My homegrown harvest, April 2019.

The first harvests of spring are starting to come in, they always taste the best.

I've been growing this cauliflower plant for about 18 months and was just debating cutting it down as it hadn't produced anything when all of a sudden a little cauliflower appeared, and within 2 weeks that little cauli grew until it was bigger than my head!  Although it was impressively sized, I can't say it was particularly tasty, I wouldn't grow this variety again (it's 'cut and come again', so it's supposed to make several heads but I'm not sure I'll bother with it any more).

I've also had some small shallots, I bought the shallots for 50p on sale really late in the season last year and they've overwintered, but not very well.  Some are really small and some are just about to go to flower, but it's nice to have fresh onions, whatever form they take.

Apart from the usual herbs, and a few pickings from my perennial welsh onions that's all I've eaten from the garden this month.  I can't wait for next month to see what's coming! 

Have you eaten any spring crops from your garden yet? 

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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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Charity shopping.

Joe says he's noticed I keep putting things in bags and asking him to carry them away to the charity shop for me, but that I also keep bringing other things in other bags into the house from those same charity shops. Yep, that's just how it works round here I'm afraid Joseph, here are some things I've been buying from the charity shops recently (and I bet Joe hasn't even seen some of these yet!).

I walked passed the charity shop on my way to buy the paper for work and spotted a motherlode of blue retro crockery.  It was a Saturday morning and I was pretty sure it'd all be gone when I went back...but it wasn't!  I chose this little bowl because it's cute and I can probably pop a plant in it. 

Retro bowl, £1, local Samaritans charity shop. 

This was the only other bit I bought from all the blue retro crockery, which was obviously someone's lifelong collection.  I guess it's a casserole dish, or a serving dish of some kind.

Retro Midwinter 'Caprice' dish, £3, local Samaritans charity shop.

I have a really lovely 70s enamel pendant that I really would like to wear, but it's a big cross and I don't feel comfortable wearing it, so I set out to find something new and scored this on eBay.

Enamel necklace, £1.20 plus P&P, eBay.

I picked up this plate to pop under a plant, I'm always on the look out for retro crockery I can repurpose in the garden. 

Bilston's plate, 50p, local Air Ambulance charity shop. 

Have you bought anything good from the charity shops lately? 

PS. Check out my other charity shopping posts for more like this! 

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Easy green actions and articles.

Here are a few easy online actions and interesting articles to make the world a better, greener, happier, place, 

Sign Friends of the Earth's petition, asking the government to do all it can to stop climate change before it's too late.

'Nature is the ultimate carbon capture and storage machine. The fastest and cheapest way for Britain to suck carbon out the air would be to double tree cover, restore our peatlands and wetlands, restore fish populations in the North Sea to their historic levels, and end the chemical warfare in the countryside that has led to the catastrophic collapse of insect and bird populations'

Let's all plant some more trees, ok?

Do you have some old (gently worn) bras to get rid of?  Send them to Smalls for All so they can be given to women in Africa who would otherwise have to go without.

Check out Greenpeace's plastic league table to see where your favourite supermarket ranks.

Some great, not-scary articles from Positive News this month - like Britain's endangered wildlife has made a come back, European agriculture could go green and still feed the whole continent, and a UK wide plastic bread bag recycling scheme has been launched. 

'Most of all, I wish Marie Kondo would just say stop! Stop buying all this stuff. The only solution to our waste crisis is to halt the consumerism clogging our landfills, polluting our oceans and overcrowding our homes. Because what would really spark joy would be a world that isn’t overflowing with garbage.'

Do you know what would spark more joy?  Buying less crap. Indeed. 

On the same note, check out Lindsay's post - 6 places to declutter to that aren't the charity shop.

The EU has voted to ban all single use plastics by 2021!

Every Wednesday this amazing group of women stand in protest of the fracking taking place in Lancashire.  Earthquakes have been reported near fracking sites in the UK, so sign this petition to show your support for a fracking ban.  

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Diary of a permaculture (ish) garden, February and March 2019.

Hello!  The garden is waking up (and so am I, I always want to hibernate through the winter!).  There's some blossom already, beautiful pink almond blossom and white on the new cherry plum trees.

The crocus have been and gone.

In the front garden I've planted a couple of patches of zingy yellow daffodils.  Some by the new cherry tree just as you come onto the drive, a pretty little springy area with some snowdrops, muscari, daffs and a hellebore my mum bought me.  The other in the corner by the fence, there's a new rose (a David Austen rose called 'generous gardener' that was my lovely valentines present) and some daffodils at the front of the bed.  It's always surprising how a few cheap little bulbs can make a garden look pretty and well cared for in the spring.

The new raised beds have gone up in the front garden!!!  I'm soooo pleased with them!

Joe's filling them up with the soil he dug out of the drive when he was levelling it, and I'm adding layers of garden clippings and cardboard to try to create a lasagne bed effect.  The driveway soil is slightly clay-ish, so I'm wanting to break it up with some organic matter, and hoping it'll all rot down together into something nice.  When I get nearer the top of the beds I'll add some bagged compost (I went to get some from Homebase the other day and there was some on offer for £2 a bag - so I bought 8 bags!) and some biochar (which is my new experiment this year).

We've had to have all our gutters replaced this month and I had to move my hotbin composter out of the way.  So it seemed a good opportunity to empty it.  About a million worms were living in there!  My back garden raised beds have had a nice top dressing of compost ready for the new growing season.

I've started planting some seeds in the heated propagator (tomatoes and peppers), chitting some potatoes (Jazzy, Nicola, Kestrel and Swift, I have no idea what I'm doing with potatoes so I just bought a small packet of several varieties to try.  The tray I'm chitting them in is the innards of Joe's Lego advent calendar and it's perfect for the job!) and I have my onions and some supermarket organic garlic ready and waiting to get going. 

Here's the garden in full, for posterity! 

How's your garden?  Have you survived the winter?  Are you ready for spring?

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