home grown veg

sharonl

I'd say you could build raised beds alright. You can sow lettuces, carrots, beans and peas right up to July and a raised bed should give you a bit longer of a growing season as the soil would be slightly warmer and be easier to cover and protect through frosts. Go for it I say!! If your stuck on time this year to sow from seed, you can always pick up some already established seedlings for this year.

Sharon
www.plot103.blogspot.com

lucylu

deisemum
No its not too late at all. Most veg can be sown now!

Take a look at
http://www.allotment.org.uk/garden_month/garden-may.php

The Sweeper

As an aside, I got a useful recommendation from someone who gardens and owns cats down here - she uses paper pellet kitty litter, and swears by it - once shes removed any poos, she uses the spent litter as a soil improver, compost ingredient and as a layer builder in raised beds. Swears by it. She also uses it as a mulch. I'm starting to see what she means - once you put the hose on it it basically turns into disentegrated cardboard and it's definitely better than throwing it in the bin... I've started to use it as a layer in raised beds and it's brilliant for helping get the depth without having to spend hours shredding newspaper or cutting up cardboard so it'll disintegrate more quickly.

sorella

My new garden plans were foiled by flu that left me too weak to dig; and by finding that almost the whole patch ( we moved in October) is full of bluebells. They are an utter glory just now. Amazing sight and just could not bear to harm them.

So we have potatoes - from a supermarket bag- in containers, peas growing up trees and runner beans about to join them, cabbages in odd places.

Most of our seed is saved from other years.

Yesterday we fenced off a patch where the bluebells are very thin to keep our dogs off; the area is also full of tree roots etc.

Containers are great and we bring in seaweed from the shores.

The war against slugs goes on now.

prentice

twenty8 wrote: »

I have a small patch that I am trying to get a nice selection of veg and fruit.

At the moment I have a good few rasberry canes, gooseberry, blackcurrant and a good few strawberries.

I have also 2 drills of Rooster potatoes - which were planted late and are still not up - not sure if I will have much success with them!

Planted peas and scallions outside last weekend and also got a load of pots and planted sweetcorn, pumpkins, more peas, lettuce and tomatoes at the start of May.

I will plant all of them out when they get hardy - my pumpkins are flying, sweetcorn is just coming up and the rest are slow - different sowing times. My lettuces are nearly ready to go out.

This is just my 2nd year and it does take time to get used to things, how they grown and to appreciate how much space they need. My veg last year was a mess - but I am a lot more in control this year. I am sure that I will get the hang of it in 20 years!!!

The roosters will come fine late or not. just make sure to earth them up (mould them) a lot when they do. they are a bit late so will be more likely to get the blight

parkerpen

This is fantastic and has got me thinking. We have no idea of the junk we are buying in our supermarkets. God only knows the chemicals in the vegetables so many of us are eating.

sharonl

Most supermarket fruit and veg, unless its organic I suppose, is riddled with pesticides and chemicals. These are designed to kill living organisms! I certainly don't want something thats designed to kill living things in my body, and while harmless is the traces left on veg on a one off, what about the cumulative effects of eating small traces over a number of years or a lifetime? Not something I'd like to risk. And aside from that, the fruit and veg you get in a supermarket tends to be harvested before its ripe and is allowed to 'ripen' during transport over here. This means the veg hasn't had time to properly develop its flavour. Most people who eat supermarket veg, really only get a hint of what the true flavour of the vegetable is, you can see this first hand when you grow your own, the flavour is so much more intense when its let develop on the plant as it should, so much so that in some forums where people have grown their own, they think they've done something wrong because the flavour of veg is too strong, when in fact thats the way it should taste. We've become far too familiar with the tasteless, unripe, air-mile ridden stuff thats available at the moment. If you have a good local veg shop near you, do everything you can to give it business as this is the proper stuff and shouldn't be let close down for business deffered to giant multinational supermarket chains providing low quality, cheap, tasteless produce.....Particularly for veg and fruit that can be grown in ireland which is a lot...and will obviously be fresher in a local fruit and veg shop as it may well have only come from down the road and at the worst..another county in ireland. It doesn't have to take much space to grow your own even if its just a cherry tomato plant to keep you in salad tomatoes during the summer, just to realise how good the stuff tastes when its done properly.

AAh thats my rant over for a while!!:D

sharon

mor_rigan

I'm having some limited success in controlling the slugs with lime. As a plus carrots and cabbage like limey soil

Dr Galen

i was able to get some organic friendly slug pellets in local garden centre. I can't remember the name but I'm sure the empty tub is still in the garage. I'll check it out later. Between those, beer traps and some copper I've managed so far to keep pretty slug free up at the allotment.

@MAJD regarding the kitty litter idea, doesn't cat poo have nasty bugs or worms or something in it? even removing the poo's I'd be wary i think. I thought of that myself though, as we only a wood based litter too, and it can go into the compostable bins that the local council provide.

The Sweeper

If you hot compost, the heat is enough to kill off anything. Layered beds (not generic raised beds, but specific lasagne layered raised beds, hot compost as the layers break down.) I wouldn't be mulching my edible plants with cat litter, mind.

If you think of it most composts contain animal manure of some variety.

I wouldn't chuck cat litter into a cold composting bin. Doesn't break down quickly in those conditions.

Mozart1986

My Dad and I want to see if we can make a bit of cash out of installing raised seedbeds. We can make very good soil with very little weeds out of horse manure and mushroom compost. It would be nice to know what kind of competition we had. These things are suitable for any house with even a small garden and this thing seems to be exploding right now. I think even big balconies can take them with ease, so that adds people in apartments to the demographic (maybe? Not sure if thats feasible). I'm sure there are lots of people doing this already.

Any advice? I think we are just gonna leaflet and hope that if we get a couple of picturesque gardens we can then use them to advertise properly.

luckat

Mozart1986 wrote: »

My Dad and I want to see if we can make a bit of cash out of installing raised seedbeds. We can make very good soil with very little weeds out of horse manure and mushroom compost.

Brilliant idea! Why don't you offer to put in copper bands around them for a little extra, to deter slugs and snails?

Edit: what are you thinking of charging, and how is it broken down?

Mozart1986

luckat wrote: »

Edit: what are you thinking of charging, and how is it broken down?

Thanks for the tip. We aren't sure how low we can get our overheads so I would be pickin' a number out of the air. If we got a job in a nice garden that we could then use for marketing purposes I suppose we'd do it with no mark-up, make our profits in any subsequent sales. This would allow us to get a better idea on the appropriate price. We have done a couple and my Dad is a very skilled perfectionist (hates the shame of a bad job) so he wouldn't want to jump the gun and give a misquote. We might get our costs down and do a small one for 50euro, but we might charge 400euro for a large job. We already know what labour is involved so thats not an issue. Dad says it would only take a couple of hours to put one in once we get everything else sorted.

Planet X

http://i527.photobucket.com/albums/cc356/Kilroy8282/P1000487.jpg?t=1243966535

Two I built earlier this year.

.....and a couple more I added last week....

http://i527.photobucket.com/albums/cc356/Kilroy8282/P1000540.jpg?t=1243972366

gsxr1

gsxr1 wrote: »

here is my years attempt.

Lots of lettice. pot with parsnips , Carrots, spinach parsley and rocket.

I also have runner beans growing and peas that are just starting to emerge from the ground.

the high winds last week distroyed half of my lettice.
Big green pots have carrots , 1 month apart. large clay pot is the spinach. leavy pot at rear is parsnips. and the rest have a selection of space saving and Italian style lettice. Lots of colour


peas


french beans and runner beans

update. we are eating veg everyday now.







Peas and runner beans are flowering . Not sure what happens next with them.

Cabaal

Harvested my first lot of potatoes on Sunday.....and they're lovely

Planet X

Raised Beds I put links to earlier but the links don't work.
Anyway, before.........spring,






and a few weeks ago,

mp22

fresh tomatoes at last:D

gsxr1

all my peas are ready and runner beans soon.

dfbemt

Excellent thread. Keep it going and keep on adding the photos.

It's great to see the progress through the photos - you can almost taste the freshness of the crop.

Blog is great, keep up the hard work.

At least one good thing has come out of this recession. We are even talking about it down the pub !!

davenewt

Finally seeing the fruits of our labours here!





Anyone want any courgettes? Didn't realise at the time that one plant would yield, um, quite a few... so I planted 8...



Discovered this one about half an hour ago, after cutting back a lot of the leaves (again!)...



Brocolli and rocket coming on nicely as well... rescued from a rather sorry-looking display at B&Q a couple of months ago when they were obviously trying to get rid... glad I saw some potential now...!



Sorry for large images folks but hope it shows even a newbie gardener can achieve something - this is my first year so I'm quite pleased with progress so far.

If anyone has any tips on the following I'd love to hear them...

1) Had to get rid of lots of weeds around the shallots this evening and some were half-exposed so I pulled them up. Is it worth leaving the others in the ground, or should I just pull them all up now? Will they continue to grow or not? (hasn't looked like it in the last few weeks).

2) Am also trying to grow some pepper plants. Have some in a cold-frame and some out in the veg patch (you can just see a couple in the last pic, top right of shot - one very small and one larger, to the left of the small 'un)... is there anything I can do to help them on, and what's the likelihood of getting any peppers from them? The ones under glass in pots are a little larger but still no signs of them developing peppers...! Bit of an experiment I suppose!

Thanks for any tips, and I hope you're all doing equally well (well, actually, I hope you're doing much better! My peas were disappointing and the less said about the carrots and parsnips the better... let's just say the slugs had an early Christmas when those were initially planted!)

Cheers,
Dave.