Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label gardening

Time to up our compost game.

The time has come! That's right the time has come to sort out our compost. We have had a compost heap for as long as I can remember, but what have we done with it? In short.....Nothing! So its now time to do something about it. This is what our compost heap looks like at the moment.  It contains the usual suspects like grass cuttings and garden waste. The heap starts off fairly high and does indeed compost down quite a lot. But we never do anything with it. And with the price of compost getting more and more expensive we should really be using what we have got. So we built a temporary compost bin! I say temporary as we have some works planned for next year which shall include more permanent compost bins. But this will do for now, the plan is to compost all garden waste, kitchen waste and brown waste. Brown waste will be stuff like cardboard, egg cartons, egg shells. I'm not sure of the ratios that are needed, but I'm guessing to aim for ab

Jobs to do around the garden in September/October.

Autumn is all but here.     With the nights drawing in and the temperatures dropping to single figures over night it definitely feels like Autumn is on its way. But its not time to retire indoors just yet! There is still plenty to do in the garden. In fact there are about a thousand and one jobs to do, most of which depends on your own garden and what you do with it. Some items that will need your attention are going to be lawns, flowers, bulbs, greenhouses, vegetables the list goes on. I'm going to concentrate on what we have here in our own garden.  The Lawn. Almost every house has a lawn! Or at least a patch of grass somewhere. Now is a good time of year to pay some attention to your bit of grass, no matter how large or small it is. You may not be too bothered about your bit of green, but some people like to keep it nice and manicured. So a few things you can do to your lawn to improve it or keep it looking and performing tip top are 1: Using a

Ideal tools if your old, disabled or able.

This is going to be a review, I was going to aim it at the elderly and disabled. But in fact it's going to apply to everyone. No one is left out here, it caters for all.  I had never given it much thought before, when I was young fit and able bodied. But now I am on wheels these things do crop up, and when it comes to gardening the tools you use do come into it. When I first got home after eight months in Hospital I decided that I would try to do what I could in the garden, within reason! I could get onto the John Deere tractor to cut the grass (we have since sold it) but when it came to the flower and vegetable beds the tools we had were either too long for me as I was now sat down or the Hand tools were too short for me to reach the beds.  So this brings us to Wolf Tools (Wolf Garten). This is a range of tools with interchangeable heads and lots of handle options. I went for the 120cm long handle and the 35cm short handle, they do more sizes and are made in ei

Planning ahead for next year (a Chilli special)

Well this doesn't happen very often! Preparing for next year, getting organised. It's unheard of in this house. So yesterday afternoon I had a cheeky look on premier seeds website.   http://www.premierseedsdirect.com/   And whilst ordering five litres of Chilli Focus fertiliser I got some of next years seeds in. We are going to mainly focus on chilli plants for next year, giving the  sweet peppers a miss and cutting back a little on the Tomatoes. So for starters we are going to be planting......... Maule Hot, these go up to about 30,000 on the Scoville scale.  So not too hot. Satans Kiss, a small chilli pepper from Italy. The Italians stuff them with Anchovies and Mozzarella, they get to around 50,000 Scoville units. Birds Eye Demon. We have grown these this year and starred in one of our chilli challenge videos........ https://youtu.be/rDdQ8tdd240   They were mighty hot when just eaten raw and have proved to be very useful in cooking, they ca

Is this Autumn/Fall coming?

It's a bit fresh outside today, is it a sign that Autumn is on its way? The forecast for the next ten days doesn't show much above 20°c with some rain thrown in for good measure. Hopefully we will still get some warmer weather, we have only just got into September after all. But the Tomatoes in the grow bags have finished, Tina has stripped the plants of fruit this morning and has since removed the plants. They never really did do that well, just planted straight in the grow bag! They did produce tasty Tomatoes, but not that many.  I think we found what the problem was, and that was that there was not enough room in the grow bag for the roots. So we invested in some of these........... Plant Halos, Growbag Halos whatever you want to call them. You cut a hole in your grow bag to fit them in, they have about six spikes that go down into the compost and that's where the water goes. You plant in the neck of the Halo and the roots can then go down into

This was a surprise!

I've been pondering over something for the last few days!  What is it? And where did it come from? So I have been searching the internet and browsing through old orders I had placed with Premier Seeds Direct. http://www.premierseedsdirect.com/   And I can't find anything that looks similar to this plant, the fruit is quite distinctive and like nothing we have growing at the moment. Then I remembered this............ Three types of seeds came with this kit, Jalepeno's, Cayenne's and some that were called "Hot Scotch". I've just read the instruction book and it called them "Scotch Bonnets". So there you go, problem solved. I've had this kit since Christmas 2015, but as I spent most of 2016 in hospital they never got planted. And then this year we had a greenhouse catastrophe! The pop up greenhouse we started with took flight across the garden and all the seeds got mixed up.  There are quite a few recipes

We've had a good harvest so far.

The nights are drawing in bit by bit and the evenings are feeling slightly cooler too. But we mustn't complain, because so far in our first year of growing we have had quite a good harvest. Just now Tina has picked about four bowls of Tomatoes, earlier I picked a bowl of Peppers and half a bowl of Chillis. So now what do we do with them? I can only eat so many cheese and tomato sandwiches. A couple of years back I bought Tina a dehydrator and it has been used for quite a few things, but now its earning its keep drying out some of the Tomatoes. Some have been made into sun-dried tomatoes while others have been dried, vacuum sealed and put in the freezer for later use. Tina has also turned some into a base for sauces which we have been trying out recently.  Check out my Youtube channel for videos on that. https://www.youtube.com/user/rrben1?feature=mhee And there shows no sign of the tomato harvest letting up, there seem to be hundreds on the plants and new flow