Now we’ve decided to get our hands dirty – even without a garden – there’s no stopping us When we got our Potato Kit we also grabbed some herbs and strawberries. They’re a token effort, but are keeping our spirits up while we try to get a garden of our own. This evening [...]
Archive for April, 2009
20 Apr
Home grown Spinach
We’ve been enjoying a taste of our future the last two nights – delicious home grown Spinach. It’s one of the great grow-your-own cliches that home-grown food tastes immeasurably better than anything store-bought. Now this didn’t come from our garden – it was generously donated from my Mother’s allotment, so we can’t put the fantastic taste [...]
19 Apr
Finally getting our hands dirty – growing our own potatoes
OK, so we don’t have a house yet, so no garden yet, but the gorgeous weather has got our green fingers itching. So we’re taking the “portable garden” route, and using containers so that we can start playing (& learning!). We’re not taking this incredibly seriously so we’ve just started at our local garden centre [...]
11 Apr
Growing Dwarf Bananas in the UK
No, I’m not joking. We used to grow bananas, in our Brisbane garden, and had a fair bit of success. Those plants were about 4m high though – and the climate was sub-tropical!
Imagine my surprise then when I saw that one of Monty Don’s favourite fruits to grow is a banana! Admittedly a dwarf banana, [...]
9 Apr
Choosing a wormery to compost our kitchen scraps
Putting out the rubbish is always one of those contentious jobs in our house. It’s never really been clear whose job it is (that’s my story and I’m sticking to it) so the bin gets more and more packed full of decomposing leftovers until emptying is incredibly unpleasant and smelly.
But no more! In our new [...]
8 Apr
Compost Awareness Week
Now this seems like another joke post . . . but it isn’t there really is a Compost Awareness Week. It’s being run by the fantastic bunch over at Garden Organic, who really seem to be at the forefront of all the issues surrounding getting people in Britain growing sustainably. as one of their initiatives [...]
7 Apr
Mushroom Kits or Mushroom Compost?
I’ve been doing a bit of research and have been coming to the conclusion that growing mushrooms is pretty hard work and that it seems that the Mushroom kits are generally not worth trying. Most people seem to have had no luck at all with the standard button-mushroom kits bought from supermarkets, and the only [...]
6 Apr
Priorities
As we get closer to the D-Day of actually having a garden to work on it’s time to start setting some priorities. My current thoughts are that I want to spend the first year getting the gross, permanent structure of the garden in place: the fruit and nut trees, asparagus, fruit canes (raspberry, blackberry etc), [...]
6 Apr
Growing Peanuts
I had thought that growing peanuts wasn’t possible in the U.K., but apparently, in a greenhouse, you can get them to grow and fruit. They can be tricky though – so maybe a second- or third-year project. I do love my peanut butter though – it’s not something I want to have to do without [...]
5 Apr
How to “earth-up” potatoes
For the first time I’ve actually seen some decent, non-vague, instructions on how to earth-up your potatoes, to get the highest possible yield. These are from a response to a letter in the latest Gardener’s World magazine:
Cover your newly-planted potatoes with about 8cm of compost
Then, when shoots are about 15 cm long add another 8cm [...]
