The Scottish Gardeners thread

cooking-mama

iainsmum,I feed my strawberry plants with tomato food,ive got 5 big strawberries bright red and ready for picking.
This windy weather is playing havoc with my tatoes..the tall green foliage is taking a right battering and is bent and bashed all over the place...im gonna have a rummage later and check for potatoes(scared i dont find any!!)
my onion stalks had been bent in half...i ended up lifting them and found next to nothing at the bottom...i planted onion bulb things and what was left was smaller than what i started with..i just cleaned out the troughs and ive got cut and come again salad leaves germinating in them now.
Im wondering about my cabbage leaves...they are tall and big,no sign of them firming or forming into a "ball of cabbage",could i just harvest these leaves as they are just now??..id rather use the space to sow more kale seeds..also ive noticed in the last few days something has been nibbling holes in the leaves so id rather eat them as they are than lose them alltogether.
happy gardening folks.

mardatha

When do I plant turnips ??

Grebe

Depends on which variety you are sowing mardatha. They are a bit like your tatties in that they have early ones, then you sow crops in succession, if you are that mad about turnips :rotfl: I know you can deffo sow in late summer under cloches for a spring harvest.
Now I have to confess I have never grown turnip but my best friend has two horses who love turnip and she grows them almost all year round. So that's the only reason for me knowing about growing them. Hope this helps. Oh, by the way she gardens in Aberdeenshire near Banff, so if they grow well there I reckon they will grow anywhere.

wssla00

evening all! What terrible weather. Well my lovely walk in greenhouse decided to crumple under the wind (it was plastic but still anchored ) and has gone to the big garden in the sky. I am looking at a new one, but not sure on what to get yet. Whatever it is is will definitely be a sturdier model!

Two of my tomato plants have also crumpled in the wind so they will need some TLC tomorrow. I just can't believe how cold and wind it is today! It's like winter already!

Oh well.... I'm off to browse greenhouses.... *sob*

mardatha

Oh the wind and rain today has been hellish. My daughter's trampoline flew away down the field, her hen coop (empty) started flying until caught, and my big heavy garden swing , a 3-seater heavy metal couch !!- just took off and tipped over right on top of my tatties !!!

wssla00

oh mardatha that sounds scary! This weather has really made me in a bad mood! Oh well.... I will cheer myself up by going to bed soon with a cup of hot chocolate and a good book!

Have a good evening all

wssla00

Allo all

Very quick warning for dumfries and galloway- Scottish Water have put in a request for a drought order so expect a hose pipe ban very soon!

skelly01

Update from Lanark:

Picking turnips, radishes, lettuce, wild rocket from the garden.
Using the potatoes that I started early in the greenhouse in bags. these were moved out in Early May. Have an exceleent crop in these.
Courgettes were going mad in the greenhouse so moved outside. Getting great crops as always.
First of tomatoes now nearly ready.
Carrots finally thorugh and coming away.
Parsnips only showed about a fortnight ago. This was the second time I had sown. They took about 5 weeks to come through.
Picking strawberries.
Main Potatoes doing great although a lot of green growth this year. Must be the sun and watering every day.
Peppers and cucumbers doing good too.
All in all this is a great year for my garden, only small problem is cabbage butterfly and the dreaded grubs that eat the roots of my cabbages etc.
Finally one of my 3 hens laid an egg last week, so now getting a steady egg a day. The rest should follow soon. if any of you have the room I would recommend. It is well worth it and the difference between home laid and even organic is phenomenal!!

mardatha

I dont suppose you'll need that hosepipe ban now it was like the monsoon up here yesterday! Awful. I had flowers on some tatties a week ago but the wind blew them off and now I can't tell which have flowered and which haven't. I will just leave them because the few that we dug up were like marbles.
My strawbs are all black patches, must have some disease, so I opened up the net and the birds can have them.
The kale is like a forest and the onions are coming on.
Next year I will do it a lot differently.

iainsmum

Hi all, well I've had more beans and some lettuce and radishes (which have grown really well), there are baby cucumbers on my plants, but my courgette disappeared - well 2/3 of it did, I think some little creature must have been in for a nibble. There are more forming, but I'm not sure how to protect them and the cucs as well when they start to grow.
Its a walk in plastic covered greenhouse thingy, so open at all sides underneath the cover. Any ideas?

I've managed to protect against slugs using some of that copper barrier tape. I stuck it to strips of underlay and laid it all around the veg patch, and touch-wood, it's done pretty well keeping them off it so far.

I've given up on the strawbs, they are running really wild, I have some flowers, but only had two strawbs which have both grown to about half an inch and dropped off. I've read up that first year plants don't give much fruit, and I should expect better next year. But should I cut off all the runners, some of them, or none of them? Will it make a difference to the plant's capability to produce fruit?

Tomatoes are only just flowering, I've got a couple of sets of flowers on each plant so far, they're about 2 feet tall. On the advice of older and wiser neighbours, I'm trimming off side shoots and lower leaves to concentrate the growth into forming new 'trusses' ? My plants do seem to be a bit behind though, any other ideas?