Our Seeds have been ordered!

What better way to end January than with some seed ordering!

Here is our list of what we ordered, (from the lovely www.giyireland.com shop) and what we hope to grow successfully this year (for ourselves NOT the slugs!).

Beetroot 'Detroit Globe' :


We did not have much luck with our Beetroot last year as the slugs made their way through the seedlings I planted out, so this year I intend to sow all the seeds and hope for the best!

Cabbage, Savoy 'Vertus':


We grew Savoy cabbage last year and what wasn't eaten by slugs was fairly successful, so going to stick with these guys again this year. They produce a nice solid head, while the slugs can have the outer leaves!

Brussel Sprouts 'Brigitte F1':


Never tried growing Brussel Sprouts before, but my mother has had great success with hers, so going to give these a try this year. Fingers crossed for our home grown sprouts for Christmas!

Lettuce, Butterhead 'Sylvesta':


Lettuce has to be one of the easiest plants to grow. I always plant enough though to share with the slugs and plant at intervals too so that we try to have continuous Lettuce throughout the summer.

Salad Mix, Spicy and hot:

Every garden should have a pot for salad mix!



Carrot, 'Autumn King':

A total disaster last year, every time a seedling popped it's head up out of the soil there was a big fat slug waiting to eat it. This year I plan on sowing more than last year in the hope we get at least one or 2 carrots....

Pea, Sugar Snap 'Delikett':


A lovely addition to the garden, I planted our Peas too late last year to have anything more than a couple of pods that we ate every time we passed the bed.

Scallions, spring onion 'Ishikura Bunching':


No salad is the same without a few scallions!

Tomato 'Sungold':



We are trying a different variety this year, after 2 successful years with 'Gardeners Delight'.


We have a few more things to get, but I think I'll leave that for another day.

Catch up in the Garden...

Its been a while since my last post but July/Aug with kids seems to fly by. Next thing you know and it will be back to school time!

As for the garden, well I was going to tell a tale of woe, of a garden that hasnt dried out all summer, or of the hundreds of slugs which have eaten all of our carrot seedlings, and the tops of most of our onions, and are slowly eating their way through our cabbage (regardless of beer traps) and I took photos to prove it too.

But why share the woe when most gardeners are all too familiar with my tale.

So instead I'll just share a few photos of what is doing well this year.......our Strawberries and our Tomatoes. And where are they? yep, in the polytunnel, out of the rain.

The strawberries have finished giving their crop so are now concentrating on 'spreading their wings' and producing offspring, in abundance!

I plan on potting up as many of the runners as possible in the coming weeks.

A small snippet

The Tomato plants (Gardeners Delight), all 20 of them, are thriving, I've had to 'top them' before they took over the tunnel though.

I planted them out 2 weeks later this year than last year, so we are still waiting on them to ripen...

We cant wait for a bit of red.....

Ok, just one photo of my woe this year...

A work in progress..

Woke up yesterday morning to no rain, which considering the week we've had was a surprise.

And as the old saying goes 'make hay while the sun shines' I was up and dressed and out to the garden as fast as my legs could carry me (not necessarily true but I can pretend).

I've so many jobs to do in the garden that I try to do them all at the same time, so a bit of this then a bit of that.

But one job that is a bit easier to do when its not raining is filling the wheelbarrow with sand/clay/pebbles and moving it to the veg patch.

A few weeks back I laid down sheets of black plastic inbetween some of our raised beds to kill off the grass and weeds. The idea is to eventually get rid of all the grass inbetween the raised beds and have nice pebbled walkways around them (easier said than done).

I've removed some of the plastic to reveal dead grass and mud. Next step is to put a layer of sand down before putting the polythene cover, and then covered this with pebbles......

our Sapro Mira potatoe plants

Its hard work, and theres only so many barrow loads I can manage in the one day, this is one job that will take some time to complete.

On the other side of our garden our so called lawn is now a meadow, we havent been able to mow it due to it being so wet but we dont really mind because the wildlife are loving it.

Another job I had been planning to do this year was make a permanent structure to enclose our 3 Blackcurrant bushes, a fruit cage of sorts, but I think it will have to wait, because the berries are starting to ripen and the birds wouldnt be long about finding them and eating them all on us.
So I've just covered them in netting instead.

In the polytunnel all of our 20 Tomato plants (Gardeners Delight) are starting to flower, I have to say I am so excited. Even the four extra that I have planted in pots are flowering. Hard to believe that from such a tiny flower comes one of Mother Natures juicy mouthfuls.

Catch up in the polytunnel

Well hello again blog!
Its been a while blog, have you missed me?

I had great plans (& pictures) to blog about some Tomato plants, weeks ago,which failed to come to fruition.....until now.

Once upon a time I had a space in the polytunnel and some growbags.........

And outside our back door I had some of these(Gardeners Delight), which had been 'hardening off' the previous week or so in a small plastic greenhouse.....

So with a coupla Bamboo sticks, some twine and a scissors we have these.....

I really dislike throwing away living plants so I potted up the 4 spares; hence the pots in the middle of the bags. This year I put 2 plants per bag rather than 3 like I did last year (only 2 out of the 3 bore fruit).

On the other side of the polytunnel we decided to grow our Strawberry plants this year. This is half of them...

Plenty of flowers (& future Strawberries).....

And while watering the tunnel our resident slug eater peeped out for a shower..

Wish he had a few more friends though because we could do with alot less slugs in our garden, with all this wet weather they are breeding like rabbits!
And speaking of rabbits we spotted 2 during the week in our garden browsing over newly planted seedlings....... its never ending with this gardening lark.

Autumns arrived!

Finally we have Blackberries in this neck of the woods, we've been waiting for these flowers to come to something, so we can make some jam...

Bet the birds are happy, the hedgerows are laden down with berries..

And in our front garden we have rose hips, might be tempted to make some syrup with them this year, in case we have any head colds this winter.

And in our polytunnel the first courgette has grown a bit...

So I picked it a few days later, along with some of our Tomatos....

Had a bit of company in the polytunnel, havent seen many this year...

Monty said to do it, so I did!

I dont know about everyone else but I find it sooo hard to throw away plants, or to thin out veg, or strip the leaves off beautiful leafy Tomato plants!
I just hate killing off anything, even though I do know it is a necessary evil.
I watched Gardeners World on Fri and Monty said it was time to strip the leaves off all the Tomato plants, letting the plant redirect all its energy into the fruit.

Before...

And after:

With the leaves cut away (and thrown on the compost heap) I have a great view of all our juicy ripening Tomatos! (& our Marigolds)

Time to pick a few for supper; I put them in my T-shirt, reminding me of when I was a child and being sent out for fresh eggs and the only thing we had to carry them back into the house with was our T-shirts.

Yummy!

Ya win some, ya lose some

We have had a hard year trying to grow carrots, they just never 'bloomed'. But a few did manage to grow a bit.
Then I noticed one day that something else other than slugs were starting to enjoy what there was of the few carrots we had....never seen it before

Wasps! I had heard of them attacking fruit but never veg still in the ground.
Anyway they only had 2 attacked, the rest I harvested...

I think the soil was a bit too fertile for these !! Must remember that next year.

Our Tomatos have started to produce as well, the Gardeners Delight are ripening (& taste gorgeous) but our San Marzano tomatos are all still green.

Holding our breath.....

After spending the time and energy sowing seeds, watching them germinate, harding the young seedlings off and eventually planting them out the last thing any gardener wants is to see them die.

This is really our first time being proper gardeners, our last garden was nearly too small to count!
So every plant is precious to us.

But I have had to learn to accept that sometimes the slugs win, or sometimes our plants just dont grow.

But on the positive side we harvested our Blackcurrants............ all 220g of them !!

We also managed to grow Garlic, and harvested them the other day!

But while half of our Tomato plants are thriving, the other half look as if they are stunted.

The one in the middle isnt growing!

Out of the 9 Gardeners Delight we planted only 3 look like they are growing, and will have some fruit, and out of the 9 San Marzano plants we have 5 with Tomatos on them...

Cant wait for them to ripen!

Our Pepper plants have babies!

Even the spare plants in the 2 litre pots

& the ones I didnt pot on...