THE Prepping thread - a new beginning :)

GreyQueen

Thank you both, I am taking notes and will wait and see if any more suggestions come in. Apples are my favourate fruit but, due to the wide variety in their tastes, textures and eating/ cooking/ keeping properties, I want to give careful thought to the choice. I will only have space for one tree, I am intending to use one of the top corners of my plot which is a bit of a neglected hell-hole at the moment, hence me not being ready for the tree yet.

Browsed some chazzers this aft and have another 10 litre water carrier. These are very portable and very easy to store behind the sofa, this will be my second one of that size.

I will clean it and sterilise it, then fill it and put it away until my diary note tells me it's time to change out the water. Only £1.50 and in vgc, was pleased with that as I was after one.

mardatha

I like the idea of changing diet to a more older simpler one. Although I think up here we'd be living on porridge, turnips and scotch broth

GreyQueen

mardatha wrote: »

I like the idea of changing diet to a more older simpler one. Although I think up here we'd be living on porridge, turnips and scotch broth

And k*le.

pineapple

On the subject of gardening, if you only have a little space (like me) then you get your money's worth (nutrition wise) from a crop like spinach which is often sold in expensive packets in supermarkets. You can treat most varieties like a cut and come again lettuce and preserve/freeze it too.
I will have to try harder with red cabbage though. My first attempts ended up with the leaves all spread out, tough as old boots and totally inedible. Maybe there is a diy use somewhere...

thriftwizard

GQ, a further thought - what other apples are nearby to pollinate it? Virtually all apple trees require an unrelated tree from the same pollination group to be nearby before they will set a good crop.

Oooh, and whilst I know nothing about these suppliers, other than that they have a nice name, I can highly recommend this particular cultivar: Christmas Pippin, which are absolutely delicious! Apparently it was randomly spotted growing on the verges of the M5...

Si_Clist

GreyQueen wrote: »

... I really want to suceed with outdoor cucumbers ...

For which we (who are also Southern Englanders) swear by Bedfordshire Pride and Marketmore.

GreyQueen wrote: »

For flavour and texture, I prefer Cox's apples, are they a good choice for the home gardener, or is there something similar which would be better?

The tree will be in suvvern ingerland, in full sun, but on a site with a relatively high elevation compared to the surrounds and catching the wind.

After 25 years of trying various apple trees on various rootstocks in a similar location (700ft ASL), we'd recommend Sunset on M27 or M9. They're both classed as dwarf stocks, but M9 makes more of a tree than M27. They'd both need staking permanently on an exposed site.

HTH a bit.

Incidentally, we're going to be eating the last two of our homegrown apples on Monday or Tuesday. We're currently down to growing Lord Lambourne, Braeburn, Sunset, Merton Russett, James Grieve, Scrumptious, a Bramley-type cooker of uncertain lineage, plus a mystery Lidl apple tree labelled as "Variety - Eating" (!), and this is the first time we've ever managed to get into the New Year with any of 'em. Normally we're down to the apple rings by crimble.

GreyQueen

thriftwizard wrote: »

GQ, a further thought - what other apples are nearby to pollinate it? Virtually all apple trees require an unrelated tree from the same pollination group to be nearby before they will set a good crop.

Oooh, and whilst I know nothing about these suppliers, other than that they have a nice name, I can highly recommend this particular cultivar: Christmas Pippin, which are absolutely delicious! Apparently it was randomly spotted growing on the verges of the M5...

Sorry to be a complete numpty, but can you explain pollinatin group? There are apple trees on neighbouring plots, including two which are fairly new-planted (2 years) and which have fruited heavily. The nearest apple trees are 15 ft from the proposed site of mine.

What's a pollination group, please? If I could find out the variety of these nearby ones, would I be able to look up somewhere to find it they're compatible?

There are a fair few apple trees on the lotties (it's a very large site) including several only a few meters away as the bee flies.

nuatha

GreyQueen wrote: »

Sorry to be a complete numpty, but can you explain pollinatin group? There are apple trees on neighbouring plots, including two which are fairly new-planted (2 years) and which have fruited heavily. The nearest apple trees are 15 ft from the proposed site of mine.

What's a pollination group, please? If I could find out the variety of these nearby ones, would I be able to look up somewhere to find it they're compatible?

There are a fair few apple trees on the lotties (it's a very large site) including several only a few meters away as the bee flies.

This should help.

You can also get multi-graft trees which give you 2 or more varieties on the same rootstock. I have a James Grieve on M26 which hasn't made 6 feet in height or 5 feet diameter but had a yield over 20KG last year. I also have a Granny Smith on the same root stock that's 15' tall and has yielded a single apple in 9 years. I intend replacing the Granny with three patio apples (worth considering if space is tight).

GreyQueen

Thank you so much for that, nuatha, really appreciate that link and have printed off that document.

I suspected that one's choice of apple would be worth the investment of a fair bit of time and consideration, and it is so. The lottie regs list 2-3 of the M rootstocks which are permissable, as they obviously don't want big trees in the plots shading out other people's crops.

The area I have in mind for planting on my own plot is a bit of a dead corner as three other people's plots join mine there and two of them have sheds (northwards, so area still gets full sun) so not going to shade any of their crops.

Thinking on, thinking on. I will also be nipping into Poondlandia today. Went in last week looking for the onion sets and couldn't see any gardening stuff, it's normally out by first week of January. Ask an employee who told me that the had the stuff out back but couldn't bring it onto the shop floor until they'd shifted the discounted Xmas stuff.

Oh baubles! I thought, as I ambled off.

thriftwizard

Nuatha, it's very good to "see" you! Hope all is well with you?

GQ, here's a more general look at pollination. The whole subject can get quite bafflingly technical, but as they say, it almost always "just works" in the end, possibly due to the ubiquitous crab apples lurking in hedgerows and wherever people have dropped their lunchtime apple cores! Two of the best crab apples I know of are down where the back gate of the old factory was, at the riverbank... lovely big scented double flowers in spring, followed by lots of tiny green/red taste-bombs in autumn. Sadly they have thorns, like most crab apples, so I doubt they'll survive the advent of the new inhabitants (many of them retirees from the Home Counties) for long.