Beans etc.

Note to self: keep better records!!!!
I'm not sure when I sowed the broadbeans last year, I seem to have planted them out on May 5th so I suspect I am a week or two late with starting them indoors. The trouble is you never can tell what the weather will do!

I had beans left over from last year so I used those again: Medes and Masterpiece.
I also started some left-over sweetpeas and nasturtium.

The sweetpeas are in toilet-roll tubes, seated in fine pumice and filled with Pindstrup. The others are in plastic pots of various sorts. My sister says that they are fine and just as good as peat-pots in her opinion.

Speaking of my sister, the runnerbeans and basil seed which I had sent to her has arrived so she should mail it on to me next week and if the customs don't make a fuss it should arrive soon and then I can try Moonlight runners which are supposed to self-fertilize.

Happy Summer!

Thursday was the first day of summer and certainly it is sunny but not terribly warm yet (7°C or less).
Ómar's mother gave me some chitted potatoes yesterday and told me to get them planted so I did! I added some leftover chicken manure and then decided I might as well get the carrots sown too. So I bought a bag of mushroom compost, a container of chicken manure, and one of dried seaweed. I put a handful of each in very square before sowing the carrot seed - see below. I added one square of spring onion seed too and there is a blank square left.




The garlic is looking pretty good now. I put some fertilizer round it today and covered it up again. Here is a picture of how it looks, and one of the potatoes before I planted them. Quite a mixture of potatoes, some I bought last autumn and kept in the fridge, the others are some French ones which I allowed to sprout a little.

Seeds sown

I bought two neat little plastic propagators from Tiger (purple-pink ones) and have now sown the following:

Parsley - Plain Leaved 2 (4)
Basil - Tiger (4)
Basil - Sweet Genovese (4)
Pepper - California Wonder (3)
Pepper - Patio Red (3)
Pepper - (Hot) Hungarian Black (3)
Brussel Sprout - Evesham Special (3)

Happy Easter!

It is Easter Monday and a lovely sunny day so I did a bit of tidying in the garden.
The official Square Foot Gardening site (http://squarefoot.creatingforum.com/) is having its second annual carrot week on April 16th +/- 1 week so I took the chance offered by the good weather and sowed some Nates 2 seed in one square. I added some chicken manure first and then the seeds - I was generous with the seed because they are from 2010 and may not germinate so well.
A while back we had a bad storm which washed a lot of seaweed up along the coast and I collected a few bags of it. I tipped it into the compost bin and gave it all a light stir. Seaweed is supposed to accelerate the rotting.
I plan on sowing some seed indoors in the next couple of days, basil at least and a couple of pepper plants.
The garlic is doing fine still. I had a poke around and it all seems to be making bulbs so perhaps I will actually get a crop this year?

Closing down for the winter!

Here we are at the start of November and things are still alive in the garden! There has been the odd bit of ground frost but not enough to kill off the carrots.

Today is sunny but cold and it seemed about time to do some tidying-up.

I dug up the last of the potatoes (more of that later) and all the remaining carrots. The parsnips are actually starting to fatten now so perhaps there will be a crop after all. The weather forecast for the week goes up to 12°C which seems unlikley but at least indicates that they could grow a bit more yet.

I pulled up the broadbean plants and put them in the compost bin. I used to leave them over the winter because the nitrogen nodules are supposed to release nitrogen into the soil but I just read that by the time they have made beans there is hardly any nitrogen left in the nodules, it has all gone to leaf and pod production, so in the bin with them. A couple of the plants had begun to shoot again from the bottom and I just cut those down a bit, just to see what happens over winter.

The red cabbage are pathetically tiny so I have left them in there for now. Might give them another try next year. I did plant them pretty late.

The big garlic experiment continues. I bought some Chinese garlic, and also single-clove garlic. I planted 9 cloves in one square, 5 single cloves in another, and replanted my own funny looking garlic in another two squares. I will leave them uncovered, except perhaps for acryl sheeting over the worst of the winter.

Will post some photos later.

Carrot time!

Starting to pull some carrots now and although they are not fully grown they are big enough to be worth pulling. The chicken manure did the trick and the leaves greened up nicely and the carrots grew a bit more too. Glad I decided to do that. Next year I will just mix some into each bed in the spring.


Here are pictures of yesterday's and today's pickings. The purple sprouting broccoli had very wooden stems but the other one was fine.
Each bean pod had about 4 or 5 good sized beans in it. These were the Masterpiece beans which lived up to their claim of being fast at growing. The Medes ones need a couple more weeks I think but do have a lot of pods on :-)






































This shot is of the two left hand boxes. The potato plants are just beginning to yellow. I'm very happy with the growth this year. I think I could have planted the potatoes a bit deeper - and earlier would have been nice too.
The onions did very little. I don't think I will have onions next year.
The strawberry plants from seed are still small but have afew flowers so it will be interesting to see how they do next year - if they survive the winter.











This is the deep box on the right. You can see how well the beans are doing. The parsnips are coming on slowly as might be expected. One or two may actually be a decent size.

























This bed looks a bit of a mess. One of the purple broccoli plants I pulled up as it looked sick. It had white grubs around its roots. Some of the others do not look to great either.
The swede are getting to an edible size but I will leave them longer. The slugs seem to like their leaves though.
The red cabbage is far from hearting-up. These were plants from Hveragerði and may just have been put in too late.
Spinach was disappointing, did not get so many leaves off it this year I think. I may look for a better type.

Mid-July

I have mixed news on the garden front. Below is a picture of the whole garden as it is today. It is obvious that the carrots on teh right are all much paler than the ones on the left (which are in fresh mix). I'm guessing that the amount of mushroom compost which I added was not enough to supply the needed nitrogen. The broadbeans seem to be perfectly happy, but I think they bind nitrogen themselves? Anyhow, I've been giving a liquid feed of seaweed fertilizer and that does not seem to have changed much so today I sprinkled on some chicken manure and I am watering it in now.
I dug up all of the garlic today because the grass had dried. Each clove only made one round bulb so not sure what is happening there. It is juicy enough but just doesn't look like garlic!
We have eaten most of the spinach, I've pulled half of it up as it had begun to flower. The broccoli is just coming on, had 4 tiny heads last night. And the strawberries are very good now.