the daydream fund challenge thread

choille

Well I'm just glad we got some more hay in on Wednesday & some more feed.

It's incredibly heavy snow this time & then blindingly bright sunshine. I hope it doesn't freeze again.

rhiwfield

Choille, dont envy you the snow, its cold, dry and bright here so have been finishing off disinfecting the greenhouse, sorting out surplus plants from the beds and generally mooching around fighting down the temptation to start sowing something.

With just onions, jams and pie filling left from last year's harvest I'm looking forward to the early crops, especially the first of the leaf beet. So yesterday I looked at the overwintered beet which had been severely nibbled, and chopped off the tops to isolate the culprits (green caterpillars), before putting on a cloche to encourage early growth. Now is anyone else growing leaf beet and having pest problems? For the past 2 years in late spring the leaves have suffered from substantial leaf mines which I've tentatively identified as mangold fly. But its these overwintering green caterpillars that are bugging me - they spoil the autumnal harvest and the early spring growth. Any idea what they may be? No pictures cos any I found yesterday were squished but they look like one of small white or green veined white caterpillars. Slugs and snails I expect, but its a pain when this "trouble free" crop starts playing up!

choille

Lucky you getting in the garden.
I think the Mangold fly thing is cyclical - you have to use boiling water to kill off all the eggs in the soil?
I've got one or two onions left, cabbages & leeks & I haven't looked at my beetroot but don't think it's any good. I still have some carrots in the ground too but I think they'll be for the sheep as the last lot really were bad with fly. Left them in the ground again this year but not as great a success as last year so been buying them last week.
Not much to be done here until it stops snowing - Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

COOLTRIKERCHICK

Hi poppycat1 welcome its a lovely laid back thread here... love the idea of the £100 egg:rotfl: if only we could charge that much.....:D

we got very hard ground frost yesturday and today:mad: did want to do another bootsale this weekend, but it would be no joke doing it with this frost, so the van is allready loaded ready for next week:D weather permitting...

choille i bet you are really getting fed up of the snow now, good job you stocked up on hat and feed on wednesday..

did anyone see this weeks dream farm? this week i think it was a bit more down to earth and real, in terms of people managing and realising you cant live totally off the land, and you do need some sort of external money supporting the smallholding, or loads of savings....

Davesnave.... i am prob being a bit too cagey:rotfl:

my rough total, between my accounts etc is 8k:T

I got an american express credit card through this week, that gives 5% cashback for the first 3 months, then up to 1.25% after that,

there are some places that dont except it, so i will look for another cashback card that will be excepted everywhere, so i can use the both....

I am using the card instead of my debit card, and as soon as the transaction appears on my on-line account pay it off, so interest will not acrue...... allready made £7.50 cashback:T but i think this is paid annually,

Davesnave... when will be the best to sow my broadbean seeds middle or end of the month? i am soooooooooooo itching to get started:rotfl:

Davesnave

It is very mixed weather here ATM. We can have either the forecast for Exeter or Barnstaple, but the Beeb/ Met Office don't seem bright enough to understand that both are coastal and about as relevant as giving us Birmingham.:mad: Snow/sleet for the past two days, but yesterday it was bright sunshine, so I cleared up all the prunings in the orchard I've created so far. Mind you, the pruning is to cover the last eight or nine years, so some of the branches are more fit for firewood rather than the bonfire.

In the orchard, I have identified two of the apple trees, by discovering their labels while clearing up.:D I don't think I will find many more labels now though. I have a Lucombes Pine, which is local to the area, and a Kirton Fair. In the other fruit area, there are four or five pear trees, one of which is Jargonelle, but the label was on the ground some distance away from all of them.

In the soft fruit garden, the labels we found needed more detective work, as they were almost unreadable, but we discovered the strange bushes which look like a mixture of gooseberry and blackcurrant are Worcesterberries. We also have some May Duke gooseberries and some Ben Lomond blackcurrants, which I can ID by their size. Still a lot of ????s though!

Pegged-out the polytunnel site to see what it was like using a laser level. There is only 6" difference high to low, so that's good. Now all I need is permission and a muck heap moved!

Hope this cold snap doesn't last. I got the electricity through the wall and into our conservatory this morning, so there is nothing stopping me from connecting a propagator....and I'm sorely tempted!!:)

EDIT: Just saw your post CTC. I would think middle of February would be OK to sow Broad beans under cover. Outside, I would leave it till mid March. I wonder how those who sowed in the autumn fared this winter?

Car boot in this weather? Not bloomin likely!

COOLTRIKERCHICK

well i froze my otes off at the bootsales:eek:, but worth it,..lol..

still plodding along with getting extra money in for my fund, and my creditcard cashback has now risen to over £13, so this is really money for nothing, instead of using my debit card i am using the credit card, and pay it all off before it starts getting interest.


had a few days off work this week to catch up on paper work etc.... so today i am going to have a mooch around town,

going to visit poundland and wilkinson to see what gardening goodies they have.

will prob end up buying a load of rubbish...:rotfl:

but i really do need to get my seed potatoes.

hope everyone is ok.....

Lotus-eater

Davesnave wrote: »

In the soft fruit garden, the labels we found needed more detective work, as they were almost unreadable, but we discovered the strange bushes which look like a mixture of gooseberry and blackcurrant are Worcesterberries.

They're Worcesterberries if they have spikes and probably jostaberries if not.

Davesnave

It's still blooming brass monkey weather here, so to you CTC for braving the elements at that car boot.

I'm getting a little bit done in the polytunnel now, but with the wind in the east, I can't light the fire I need to clear more of the orchard prunings. There's really no other outside jobs I fancy ATM!

In the conservatory I succumbed and planted about 6 varieties of chillies and sweet peppers, but not whole packets. I'm using mother-in-laws propagator, as mine is still in bits, and my heat mat is 13' long so I've nowhere long enough to set that up! Anyway, at night it struggled to keep a decent temperature, so I've moved the propagator into the kitchen where it has back-up from the Aga. Chillies need high temperatures to germinate well.

Today we visited the Planning Officer, getting good and bad news from him. He was sure our planned new polytunnel was commercial in size, insisting we'd need planning permission for that, but he seemed relaxed about our intentions for a sales area and for closing-in more of the barn. He was also quite upbeat about our plans for the bungalow, but then we probably have the ugliest property on his entire patch!:rotfl:

I guess we'll be applying for planning on that tunnel by next week. The old one will see us OK in the mean time.

Hope everyone's plans are coming together for the new season. Just a few more weeks and we will be rushing around like mad again, trying to keep up!

COOLTRIKERCHICK

fingers crossed Davesnave for the planning...you are so right in a few weeks we will be little bizzy bees around the place....:rotfl:

i went to poundland and they had summer raspberry canes for a £1..( well it is a pound shop...lol..) they were called rupus something or other

a few of them were still dormant, but most of them and had shoots appearing, but they were very spindley.. a bit like a old sprouted potato..lol.. i didnt buy them, but do you think these are ok? and would i get some sort of fruit this year? they were pruned right back only a few inches high..

also what type of spacing do i need bewteen them?

I could kick myself, 2 - 3 years ago i gave away an 8 x 10 greenhouse on freecycle, and downsized to a smaller one, but i am sooooooooo sorry i dont this now, as last year i really did struggle for room:o

so i was thinking of looking round to find the cheapest place for an 8x10 greenhouse, and using the smaller one as a fruit cage, we need to re- glaze it anyway, as half the greenhouse we had to cover in plastic,
so this could be used for the raspberries,

also would gooseberries be ok without being covered with netting? or would you put htem in the greenhouse frame covered in netting too?

The greenhouse is a 6x4

Davesnave

CTC, rubus is just the latin name for all raspberries and members of that family. AFAIR they are planted about 18" apart in rows. The taller growing ones need support with (usually) two wires, one at 2' and the other at about 4' stretched between poles. When they are planted, they go in a bit deeper than they were in the nursery, then they're cut down to about 6". This means you wouldn't get any fruit till next year.

The above is for ordinary summer fruiting types. Autumn fruiters are different. I grew Autumn Bliss and they would fruit on the current years growth. They were OK but quite pippy.

Gooseberries can attract birds, but when I grew mine as cordons I had very few bird problems; it was the sawfly that used to get mine when I wasn't looking. They eat all the leaves in a matter of days! Mildew can be another problem too. Having said that, mine didn't suffer mildew. I just grew Invicta, but the kids ate most before I could do much with them anyway.:mad:

I'm not a fruit expert, having dug all mine up when our home nursery took off and we needed the space to grow perennials for sale!:o
Gooseberries being prickly, I'd not put them in a restricted area under a frame, but I would always grow them as cordons, as they take up less room that way.;)


Hey, my peppers are up! I have about 15 so far. Everything outside has been pretty solid in the pots, making dividing-up a nightmare, but I think the cold weather leaves us today.:)