A visit to Van Gogh country?

My sister-in-law will never forgive me if she ever sees this. We were visiting her for a few days last week and as ever, she and her boyfriend generously gave up their bedroom for us and themselves slept on a sofa bed in a very crowded home office. And I thank her by posting a photo of her garden on my blog. You'll have realised by now that she's not a garden person.
I think if you squint a bit, it could be a field of Van Gogh sunflowers that are far far away.

Polytunnel envy

I was privileged enough to recently visit a garden that has been tended by a couple for the last 50 years. It's your classic secret garden, hidden just off the high street of a Hertfordshire village and I bet that most of the village residents don't even know its there. It has all the elements of a garden that I would love - beautiful old walls to trap the heat and act as backdrops for fruit cultivation, small meandering meadow areas with mature trees underplanted with daffodils and paved paths weaving beneath arches framed by climbers.
And in one area of this beautiful garden is an amazing vegetable and fruit plot. Potatoes growing in sacks in a greenhouse big enough to house my entire garden, rows of mange tout merrily waving their tendrils in the sun and then - the polytunnel envy set in. It's fatal, I should really stay away from other people's polythene-lined supercharged, super-heated growing spaces. I just don't have the space for one - unless we fastened the top of the arch to the back door and it ended at the larch hedge on our boundary. It would be like that scene from ET where the government scientists rig up a plastic walk-in tube stretching from the front door to a van - you'd never see the outside world again. But sadly I'm not sure the chickens would be very happy with that. Anyway, back to my gardening jealousy. The owner of said amazing garden structure explained that he uses his polytunnel to grow an array of veg, starting them off much much earlier than you'd be able to in an open plot and just look at the result!


The broad beans are not only about 4 times the height of mine, they're also in full flower and complete with visiting bees. Although they look like they were autumn sown, he actually sowed them in situ in February. Behind the first row of Aquadulce Claudia is a row of peas that are not quite visible in the photo. With leaves a good 3 inches across! It makes my 2 inch tall efforts in the suburban veg plot look a little lacking. Roll on the suburban smallholding...

tracking the radishes

One of the many things I love about growing my own produce is seeing how things progress almost on a daily basis. And that's where photos come in - particularly digital ones. You can snap away all through the spring, summer and autumn and see how things are growing and changing. Dates are no problem, as most digital photography systems automatically assign the date and time to each image file so the info is always there to see. I also like seeing how further on (or far behind) I am from one year to the next. It acts as a prompt for sowing times - reminding me to get a move on usually. And it always give me a little self-satisfied thrill to know that the progress is down to me - the seeds I sowed, the seedlings I watered, the plants I tended.
As radishes are usually the quickest thing to develop in the suburban veg plot, here's the progress thus far for Radish Scarlet Globe sown in situ 12 March.
First photo taken 25 March:


and this one taken on 6 April:



All this talk of dates is now reminding me to sow another pot this weekend if I'm to keep myself in radishes throughout the summer!

Emerging into the light

So, we've now reached the end of March and are officially into British Summer Time. Yes, that'll explain the forecast for torrential rain tomorrow - but to be honest that's what umbrellas were invented for. At least the garden will appreciate it, even if the chickens don't.
The house has been a hive of sowing activity this month. I established a production line of modules in unheated propagators circulating their way around the house. Last year's scheme, which had seed trays sitting on the heated kitchen floor was a good one in principle, but there were a few, let's say, tripping incidents en route to the back door. So this year chilli seeds have been germinated in the airing cupboard before being moved to one of a number of 1st floor rooms to take advantage of either the early morning or afternoon sun. I've even been creating foil wrapped receptacles out of wine boxes in which to sit seed trays of emergent seedlings in order to reflect sunlight all around them and reduce the leaning tendencies of young seedlings towards the light - which I learned recently is termed phototropism.

The shallots are germinated and residing in the unheated greenhouse, where they'll stay until mid-April.
The leek seedlings are up - but will stay in their respective pots until May/June. They've been moved outside the greenhouse now but the trick will be keeping them watered during the warmer months. Basically if I don't fall over it on a daily basis it risks being forgotten in the watering round. As for the next stages, the common advice is not to plant them out until they're 'pencil thick' but I've yet to achieve that. To be honest, some of mine are still only pencil thick when they're harvested, but that's usually due to planting out too late which restricted the length of time they have to re-establish themselves before winter set in. I've introduced a journal of sorts this year in order to plan my timings better. But let's just say I'm not holding my breath...

No queues at Kew

I took a break from the suburban veg plot last week and took the train to Kew Gardens to meet up with a good friend. The visit served a different purpose for each of us. Since completing my RHS course, I've become a little more interested in ornamental gardens and my only previous trip to Kew Gardens was as an environmental science student in the mid 1990s and I couldn't really recall much of what I saw there. She on the other hand, is a student of design and architecture and wanted to see the Xstrata Treetop Walkway designed by Marks Barfield Architects who also designed the London Eye (which, as an aside, can be seen from the walkway).
The walkway is 18m above the ground (so not for the faint-hearted) and currently accessible only by a staircase. The original lift, intended to ferry wheelchair users and child buggies to the top, hasn't worked reliably since construction was completed and is now out of service until they come up with a replacement for it. Once at the top, you have a panoramic view of Kew Gardens and the city and countryside beyond. You are quite literally walking through the treetops and I'm sure that come late spring and summer, when the leaves have returned to the trees around, the experience will be different again when you'll be able to reach out and touch the foliage.





We also took a walk around the Temperate House, once the largest glass structure in the world and now the largest surviving Victorian glasshouse in the world. It's official, I now have greenhouse envy... My greenhouse will only fit 2 grow-bags on the floor plus a small staging unit for the pots of chillies - a bit on the tiny size compared to this one...

2011 - a reawakening

So, 2010 stopped suddenly for the suburban veg plot blog in July. Needless to say I have excuses, nay reasons, galore for it.
Reason 1 - mainly time-related. The wedding was fast approaching which involved many visits to Belfast, many phone calls and emails to caterers, suppliers and wedding guests alike to ensure that everything happened on the day, in the right place, at the right time. And it did. Even the sun came out (a novelty for Northern Ireland!) so our garden setting was just perfect. If any gardeners out there are thinking of tying the knot and are looking for a garden-related reading, then this one went down very well indeed.
Reason 2 - erm, time-related again?? Went on honeymoon for three weeks and then life was very busy after that...?
Okay, okay, enough of the excuses. I got entirely out of the habit of blogging and there always seemed something else that needed doing.
Now we're in 2011, and there are seeds to be sown and winter veg still to be harvested, so all this raking up the past really isn't helping. Talking of raking, why did no-one warn me that putting chickens to free-range into a garden with very stony borders would only result in said stones ending up all over the lawn area? We started off by raking them up and throwing them back on the borders only to find them on the lawn again in just a few hours. Now we do regular stone collections and transfer them to the suburban veg plot to create paths between the raised beds - which also serves to keep down the weeds.
As well as the reawakening of the suburban veg plot blog, the garden itself is reawakening in the recent mild weather. Wild birds are returning, blue tits and blackbirds mainly, enticed in by peanuts, fatballs and saucers of mealworms. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that blue tits will settle in the nest box on the fence as a couple of them have shown something of an interest in it.
The strongest signs of new plant growth (aside from the snowdrops and crocuses) are the buds on the blueberry bushes (one Jersey and one Ozark Blue). These were new acquisitions in the autumn of 2010 and so this year will be the first harvest from them. They're in large pots on the patio, as the soil in the suburban veg plot is too alkaline, though they may be moved into the front garden if space becomes tight. As ever, my plans would fit an allotment rather than a suburban garden!

Black times ahead

I must be very good indeed at growing tasty broad beans. Well, certainly the local population of blackfly seem to agree. The autumn-sown Aquadulce Claudia escaped the onslaught - we had 3 harvests from them during May/June. But the spring-sown broad bean mixture have been plagued by them since they threw up their first shoots. I've tried the various remedies - squishing them (I can't bear doing it, even wearing gardening gloves), spraying with a soap solution (works to a certain extent but doesn't actually vanquish them all) and pinching out the leafy tops (they colonised too quickly along the entire height of each plant for that to have any effect).
So, though I'm loath to admit it, I've given up fighting. At least if they're on the broad beans then they're not infesting anything else in the suburban veg plot.