March Update: What are you growing in 2006?

bluemoon_3

moggins wrote:

One thing I found last year that was really easy to grow and I got a great crop from it was perpetual spinach. You just pick what you want and let it carry on growing. I was a completely novice gardener last year and it was a big learning curve, this year I plan to put into practice what lessons I learned.

Oh, I'm glad to hear that - I have some seeds for perpetual spinach!

I've spent a good part of this weekend out in the garden digging and pulling and cursing, lol. I have a rough plan for what I need to do over the next three weekends to get my rather unkempt garden into shape ready to get outdoor sowing in April.

pollys

I've just filled pots with compost from the heap which has been resting over Winter. I've got some lovely compost. The other compost bin is full, so needed to get this one emptied so I can start filling it again.

I plan to grow

spring onions
peas (for the children to snack on when playing outside)
Strawberries
tomatoes (got loads last year)
courgettes

and.............not sure yet!

I love being out in the garden.

Good Luck Everyone, whatever you are growing

serena

HI silverelephant,

I notice you are in Scotland, so I should think that time is on your side! Things are moving very slowly down here in the south, but fingers crossed Spring will arrive soon.

Among the easiest things to grow are: potatoes, broad beans, shallots, spinach beet (perpetual spinach/leaf beet, all the same thing), lettuces, especially ones cut as leaves rather than hearted. These can all be sown or planted direct.

Tender plants that need special care at first then grow fine: courgettes, runner beans, tomatoes, french beans. These need to be sown in the warm hardened off and planted out after the last frost date.

Was it you who listed some plants that you have already lost? ( I can't check back without losing this post!). I noticed that they were either annuals, in which case they die anyway in the winter, or they were plants that like full sun and well drained soil. Is it possible that you have heavy wet soil, or perhaps watered them too generously?

Good luck

Chip_Butty_3

Trying to do this without investing to much ££££ into it.

Got an allotment last Sept (£35 per annum) & have been slowly digging it over.

Planted Onions & garlic to overwinter & between them have now planted more Onions & garlic for ...presumably Autum picking.

Spent £14.99 on a three tier rack, with plastic cover & got a bag of potting compost. We used plastic meat trays, that we washed & stored as seed trays & have sown two types of Tomato (Moneymaker & Gardeners Delight), the latter are germinating, a red & green cabbage, again both germinating. Some Chillies, Pumpkins, Origano & Corriander.

When there is space we hope to sow cauliflower & courgettes.

We planted two types of Potatoes, Accord & Lady Christel

I have a box full of seeds to plant when the weathers better, hope to grow Radish & Spring Onions... which people tell me are relatively easy. Carrotts, Leeks, Brussels, Kale, Broccoli, Sweet Corn, Beans & Lettuce. That is to say, if we don't get any more packets of seeds !

So spent well over £75 so far, however been given some veg by other allotment holders & the taste of the stuff far suppasses the supermarket bought veg.

Looking forward to some successes & some faliures.

Mick

Wendrie

Planted out some potatoes we got through the school's organic garden scheme today - we are going to plant some out now and some once chitted and see which gives us more potatoes (I'm the only one wondering how I'm going to keep them sorted until the autumn - 2 identical pots....), also got an order from the Organic Catalog (https://www.organiccatalogue.com) so dd planted up four holes in a root trainers with ornamental gourds (she wants to make bird feeders from scratch ) and we filled the rest with poached egg plants (limanthes douglasii) for the borders. Put the other half a packet from both in the fridge drawer for next year.

Excitingly when we put the new seeds on the window sill we noticed green shoots from the 48 cells we sowed from our free wildlife seeds. Our new wildlife area and meadow should be off to a good start!

annie-c

Hello everyone!

After a very enthusiastic start, I've done very little for the last month, except to water my (now very leggy) nasturtiums, and try to stop my frail chillies from dying off!

But after re-reading this thread today I set up a worktable on my patio and potted up some peat pots and plastic module things with:

-- more nasturtiums (to test out whether they grow better when planted early or later in Spring)

-- more chillis (because I lost so many of the first lot)

-- tomatoes - moneymaker and gardener's delight

--peppers - californian wonder

--chives

--spinach

--sweet basil

That's as much as I can fit on my windowsills for the moment. I could really do with moving my nasturtiums on somewhere, but would be grateful for advice as to where to place them. They are currently in 3" pots and are of the trailing variety, each plant about 6-12" long. I want eventually to have them in planters on my back garden wall, trailing downwards.

I have one of those plastic greenhouse/shelf things against an outside wall - is it too early to put them outside in that (we had snow the weekend before last and though it is gone now and I was outside in t-shirt for a bit today, the nights are still very cold)?

Would be grateful for advice!

Thanks

Annie

battybird_2

chem14346777 wrote:

I've just moved into a house with a tiny little garden, and its all paved unfortunately, however I'm quite eager to get growing some bits and pieces for the first time.

My mum has gone out and bought me a little plastic greenhouse thing from Aldi, and I've been ordering various makes of Chilli seeds from EBay (i love hot food!), so hopefully I'll be planting about 6 kinds of chilli, along with some peppers and various herbs this year (corriander, parsley, chives, etc). I'm really looking forward to the harvest! :drool:

have you tried dwarf runner beans they look fab in the garden and are ideal for pots

battybird_2

i am sooooooooo glad i am not the only one that grows my own just a tip for sweetcorn i noticed someone was having probs if you grow them in a block ie 5 plants by 5 plants or bigger they grow great but as they are wind polinated planting in rows is no good ps i never chit my spuds and they crop fine

bluemoon_3

I potted up my tomato seedlings this morning into newspaper pots (if you want to know how to make these, there are few different pages of instructions come up on google). At first I was worried because they all kind of wilted over within an hour - I thought I'd killed them! I checked them again just now and they seem to be recovering, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

I also have one of the plastic greenhouses mentioned - I set it up at the weekend. I asked about them on the OS board in January and amongst the recommendations there are some helpful tips worth reading http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=140325&highlight=greenhouse

I've also been looking into square-foot gardening, since I'm having trouble working out how to plant my veggies in traditional rows in the space I have. I'm sure I've seen this subject on the OS board before, so I'll go and see if I can find anymore useful tips! I won't be doing the 4'x4' beds, but I should still be able to get about 26 squares in various sunny spots, plus a few containers, which should be plenty for this year's crops.

If anyone's interested:
http://www.squarefootgardening.com/
http://www.nepanewsletter.com/square.html

ellas9602

hello

I have a bag of dried chillis and was just wonderting whether the seeds would germinate from them?