The Great 'Green-fingered tips for growing your own' Hunt Revisited

trollopscarletwoman

redfox wrote: »

I make a veg and tomato food/fertiliser from nettles. Totally free and full of the nitrogen which plants need, it's every bit as good as commercial tomato food which costs a fortune!

You just need some nettles, a watertight container (like a bucket) some water and a fairly heavy weight. Pick some nettles and crush them by scrunching up the stems (using gloves, obviously!) Place them in your container and put a heavy weight, like a brick or similar on top of the crushed stems.Then fill the container with water sufficient to cover the nettles and leave it to 'brew'

It tends to get rather smelly as it ferments so place as far away from the house as you can. After 3/4 weeks, strain the liquid and it is ready to use on your veg plants, especially tomatoes/peppers etc. The solid matter left behind from this can be incorporated into your compost heap.

The mixture must be diluted when using as it is very concentrated - I usually dilute around 1 part nettle liquid to 10 parts water.

I would add to this excellent advice-if you happen to live by the sea (as I do) add seaweed to the drink. Lots of the commercial foods have seaweed extract in them.

Primrose

Buy a £1 punnett of Living Salad leaves from the supermarket (Lidl and Waitrose sell them, probably others do too) and plant them in the garden or in grow bags. A Punnett will give you up to 60 plants and is far cheaper than buying seedlings from a garden centre.

tangojulie

tds wrote: »

I buy growing salad all the time from the supermaket. How can I make a huge instant lettuce patch from one box? I spend a fortune on lettuce throughout the year so any savings would be good

Turn it out of the box, break it gently into pieces, plant and water it in. It helps to give it a bit of extra protection such as a cloche or fleece for a few days, but it's not essential. You can cut it up if you prefer (from underneath, like cutting carpet). You don't have to separate it into individual plants, clumps of 3 or 4 are fine.

You can do this in troughs or window boxes too.

Typically I get a patch 120cm by 60 cm from one tray. I leave it a few weeks to get established and then start picking a few leaves from each plant.

I do this probably 3 times a year and it easily keeps the 2 of us in lettuce.

Primrose

Another very cheap speciality salad is pea shoots. Buy a cheap packet of dried peas in the supermarket and sow them in trays. You only need about an inch of compost in the trays with a light sprinkling of compost to cover them Keep the compost moist and within 14 days you'll have some delicious pea shoots to mix with your salad leaves. Or cut them individually with scissors to make a rather delicious and unusual garnish .

safestored4

I use toilet roll inners for the things mentioned above and also for garlic and sweetcorn. We have been self sufficient in garlic for 4 years. We have been growing on the large outer cloves of the best bulbs and the resultant crop seems to get better every year. For seeds that throw out really deep roots I use the inners of christmas and birthday wrapping paper rolls cut to a longer length.

Parsley seeds are very slow to germinate. Just buy a couple of pots from the supermarket - one flat, one curly - split each up into half a dozen clumps and plant out inthe garden. Give them a few weeks to settle in and you will have parsley for the rest of the year.

Living on the coast I pick up lots of free seaweed when I take the dog for a walk, give this a rinse, and put it down as a mulch around the soft fruit on the allotment.

All plain cardboard boxes are torn up and put in the compost bins. I endorse the comments above about using pallots to make a large bin if you have the space. Our local builders mercheant is happy to give these away for free.

Soft fruit cuttings - black currents, red currents, gooseberries etc are really easy to take if you have the patience to wait a couple of years before getting a return. The time to do this is October/November. Just ask Google how to do this.

nathan0578

The advice on nettles for feed,remember the friendly green fly killer the ladybird lays its eggs on the underside of nettle leaves and we don't want to see a shortage of these creatures do we.

malebolge

tds wrote: »

I buy growing salad all the time from the supermaket. How can I make a huge instant lettuce patch from one box? I spend a fortune on lettuce throughout the year so any savings would be good

You've been given good answers on how to grow lettuce, but remember you can do the same with the herb pots sold in supermarkets.

Just remember that what both the lettuce and herb pots are, are a lot of seed planted in a small amount of growing medium. The reason why they don't grow indefinitely in the container they are supplied in is that they run out of food and the roots get clogged too.

All you need to do with herbs (particularly perennial ones such as mint, rosemary, thyme etc, but I've got parsley regrowing and that's annual) is to re pot them in a decent compost and you've got a herb garden.

I look for reduced price herbs; all mine that I have cost 10-20p and I've had loads - enough for me a herb garden and to supply friends.

A final tip connected with reduced price herbs. My local A*da often sells off packaged fresh herbs at silly prices- some have been 2p! It's very easy to dry these to make your own dried herbs for soups etc.

All you need to do is lay out a piece of kitchen roll on a plate that can go in a microwave. Put a layer of fresh herbs (parsley and mint are good for this), lay another on top, and microwave for - well I do 30 secs at first then another 30 if needed.

The time depends on the moisture in the herbs (the kitchen roll helps absorb this) and your microwave. When the herbs are totally dry & crisp, just scrunch them up and store in containers. It's a dead easy and quick way to dry herbs.

Oldbiggles

One of the best tips for vegetable growers is Crop Rotation. Move your root crops, cabbage patches, peas etc to a different site each year to avoid unpleasant diseases especially potatoes but other crops as well. The only thing you do not need to move is your kidney bean frame and when you have picked your beans, cut the dead vines from the frame but leave the roots in the ground, they are packed with nitrogen which your next crop of beans in the following year will flourish on.
Grow carrots alongside onions and or garlic. The carrot fly doesn’t like onions and the onion fly doesn’t like carrots.

:beer:

Dizzy_Ditzy

Another tip I've picked up is to use inside out compost bags for growing potatoes- especially useful if you've run out of plot space