Diary of a suburban edible garden, October 2017.

There's been some really very lovely sunshiney days this month, but it's definitely feeling more autumnal.

Look at these lovely berries, 

I'm really pleased with the growth of the hedge in the front garden - look it nearly covers that annoying van, and the silver car that keep parking outside my house (even though they have their own drives, grumble grumble).  At least they're not as bad as the blue car that frequently parks over our driveway. Sigh.  These are grown up problems indeed.  I know we don't have a car but we would actually like access to our own drive to, you know, actually walk up to our house!

'Scuse the state of the front garden, we're going to re-gravel it and move things about, but until then I've let it get a bit feral.  Look at all those strawberry runners rooting themselves in the gravel.

I've planted loads of new things in the back garden.  I'm not sure if you can quite make them out, but there's a new tall yellow plant, smoke plant, almond tree and my bin of blackberries in this bit of garden.

  

I thought the bin would match the metal raised beds, and it was also a cheap option to contain the thornless blackberries.  I do not want a repeat of the raspberry situation I've currently got going on - they're sending out runners everywhere!

I put an olla in the bin - I'm not sure if the metal of the bin will mean the soil will get hot and dry out in the summer or if it'll be ok here in the shade of the wall.  I've mulched it with leaves too and added a stepping stone so I can get to it without stomping all over the soil.  On the right of the bin I've planted an angelica and transplanted a self seeded hypericum. 

I'm really happy the late sowing of borlotto beans I did have fruited - I'm just leaving them a little longer to fatten up.

I don't know if I planted this sweetcorn too late for it to do sweetcorns before it gets frosty - fingers crossed!

For some reason I still have strawberries coming.  This is climate change everybody.

I'm in the process of digging up the huge fuchsia down the side of the house.  Every year I cut it back and it comes back bigger and bigger and it's blocking the path.  The roots are proving tricky, but there's lots of space now it's nearly gone and I'm going to plant an apple tree in it's place.

I've planted my new blackcurrant bush at the back of the garden and my hazel trees are lurking at the back there, I'm still trying to decide the perfect position for them.

 

I made a 'water feature' with the bin lid (from my blackberry bin), it's just upturned and buried, filled with stones and water.  I've yet to see any birds use it for a bath like they do my washing up bowl pond, but maybe a toad will visit in spring!  It's not the prettiest thing, but it was free and it brings in another habitat to the garden too.

Here's my little robin friend, he's getting stupidly tame, as soon as I take my root off the spade he's hopping about on the blade!

I just love the colours and the leaves and the berries and the flowers this time of year! 

How's your garden this month? 

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Review - Morrisons organic veg box.

Now that the growing season is nearly over I've been looking into organic veg boxes to keep us in fresh and ethically grown fruit and veg during the winter. 

I ordered the new Morrisons organic veg box so I could compare it to the Abel and Cole organic veg boxes I've also signed up to. 

The Morrisons veg box costs £8 and is available in store or for home delivery.  They also do a non-organic box for £5. 

The organic box I received was quite big and it contained the following,

17 potatoes of various sizes

11 carrots

4 leeks

4 golden beetroot

5 small red onions

1 bulb of garlic

1 fennel

The veg is nice enough, but not as nice as the posh veg that comes in the Abel and Cole box.  It's a good budget organic option - and it's going to take us ages to get through all those potatoes and carrots - but I'm going to stick with the Abel and Cole box as long as we can afford it.  

Having said that there's nothing actually wrong with the Morrisons veg box, other than the veg is not quite as fresh as I would like.  It's nice to get a bulb of garlic, the leeks, fennel and onions are fine, the beetroot and potatoes are all perfectly usable but they're a bit knobbly bobbly and blemished. 

As you can see, my fridge will be full for quite some time! 

Can you recommend any other organic veg boxes for us to try?

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My Hotbin composter.

Back in spring I bought myself a Hotbin, which is a super-posh composting bin, that takes all cooked food waste, as well as gardening waste, and cooks it up into compost really quickly.

I emptied it for the first time a couple of weeks ago, and I thought it would be a good time to share how I've been finding it.  Spoiler alert, I love it!  

It's clean, not-smelly, compact, gets really hot and steam comes out of it - what's not to like! 

Filling the Hotbin composter.

There's a set up process with the Hotbin, you fill it with twigs at the bottom, then either add a lot of waste to get it heating up fast, or add little bits of waste as you have it (both these methods are described on the Hotbin website).

Once you've done that first step you continue to add a mix of waste to the Hotbin regularly.  I find my compost stays hotter if I add waste every other day, but sometimes I go a week between topping it up if I'm busy or the weather's bad, and it still works good.

The mix of waste you need to put in the hot bin is as follows,

Food waste - raw and cooked food waste is fine

Garden waste - chopped into smallish pieces so it breaks down quicker

Shredded paper - a handful or two of shredded or ripped paper or card - I find shredded paper works best and I shred it with a pair of those special shredding scissors with 5 sets of blades.

Bulking agent - a couple of handfuls of bulking agent - Hotbin supply partially composted wood chippings, but you can make your own and I often cut up some twigs to use instead.  

Use half the volume of shredded paper to waste, and another fifth of bulking agent to get the mixture right.  I like to mix everything up in a trug before popping it in the Hotbin, then I tip it in and mix it with the top layer of compost.

Emptying the Hotbin Composter.

I put off emptying my Hotbin for ages, because I thought it might be tricky, and because I was worried if it hadn't have worked I'd have wasted a lot of money!  But I shouldn't have worried it was fine. 

Once I'd opened the bottom hatch I started digging the compost out.  Eventually the top, unfinished layer of compost collapsed down, but it happened slowly enough that I was able to shove a trug in place and catch it.  

Emptying the Hotbin was a surprisingly un-smelly and quick job, it took about 45 minutes to empty including spreading the compost.  I've spent entire days emptying compost bins before, so I was really happy with this!  I got about 4 small trugs full of compost out too which was more than sufficient to spread by my fruit trees.

The finished compost.

The finished compost is dark brown, it smells good (am I the only one who smells their compost to see if it's ready?!), and it's also really, really sticky.  This is normal apparently, due to the large amount of humic matter in the compost. 

It was easy to spread, although a bit clumpy, but I'm sure my garden worms will work on that over the winter and by spring my garden beds will be lovely.

My most favourite thing about my Hotbin composter.

I just love that it comes with two thermometers (one on the lid and one on a probe to poke inside) and that steam comes out of it.  It's so satisfying to see it working! 

Don't forget to check out my other gardening blog posts! 

Disclaimer - I received a teeny little discount on my Hotbin in return for the promise of reviewing it.  I was going to buy one anyway, and as always all opinions are my own.  I've also borrowed a graphic from the Hotbin website - I hope they don't mind and it 100% belongs to them. 

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What I ate in a day, a day of yummy vegan food.

This is what I ate in a day, it was my day off work, with just a few errands to run and a bit of gardening to do, but mostly just chilling out at home.

Breakfast was a yummy mix of potatoes, chickpeas and onion, fried til crispy with some paprika and garlic and a splodge of ketchup.

My breakfast was super filling, so for lunch I had some home-grown salad leaves, with a few crackers, a stick of vegan cheese and a BBQ Graze box.

Followed by an apple and home grown raspberries - they're so sweet this year!

Joe made this tea.  Home-made tomato sauce, wholemeal spaghetti and sausages-pretending-to-be-meatballs.  If you cut up Linda McCartney sausages and fry them in a little paprika they make excellent quick pretend-meatballs for pasta dishes.

This vegan ice cream is supposed to be in the shape of a lion, but I think it's more like a cute little sheep!  It's not quite chocolatey enough so I like to dip it into dark chocolate chips too!

Don't forget to check out my other vegan blog posts for more vegan meal inspiration! 

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My homegrown harvest, September 2017.

I've eaten so many raspberries this month that I've started craving them.  I'm going to be sad when raspberry season is over! 

I have about 8 raspberry canes and they've provided more than enough for me and Joe to scoff at least a handful each every other day.

I planted a sprouty potato in a pot super late in the season.  The plant died so I tipped the pot out and harvested these 3 nice red potatoes.  They were so yummy!

Mini sweetcorn is one of my favourite things to grow.  It's Always over packaged and imported when you buy it in shops, so I grow it myself and have a couple of delicious stir fries every year!

This is my first home grown apple.  As you can see I wasn't the first to get to it!  I suspect Mr Squirrel and I am not happy with him!

I finally got some salad on the go, I've learned my lesson about being organised with successional sowing for next year.

How are your gardens?  Are you harvesting anything exciting?

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Diary of a suburban edible garden, September 2017.

This month, most of my gardening time has been taken up with de-lawing.  I no longer have a (weedy, patchy, lumpy, bumpy, weirdly small) lawn!

We sheet mulched it, which involved digging the edges of the lawn up, laying card and newspaper over the lawn, then topping with a thick layer of bark chippings.  Bonus feature - the garden currently smells like a pine forest!

We also removed the stones that edged the narrow border between the lawn and the fence, which is why there's a pile of stones in the middle of the path now!

Here's what it looked like before.

I'm much happier now.  And once we've got the hard landscaping sorted (path, patio, shed + stompy builders stomping all over the garden) I'll plant up the ex-lawn and have lots more lovely plants and trees.

You can see I also bark-chipped over the ex-weedy patch at the bottom of the garden, as I'm probably not going to get round to planting it all this year, and the chips will prevent weeds and soil erosion, and rot down into the soil and make it nice. 

The bin's there because it's waiting to be planted up with a thornless blackberry plant I was given for my birthday.  I figured it was the biggest, cheapest plastic free option for a large pot, that would also stop the roots escaping and spreading through the garden.  It also matches my steel raised beds. 

This is my plant waiting area.  Every time I go out to garden it rains on me!  Waiting to be planted are a blackcurrant bush and the thornless blackberry - excellent birthday gifts from my father in law and his partner, it's not very often someone buys you exactly the things you were planning to buy yourself, with no prompting or clues, but this was one of those times.  There's also two hazel nut trees, an almond tree and a discovery apple tree that I bought with some birthday money I was given.  

This is my other plant waiting area.  There are lots of herbs waiting to be planted, including a curry plant that smells amazing and Siberian perennial onions.  I have a tray of herbs I bought from Homebase in the sale for £2 to plant too.  The herbs and trees are from Victoriana Nursery, it's hard to buy plants without a car, but I think this is a good online option, they seem pretty eco-friendly and the plants are healthy barring the odd insect hitch-hiker.  

I bought these perennial cut and come again cauliflower from Victoriana Nursery too, which I'm pretty darn excited to plant! 

My back garden raised beds are doing good.  I was worried I wasn't going to get any beans from my lazy housewife beans, but they're coming along now.  I had two cabbages that suffered from being eaten by cabbage white caterpillars.  I've tried to live peaceably with my caterpillar chums, because butterflies are struggling so much, so I just left them to much away happily.  I like the thought that the caterpillars have eaten their fill, and now one of the cabbages is making a comeback, so I'll get to eat my fill too.

There's lots of yummy salad growing too, and some beans and sweetcorn that I'm doubtful will make beans and sweetcorn before we have frosts - but you never know! 

This bit of the garden is really pretty right now, all the flowers seem to be putting on a final flourish before winter.  I'm planning on planting my new almond tree at the back of this patch by the fence, and I have a smoke bush on order I want to plant along here too.  There are lots of plants to move if the weather is Ever un-rainy.

This cute little calendula has been my favourite flower this year.  It's smaller and yellower than all the others and has flowered all summer long, I'll be saving seed from it.

I shall leave you with this beetle friend.  Isn't he cute!  I'm so pleased there are beetles in the garden - they eat slugs don't you know! 

 How's your garden this month? 

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