Better Late Than Never!!

It has been that long since I've blogged about our garden I wouldn't blame anyone from thinking I don't have one any more!!

I am coming to terms with the realisation that I am more of a warm weather gardener (Spring/Summer) than an all seasons one (whom I admire very much).

So I have finally come out of hibernation and intend to get myself out in among the weeds/mess over the next couple of weeks and take loads of photos (ugly as well as nice) of everything and anything!

BUT first I have to order seeds!! cannot grow anything without some seeds!

So here is my list this year:
 Beetroot 'Detroit Globe' - we had these delicious Beets last year and got a wonderful yield all summer from them.

 Beetroot 'Pablo F1' - because we love beets so much we are going to try a second variety this year.

 Brussels Sprouts 'Brigitte F1' - had these last year, and we had a wonderful crop just in time for Christmas! (and plenty for the freezer).

 Cabbage, Savoy 'Vertus' - another success for our winter veg. last year, so going to go with this variety again - nice hard head which kept the slugs out.

 Carrot, Starca F1 - grew 'autumn king' last year but going to give these a try instead.

 Leek 'Bluegreen winter' - never tried to grow Leeks before but sure there is always a first time for eveything!

 Parsnip, Javelin F1 - another one for the winter, and have never tried this one before.

 Pea, Garden 'Greenshaft' - had a wonderful yield from our Sugar Snap 'Delikett' last year but want to try out a different variety this year.

 Tomato 'Sungold' - these wonderful sweet beauties just gave and gave last year, so are a definite for our polytunnel again this year.

 Tomato 'Rosada' - love trying out new varieties so going to give this one a go.


We ordered all of these from www.giyinternational.org and photos are courtesy of their website too.

Looking forward to some gardening now.

Spring has finally sprung!

At long last I feel like it is Spring; the spuds are down!

It has been so cold and the garden has been so un-inviting the past few weeks that I was beginning to think we would never get our potatoes planted.

Two weeks ago I ordered top soil to top up our old beds and fill a new one. It is a shame really that our own soil has such heavy clay but having raised beds is brilliant for a garden that tends towards waterlogging!

Four tonnes of soil arrived and a new raised bed made, the last of the 16ft x 4ft ones that we planned on having in the garden. Thats six altogether now, plenty of room for crop rotation!

I got the boys out doors last week (thank God for Easter break!) to help me with the weeding while I started emptying the top soil into our new and old raised beds.

It wasn't the easiest of weeks for working out there; we had a few showers of snow sending us back indoors once or twice. But it had to be done!

Yesterday was a lovely day; not too cold. So we managed to fill the new bed and plant our Sarpo Mira potatoes in it. These were great last year; blight resistant and we got a good yield from them.

 In another bed we planted our Red Duke of York potatoes (earlies); never tried these before so hoping we get a nice crop from them, even if they are being planted very late....

Our Peas are up too, it is so lovely to see them sprouting, they are so cute!

The Sungold F1 Tomato seeds I planted are up too (all 8 of them) but I think I need to buy a few more seeds; don't think 8 plants are enough (we had 20 last year).

It looks like a gorgeous Spring day out, and theres loads of work/gardening to be done, hope it is gorgeous where you are too!!

Happy Gardening!!

Chitting time!!

Yes, it is that time of year again.

The egg cartons have been saved over the last few weeks and the seed potatoes have been selected and purchased.

This year we have decided to try out Red Duke of York for our First Early crop. The guy at the local garden centre maintains they are worth a try.

For our Main Crop we are going with Sarpo Mira again. We had a successful crop with it last year and it is blight resistant (and didn't drown in all the rain).

Egg cartons make the nicest beds for little seed potatoes to chit, eyes up!!

All the nice wee spuds in a row; our bedroom window sill full of chitting potatoes!

And our seeds arrived in the post from the lovely people at www.giyireland.com .

Hopefully next blogpost might be about sowing some seeds (must go get some potting compost).

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.

Garden reflection

I love Spring, and the Summer isnt too bad either, both full of colour and growth.

I love all new things regardless of what they are.

But Autumn is different, its about harvesting and easing into the hibernation that is Winter.

Its also a time of reflection, looking back at what I did grow, or tried to grow, how it did and what I might do differently next year.

This year was a bit tough for growing vegetables and not just for us, for all gardeners from what I have read in blogs and on twitter - it has been such a wet year that the slugs took over, they came and destroyed nearly everything in their path.

In our garden they started at the Rhubarb in the Spring, and every evening I went out on 'slug patrol' picking them off the leaves and putting down beer traps.

Thankfully the Rhubarb survived and I have been harvesting it since (and baking plenty of Tarts).

Yummiest in a Tart

Then the slugs turned their attention to the Carrot seedlings.......they ate everything, not a carrot survived.

After that it was the Onions turn, they didnt do so well either. It seems that Onion greenery was this years delicacy in the slug world and so the beer traps and my evenings of 'de-slugging' were needed again. I think I lost that battle.

I do believe the slugs had more beer this year than myself!

We have lovely Onions (albeit small) but because they have no green stems left they wont store very well unfortunately.

Sarpo Mira spuds/wee Onions

The Homeguard potatoes got blight and the slugs helped 'clean up' so the harvest was very small.

But the Sarpo Mira potatoes which are blight resistent did very well (as well as expected considering how wet the soil remained all summer) and I havent found any signs of slug attack either.

We are still harvesting them, but I must harvest them all this week and harden them off in the polytunnel so they store better.
I pulled this mutant one the other day, gorgeous isnt it? not.


Mutant spud (size of tablespoon)

The Parsnips are actually doing very well, (slug free) but I think the soil has been a little too fertile for them so they are all very leggy. I am learning, slowly.

Spindly Parsnips

We also tried growing Beetroot this year but they failed miserabley.

Have to start planning next years crop soon. Think its time to start ordering seeds.

Boom to Bust, in Plum terms

Seeing as last year was our first year in this garden we were intrigued to find out what the main tree in the wee orchard was.

When the fruit started to appear we had no idea what these wee green things were (having never seen anything like them before).

It turned out to be a Plum tree, which ended up producing nearly 18 kg of Plums. We had Plum jam for months after, and some very yummy Plum Vodka too which we only finished off at the start of the summer.
The branches were laden down with the weight of the fruit this time last year...

We couldnt believe our fortune!

This year its been a completely different story...

How many Plums did I find?

One!!

And why? I have no idea.

I suppose we'll just have to wait and see what happens next year (and maybe do a bit of reading about how to take care of Plum trees in the meantime).

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 very quick job

A couple of weeks ago we picked up some nice cute Lobularia maritima (Alyssum) flowers in mixed colours. They make great ground cover, but I was probably very late planting them out. They are supposed to be annuals but the 2 we planted last year came back again this year so fingers crossed these wee guys will make a reappearance next year, bigger and better!

Buying a second hand house has its advantages, one of which is that the lawns are established and the previous owners used railway sleepers to kerb the front drive.

But arent they very dull looking? And the one thing the garden is missing alot of is flowers. Something we are slowly trying to rectify! So I had an idea for the Sweet Alyssum....

After a bit of weeding I planted them out inbetween all of the sleepers. Some gaps were bigger than others so I had to compromise in places. But if they grow (hopefully) we'll have beautiful wee flowers instead of weeds/grass.

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.