Diary of a suburban permaculture -ish garden, February 2020.

Look at this little blossom! 

It's a cherryplum and I hope the weather doesn't go too crazy and blow the blossom away before it gets pollinated!  And look at these crab apples, still holding on, I love the colour of them.

It's been so long since I wrote about my garden.  And that's because my camera's memory card corrupted so I've lost like a years worth of photos.  But I have a new camera and a new memory card and I'm backing everything up like crazy!

I got some pennies for Christmas and I used them to buy this b-e-a-oootiful new trug.  I have lots of bulbs to plant and I still haven't planted them all - woopsy!   I also bought some mini fruit trees from Thompson and Morgan, the kind that stay really small for pots on the patio, the trees are nice but there were grubs in the pots (maybe vine weevils!) so I wouldn't buy these ones.  But I'm looking forward to having 2 new apples, a pear, a plum and a cherry!

I made this cute little project one winters day.  I hope to collect lots more cute little tins to make a little display somewhere. 

My back garden raised beds still have some chard going in them, but not much else.  There's messy bits everywhere that need dealing with, and theres Still that big pile o' dirt at the back of the garden that I'm running out of inspiration for!  My potting table broke too, I need to find a new one. 

My little garden robin is still keeping me company. 

In the front garden raised beds I've been picking kale and chard all winter.  The overwintered onions and garlic are going strong too. 

Can you tell I haven't done any proper gardening since last year??! 

Luckily the flowers don't mind a neglectful gardener and carry on blooming anyway! 

How are your gardens?  Have they survived the winter?  And the storms?  I hope so!

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Dairy of a permaculture (ish) garden, June 2019.

I love it when the foxgloves flower, they're soo beautiful!

Our biggest garden-y excitement this month has been that the driveway is almost finished!  Seven 850kg bags of gravel have been spread (we may have bought one too many, but we've come up with  a plan for it!).  Joe's about to put up a new fence, there's a bin store to build and we want a couple of big pots with something pretty in by the front door (any suggestions - we want something hardy and evergreen and it's mostly shady apart from a few hours of sun in the morning).  I have a new waterbutt too, it's 250 litres and filled in one night - it's been really rainy here!  We've also had new guttering and facias so please note how nice and shiny they are because they cost £1700 (our old ones were asbestos...).

I think the gravel will be slightly less white and a bit more more pale grey once the rain's washed the dust off.  Look at this side path too - I think it's sooo nice!

The front garden raised beds are doing really good!  I've already had my first potatoes and there are beans and peas growing in with the potatoes too.  I've got carrots and beets on the way, and I've trimmed all my onions back because they were hitting the top of their protective mesh (the internet said I could trim them back to 4 inches high a couple of times during the growing season, and it would send more energy into making a bigger bulb, so we shall see).  I've had loads of kale, the sweetcorn is up and my tomatoes and peppers have flowers on them!

I've got little apples on my little apple tree! 

I've got broad beans, peas and borlotto beans in my back garden raised beds.  There are some courgettes in the other raised bed and a lot of weeds too (not pictured!).

Here's the garden in full for posterity. 

How's your garden doing?  Every time I plant a new plant a slug eats it and I'm getting fed up of that, and I had to pull up nearly all of my outside tomatoes because of blight, but otherwise I'm enjoying my garden! 

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Diary of a permaculture (ish) garden, April 2019.

I love this time of year when all the forget-me-nots go 'wooosh' and take over for a while.  They're one of my favourite flowers.

The weigela is flowering and the lilac too, the lilac smells so lovely. I always wanted a purple lilac to go with the white one at the bottom of the garden.  It turns out I already had one - I just had to let the branches from the old tree stump grow and bloom.  The people who had our house before us were monsters, who cuts down a lilac tree?!

My apple trees are blossoming too!  There's just one that didn't blossom last year and hasn't this year either, I don't know what's up with it, but if it doesn't buck it's ideas up I might have to dig it up.

This is my set up from last weekend, when I decided to empty my worm compost bin.  I thought it wasn't working ok because I'd never got any worm wee liquid out of it for the 3 years I've had it.  But turns out the tap was just on wonky and I there was a whole bucketful of liquid, plus a washing up bowl and half a bucket of worm castings.  I've reset the wormery with new coir bedding mixed with shredded paper and I'm going to start feeding them differently, chopping their food scraps into smaller pieces and burying it under the surface, it's supposed to reduce pests (like slugs, I found some mega slugs cleaning out the wormery!) and make decomposition quicker.  

All my fruit and nut trees have received a mulch of worm castings to give them a boost this growing season. 

In the front garden I planted my onions and garlic at the start of the month and they'd sprouted up by the end of the month!  I've planted some carrots and beets too that you can see in the second photo.

My onions are covered with enviromesh over part of a little greenhouse from wilkos, which was the easiest way to make a frame I could think of considering I have terrible woodwork skills.  I got onion fly on my onions last year and the only way to keep them off is to keep your onions covered so that's my plan this year. 

I've also planted my tomatoes and peppers out into my covered raised bed, I think it's warm enough now and they were taking over my kitchen worktops!  Some test tomatoes have gone out without cover into my upcycled big tomato basket in the back garden, I'll soon find out if it's warm enough out there!

 

I'm experimenting with biochar this year, you soak the charcoal-y bits in liquid fertiliser for a while, then mix it with your compost.  It releases the fertiliser and helps retain moisture in the soil too, I'm wondering if it will help if we get another super hot summer.  I've put it in my new raised beds in the front garden to test it out.

Look at this messy area!  Joe's taken the paving slabs off the weird steps that go nowhere, to lay a base for the bin store in the front garden, so now we have a muddy mound!  We're hoping to get someone in to look at the back garden soon to help us sort out a nice patio.  We dragged out a water feature left here by the previous house owners, so I'm going to clean that up and find a spot for it.

The side garden is looking nice, it's one of my favourite parts of the garden.  Only one of my tulips has come up successfully, but at least it's a pretty one! 

How's your garden doing? 

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My homegrown harvest, July 2017.

This has been a month of many courgettes!  

I need to sort my timings out for next year, and plan to do more successional  sowing, I've run out of lettuce and had the last of my peas, and didn't sow any more to replace them! 

I've had loads of courgettes however, I'm at the taking-courgettes-to-work-and-passing-them-off-to-my-colleagues stage of courgette glut.  

I had a gorgeous head of garlic, just from a clove of supermarket garlic I planted - it was so lovely and fresh. 

I've picked all my broad beans and the start of the borlotto beans, I'm not waiting for them to dry, I'll eat them fresh.

 

The rats tail radish has been prolific, unfortunately neither of us are keen on the seed pods, either raw or cooked.  They may be heading compostwards!  The flowers on the plants have attracted loads of hoverflies into the garden, so I might grow it again next year just for the insects. 

There's been a bit more that I didn't photograph, but not much.  We've had a few blueberries, but the blackbird has had more!  And my autumn bliss raspberries have produced a few berries too.  I'm not sure why, you can leave a cane of autumn rasps to over winter, then it'll fruit earlier in the summer, but I cut all my canes to the ground.  Whatever the reason the raspberries I've had have been so delicious, like sweeties.

How are your gardens?  Are you harvesting anything exciting? 

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My home grown harvest, June 2017.

Things.  Are.  Happening.  In the garden.  It's food.  And I'm growing it. 

This has been my best year so far for growing my own, and I'm really seeing the potential for being able to grow loads more as the garden progresses over the next couple of years.  My new raised bed in the back garden has been amazing and I want more!

I have so much lettuce, and so many peas.  The yellow mange tout I planted has been prolific.  Unfortunately they're not as tasty as the less prolific purple mange tout I planted last year, but happily the purple ones have self seeded so I have some of those too!

My favourite lettuce is this one, I'm not entirely sure what it is because I mixed some lettuce seed together without noting down what I was using, but it's huge and delicious.

I've had far too many mange tout to eat, so I've been blanching it in boiling water (about a minute - minute and a half is right for mange tout, it's probably not right, but I've just been doing odd handfuls in a mug of boiling water!), then drying and popping into a sterilised jar in the freezer to use in stir fries in the winter.

I've been enjoying garlic scapes, wet garlic and some unsuccessful elephant garlic (won't bother with that one again, I've included my finger in the photo for scale! It wasn't strong tasting enough for me either!)

 It's been my best year for strawberries.  I'm so happy!

We've been picking home grown herbs all spring and summer too, rosemary, thyme and sage are our favourites and Joe makes amazing herby roast potatoes.

How are your gardens?  Are you harvesting anything exciting?

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