. These patches will get a chance to breathe and with some manure or compost will be ready to go again in 2013..

A path from the kitchen garden leads you to a large lawned area...

On the way we bypass this little sign...

That oak tree is now over 50ft tall!!

Back on the path behind the kitchen garden, where will we go now?

Plenty of woodland..

Now the pond....

Needs a little tlc but is a nice feature none the less...

I spotted plenty of dragonflies around the pond. There was plenty of other wildlife I saw on this little tour including some birds of prey which I think were buzzards, there were also squirells, magpies, a robin, bees, and lots more too!

Looking back at the historic main building which as I have said used to be the Cadbury family home...

In the foreground is a small rose garden....

After all that I even bought myself a present back to the office from the woodland floor....

Alongside courses for adult learners including literacy and numeracy we also host courses for professionals in the voluntary sector, but if that isn't your cup of tea and you've stumbled across my blog whilst looking for gardening start up advice then we also run gardening courses in the summer. It would mean a lot if you took one moment to have a look at our website and see some of the really important work that we do. There should be more details of the gardening courses and their dates on the website too, and maybe some more pictures. www.fircroft.ac.uk

Well, I hope you have enjoyed today's mini tour. I'll try and do at least a monthly update from within the college and let you see what we are up to in the gardens. One of my ambitions that I have is to open up the gardens for the general public next summer, so I'll keep you posted on any developments as and when they happen.

Before I finish here are a couple more pictures of Fircroft at more favourable times of year and also taken with a good camera as opposed to an iPhone!

Also, you may notice that there is a bit of maintenance going on behind the scenes here at www.our-good-life.blogspot.com , so don't be alarmed if when you next come back some bits have changed or are missing, we are actually updating a few things here and there to bring the live facebook stream to you. I also have a lot of emails throughout the year about growing, gardening, chickens, quail, you name it, so I have decided to add a couple of pages with some FAQs and 'How To Guides'! We hope you'll like them and will let you know when they are ready.

Thanks once again for reading this blog! Your continued comments, emails etc. they mean the world to us and it is always nice to know that people enjoy reading about us and what we are passionate about.

We'll be back tomorrow with an update from tonight's shift at the allotment!

Martin

Beautiful..

Today saw the harvest of the first ripe tomato. This is from a variety simply called 'Orange Cherry'.

Hopefully this is the first of many, a whole vine were ripening in the sun this afternoon...

It was sweet and delicious! It was only small but we had half each. Not quite enough for tea.

Talking of meals though, we have had plenty of food from our own garden to eat. We had an entirely self produced curry (minus the sauce) the other day. We also had cottage pie with home grown new potatoes, spinach and runner beans. Sunday Lunch was completed with the daily harvest too!

Enjoy the weekend!

Martin

The Jubilance of July

July. Probably the best month for being a veg gardener. All of your hard work during the previous months have lead up to this point. Over there the tomatoes are doing well, over there the potatoes are almost ready, over there the courgettes continue to come, over there the lettuces get bigger, over there the pak choi has bolted. Everything seems to be doing well (there is always one exception, stupid pak choi!!), and there is little maintenance to carry out.

In fact, it is very nice to pour a glass of homemade lemonade, sit back and look at what we have done. We have turned an old fenced off chicken run into a small producing plot, with plans to make it even better next year! (Hopefully)

We have enjoyed a few completly home grown meals. We used the saveable pak choi leaves in a stir fry last night, with some courgette, spinach, mange tout and some very hot chilli peppers. It was delicious. We've had a nice salad, and a vegetable fritatta, with some courgettes and mange tout in an omelette. It's been great.

We are just waiting on a few other things to mature and then there will be plenty more meals like that to come.

I said there was no maintenance on the plot. Well that is a lie. There are jobs to do, but there is nothing major really. If you afford yourself fifteen minutes a day then it is easy to keep on top of things. Although everything is going well, we need to be vigilant. At any moment, we could see blight overtake the tomatoes and potatoes, cabbage fly wip out the cabbages etc. If we keep a good look out for these things then we will definately be in a good place. Picking the odd weed from between the rows of veg is not particularly stenuous on our small plot.

Yesterday I spent a little while doing some of the simple jobs.

I've given the sunflowers and sweetcorn some support. The sweetcorn are planted in a triangle to aid pollination, but they were all leaning in to the centre and it looked a bit of a mess. So some bamboo canes have been added and I've loosely tied the sweetcorn to them.

 The sunflowers are not in the sunniest spot in the garden, so they have decided to start leaning towards the sun, although they would benefit from a bit more sun, they are not in the world's worst position so these were staked back too. My Grandma and Grandad gave me the seeds for the sunflowers so I gave them three plants in return and these are now planted too..

Since the pak choi plan went bottom side up, there is a bit more space at the end of the plot furthest away from the shed. We have had our cabbage growing in pots in the greenhouse ready for transportation when some more space becomes available. I planted out three of the cabbage plants we planted a few months ago. They are in a good spot by the damson tree.

There is still time to sow some more salad leaves and lettuce so I did that to give us some late summer salad greens. We will definately appreciate them come late August and early September.

We are really looking forward to the sweet peppers we are growing in the mini greenhouse. I placed them more centrally in the greenhouse as they seem to be growing well. The middle of the top shelf in the greenhouse is the highest point.

 I have always had fantastic luck with chilli peppers but not so much with sweet peppers. We have 4 sweet pepper plants and 5 chilli pepper plants this year, so hopefully there will be plenty of peppers of different shapes, colours and sizes over the next couple of months.

The flowers are going wild in those hanging baskets too..

I had to pick out a few dead heads, but nothing major. I am really pleased with these!

We are both really enjoying reading everybody's blogs and seeing what you are picking from your own gardens, allotments, window containers, greenhouses, polytunnels, smallholdings and farms. It is amazing that all of us bloggers have different sized growing area.  From Rachel with her small city balcony to  Mo and Steve and of course Sue with her much larger site. It is superb to see how we all grow things, both similarly and differently.

Have a great day, don't forget to check out some of the other blogs on the right hand side toolbar, and see what everybody else is doing this wonderful summer's day.

Martin

Green is the old... Green?

When growing your own fruit and vegetables you can end up with a period on your plot where there is a lot of green, green and more green. The only things ripening fast enough are courgettes and they are well.. green this year. We did buy some yellow courgette seeds for next year though. Then there's the lettuce which is.. green. Tomato plants are.. green, although the yellow flowers are dwarfed by mountainous amounts of.. green.

Following our visit to Gardener's World on Wednesday, I was inspired by some of the show gardens where there is less.. green... and more... purple, yellow, orange, red and blue. I'll remind you of a couple of the 'Grow your own' style show gardens. Look at them closely..

and..

I've learnt my lesson this year. When you are in a small garden you need a bit more colour. We did buy some seeds for yellow courgettes, purple runner beans and purple sprouting.There is the Fillius Blue pepper plant too with the georgeous purple flowers. But what can I do immediately to brighten the place up a bit?

No... flowers?!?!

I am no flower expert. I won't pretend to be one either. Ask me about fruit and veg and I have had the input from my grandparents, I've read all the books, and I've read your blogs, and I've been experimenting with varying degrees of success and failure all my life. So I may be able to answer your questions. However, look at those photos again if you need to. What can you see? Yes, flowers. Look at the bizzy lizzies planted in the children's wellington boots in the second picture. Look at the rows of marigolds inbetween the tomato plants. Sunflowers too!

Amy was keen to get flowers but I consistently said to her 'they waste valuable growing space' which I suppose is still true. But she has twisted my arm, with the help of the endless amounts of green fly sat on our tomato plants.

We took a visit to that garden centre in our town that Amy didn't know existed two or three months ago (she is a regular now). They have a great choice of flowers. We didn't want too many, just a few.

So we bought 84 marigolds, two trays of labelia and two trays of something which I  can't remember the name of (and two cheeky pepper plants of course!!). The marigolds are an ideal companion plants for tomatoes as they deter the ever persistent green fly. On sunny evenings at the moment, Amy only needs to go over to the vegetable patch to get swarmed with them, and then have to pick them out of her hair afterwards. I'm sure they get in my hair too, but Amy's hair is a really light blonde so they show up easily.

Well, you know that blue tubtrug we bought on Wednesday. Well we decided we would use it to store our tools. Until today....

We filled it 3/4way with compost. Before placing a tomato plant in the middle. Then we placed 16 marigolds around the edge. This tomato plant won't be touched by green fly that is for sure. We've now put the planted tubtrug next to the tomatoes in the grow bags so hopefully this will work out well in fending off the invasion.

The one blot on our veg plot was the ghastly old hanging wall baskets that had been untouched for well over a year. So using some more of the marigolds and the labelia. The veg plot has had a bit of a much needed face lift.

We had a few left over marigolds so I have planted these strategically in the garden. I've just sown some wild flower seeds and we have 3 sunflowers that are ready to go in to their final positions.
The raised squash bed which I have mentioned before. Is now a seprated area of the garden. Last month I made a post called 'Windy' where I said that the old water feature had fell over thanks to the rapid winds and the top of it had smashed in to bits. Although there were many small bits that were not useable, I saved the large bits because I knew they would come in useful at some point. Well, they have and they are now the edging around the raised area which is the squash bed. I planted some more marigolds next to the edging to give it even more colour. There is also the giant yellow tubtrug and the Rhubarb in the blue pot.

Look at the sweetcorn in the yellow tubtrug. Because it is in the tubtrug it doesn't compete for root space with the squash and (soon to be planted) pumkin. Therefore because the squash plants should swallow the majority of the area and need the root system to support it, we are ensuring that the squashes, pumpkin and sweetcorn get their fair share of needed nutrients.

The green has definately been brushed over with the flower power and the introduction of the new brightly coloured tubtrugs and the yellow plant labels. Here is the new and refreshed view..

I'm hoping for a bit more colour soon when all of those fruit and veg start to ripen up nicely, ready for harvesting.

We are making the homemade beeswax candles tonight, so that's something to look forward to.

Enjoy the rest of your weekend!

Martin



Winter

It's strange to think that on a lovely, sunny June day the topic on my mind is the hard months of winter.

We're going to have a go at growing a range of brasicas including cabbage, brocolli and purple sprouting to name a few of the seed varieties we bought at Gardener's World.
We also need to get a move on with some of the root crops including parsnips and turnips, otherwise we really will have missed them for this year...

Don't worry, we're not only confined to the doom and gloom of the 'hunger months' but we are still preparing and sowing for summer and early through to mid autumn.

I transfered the lettuce seedlings in to the ground directly next to the leeks and then  planted a row of beetroot too. The beetroot looks great, it's been sat in a pot up until now and they have come on great in the short time we've had the greenhouse. Amy doens't like beetroot, so it's only done a small row for myself. We can plant a row of lettuce each week now for a few weeks time so that we have a continuous crop in to the autumn.

The broad beans look really good, seeing as we only bought 12 plug plants that were a bit battered and starved and thus reduced at a local garden centre, we are both amazed how well they have come on. They are all flowering and we watched the bees hard at work on them. I noticed the first mange tout flowers today aswell which is fantastic. Here are a couple of pictures of the bees doing their business..

There are plenty of tomato flowers on the tomato plants, and the first sign on peppers on the pepper plants. It was great to have Amy back in the garden now she has finally finished her own exams. She helped me move the sunflowers on to larger pots, and they will be moved over to my Grandma and Grandad's house next week or just after. We are keeping a few for our own garden and I plan to save the seeds. She also got her infamous pink watering can out and gave all the plants a little sprinkle this evening. Everything seems to be thriving, even the scorched runner beans are coming along really well...

Have a good day!

Martin

What's going on in the vegetable patch?

Well, so much is happening at the moment.

We rather embarassingly had our first potato harvest of.. one potato, but never to give up we have hope with the others. The plant seemed to be dying so we pulled them up a few weeks before they would normally be ready, and all that was in the bag was one solitary potato. Oh well. Hopefully the others will provide more...

The 'barrow of berries' as I like to call our strawberry patch is full of fruits, none are ripe yet, but it won't be long now. They are in the front garden and this area has a lot less sun than the back garden. Most of the blogs I follow are already proudly displaying their finest, juciest, red strawbs.

In the veg patch, most of the tomato plants are establishing flowers. Harvesting tomatoes is one of the best bits of growing your own and so easy to do too!

 The next picture shows that we have 5 MORE tomato plants that I need to find some room for. They've come on leaps and bounds since they've moved in to the greenhouse. The sunflowers in the foreground likewise. These are going in to Grandad's garden as soon as they are big enough! There also some pak choi sowings, some lettuce seedlings, beetroot and pumpkins.

The growbag at the bottom of the greenhouse is now planted up with 3 courgette plants. I'm hoping they'll grow rather wildly in the bottom of the greenhouse and we'll be harvesting courgettes well in to the autumn.

 A quick snap of the jungle as a whole...

Remember, that arched structure we made for our runner beans? Well we've put the runner beans in and some of them are starting to make the long, winding journey to the top. I'm sure some of you will be familiar with the '3 sisters in a bed' form of gardening where you grow courgettes, runner beans and sweetcorn in the same area and thus maximizing the useage of your ground. Well we've adopted a similar idea and put a marrow plant at the bottom. I Will be happy if we can grow a few marrows to stuff with minced meat later in the year.

It's great seeing everybody elses blogs and seeing similar things going on. I am very proud to say that we are in the middle of a massive courgette glut. We've had about 8 or 9 lovely courgettes from only 2 plants. I see that some people's plants haven't even started producing yet, and they are green with envy at my harvest.

The raddishes should be ready very soon and most of the potato bags are full up. So much going on, just off out to give them a sprinkle of water due to the huge amounts of sun we've had already this week.

Have a great evening!

Martin

Starting them young..

I found it very amusing the other day when Amy's younger brother, Jordan told us that he wanted to grow his own cucumbers because he didn't want to get E-Coli. He said that he would never eat a Spanish cucumber again in his life.

So off we went to the garden centre and we brought him a grow bag. He decided that he wanted to grow a different thing in each of the holes. So we bought him a female cucumber plant, a tomato plant and a strawberry plant. You wouldn't normally grow strawberries in a grow bag but he insisted, and we can take them out at the end of the season an re-pot them then! It's hard to find a strawberry plant that doesn't have fruits on at the moment so we bought one with flowers emerging so he could observe the whole process.

Under our supervision, he undertook the whole activity. Cutting the grow bag, planting and watering. Amy was obviously very proud...

Here is the final product and one very pleased 11 year old!

You might be able to see the 1p coins around the base of all three plants. Well, I know that slugs love cucumber plants in particular, but they don't like copper. I thought it might work, and 4 days later the plants are still untouched. Fingers crossed if continues to work..
It is really enjoyable for me to pass on my knowledge of growing just like my grandparents did for me when I was younger. I remember my Grandad Ian would grow delicious tomatoes in his greenhouse, and he had the most gigantic compost heap. My Grandad Fred was an inspiration on the allotment and helped me greatly in getting in to all of this. Hopefully Jordan will take some inspiaration from his brief encounter with 'growing his own'

Have a superb day.

Martin

P.S I've been quite busy during the last couple of days so will be reading all the blogs that I follow tomorrow, and no doubt I will be leaving comments too!

P.P.S Thanks again for visiting, and finally a welcome to the blog to my Grandma and Grandad who are now reading!

(Hi!)