Harvesting home grown veg

apprentice_tycoon

I grow early potatoes in buckets to great effect, the earthing up is easy, you just add more compost to the bucket as needed, bit too late this year but worth planning for for next.

Pal

Erm. So lets clarify:

Currently my potato plants are nice looking green plants with lots of leaves. You think I should put compost in a heap on top of them? Do the leaves grow through the compost again? Doesn't it kill the plant?

Onions: Yes they are supermarket ones. So does that mean that this year there will be flowers and next year there will be onions all over the place, including next door's garden?

The plan is to move house in around a year so I have no problem leaving potato blight behind for the new tenants.

apprentice_tycoon

Not a clue about the onions seeding themselves, I only ever grow onion sets (that's baby onions that you fatten up) With the spuds you need to put your compost GENTLY around the leaves, you don't want to damage them because the leaves are taking in food for the tubers, so just keep pushing compost up around the leaves, let them grow some more and repeat (the potatoes will grow close to the surface and pop through and go green if they aren't covered) and keep an eye on them for diseases on the leaves, report back if needed!

moggins

Something is seriously going wrong with my spinach, it was looking lovely and lush, now all the edges of the leaves are dying and turning brown and I don't know what is going on

Pal

Apologies if I am completely ignorant on this, but..

I am supposed to put compost around the bottom of the plant, covering up the bottom leaves so that the top ones can continue feeding and growing? The plants are close to the ground at the moment so I can't see a way of doing this without covering up leaves.

Is this correct?

Moggins - From someone who is no expert, your spinage sounds like it is overwatered.

apprentice_tycoon

I would wait until all the leaves are clearly off the ground and then start covering up the stems so that the leaves are just sitting on top of compost

apprentice_tycoon

moggins wrote:

Something is seriously going wrong with my spinach, it was looking lovely and lush, now all the edges of the leaves are dying and turning brown and I don't know what is going on

Do you think that it could be frost damage?

moggins

Could be frost damage I suppose. The strange thing is that it's only happened to one pot full and not the other and they are stood next to each other. I haven't bothered watering them either because we've had so much rain lately. I was going to use them soon anyway so I think I'll just pick what I can from that pot and transplant some into the ground and see what happens.

ladygrey_2

can most supermarket veg be planted?
is it worth trying a few different ones to see what happens?

Strepsy

ladygrey wrote:

can most supermarket veg be planted?
is it worth trying a few different ones to see what happens?

I'd like some ideas there too. I did find this site about fruit http://www.personal.u-net.com/~treetops/freeplant.html but don't know what else is worth a go.