Gardening 2021

[SteveH]

Hooray! My cabbages have appeared after all! I've just been in the garden, and there they were, lots of little seedlings in two rows. One advantage of sowing in drills is that the seedlings appear in straight lines, which makes them easy to distinguish from weeds.) I have done some initial thinning, and will have to do more later. I may created a seed bed for starting off brassicas for next year. I will now have to buy some netting to protect them from birds, especially those flying vermin, pigeons.

[SteveH]

AT LAST! My 'Pink Fir Apple' spuds have appeared above ground! The 'Salad Blue's appeared over a week ago, and I was beginning to despair of the PFA. It joins my cabbages and Swiss Chard, which I'd also given up on, which all appeared in the last 24 hours or so, and some of my onions, planted out a few weeks ago, and which I thought had died, have also resurrected! 😃
I assume this is all thanks to the heavy rain of the past 48 hours. I have been keeping the plot watered with my oscillating sprinkler, but that is probably not as effective as rain, since it only wets a given spot for about one second in ten.

[Spud]

17?! Fuckest thou me - getting one out is an exhausting all-day job, in my book! How long did that take?

Hi Egbert, just seen this.
About 5 weeks. Yeah it was pretty exhausting, but satisfying. I've had a bit of experience when I took on an allotment covered in a mass of brambles that were very deep rooted. But with these stumps, I pretended I was an archaeologist and used a spade and a trowel to uncover the  stumps, cutting away the side roots as I went. One weighed I reckon over 20kg, some were small as the trees had been outcompeted by the bigger ones. The hedge had been about 8 feet high, so not too massive!
Sounds like you're working wonders with your veggie patch, keep it up.

[SteveH]

Checked the weather forecast earlier: there doesn't seem to be any danger of frost in the next 10 days, and after that it's highly unlikely, so I planted out my runner beans (Scarlet Emperor, red flowers) and climbing French beans (Blue Lake, white flowers), 12 of each, at the bases of six four-cane pyramids, alternating the two varieties around each pyramid for a colour-contrast. Some of the Blue lakes had not appeared, but I planted their fibre pots anyway, in case they appear later I should have sown a few extra of each, to have spares in case of no-shows. Must remember next year. The soil is now wonderfully moist and friable after the recent rain; it was previously dry and lumpy, even after watering with the sprinkler.
The weather is lightly overcast but warm, with a light breeze, and the bees have been working hard on my apple-blossom, including the two late-bloomers, which are just starting to open.

[SteveH]

Been out in the garden removing weeds (there were plenty to remove), and planting out my courgette and squash plants in the "everything else" bed, where the onions and lettuces were, before the couch grass took over. (I weedkilled the couch grass a week or so ago.)

[Spud]

Trying to decide what type of hedge to plant in place of the leylandii.

What do you think about yew? A friend told me it is the best. I don't like fully grown yews much - they aren't very easy to climb, too many branches and spikey bits - they seem nice when young, until they have to be trimmed, then they lose that Christmas tree look.

[SteveH]

A few months ago, my son bought a second-hand Briggs and Stratton petrol lawnmower - rather battered-looking, but it works. I used it yesterday to tackle the last overgrown area in the back garden, not just grass, but nettles, brambles, other weeds, and comfrey which I planted years ago as a compost activator. It ploughed through the lot, and chewed it all up into instant compost (well, not quite, as it still has to rot down, but it'll do so much more quickly chewed up than whole). It's terrific fun to operate, but it died on me before I'd finished - out of fuel. I'll have to buy more - I think it takes ordinary unleaded.
My runner beans are in full flower, bright red, but not yet my French beans, which will be white when they appear. My spuds are also in flower - 'Salad Blue' mauve, 'Pink Fir Apple' White. Spud flowers are quite weird and alien-looking, though pretty in their own way.

[SteveH]

Been using the petrol mower to chop up weeds for the compost heap. The heap heats up amazingly quickly when the ingredients are shredded, as the bugs have much more surface area to work on. I forked the heap up a bit, to mix in some kitchen waste, and the stuff from the middle that I brought to the top was literally steaming (and I do mean "literally" in the strict sense).

My apple trees are quite heavily laden, especially 'Cottenham Seedling' (cooker, 1920s) and 'Dabinett' (cider, c.1900). Looking forward to loads of cider in a couple of months.

[SteveH]

This afternoon, I tipped two sackoads of leafmould into one of the compost bins, which contained more-or-less finished compost. There was somewhat more leafmould than compost by volume, probably about 3:2. I mixed them together with the fork, and spread them around the apple trees as a mulch. leafmould doesn't contain much nutrient, but is a useful mulch, keeping weeds down, and eventually being dragged into the soil by worms, where it increases the depth of the humus, the largely organic top layer of soil, and aids water-retention. The leafmould was from last autumn's leaves, and still rather rough, but good enough for the purpose. If I'd left it another year or two, it'd've ended up like peat, and is a peat substitute.
https://www.rhs.org.uk/advice/profile?PID=478

[SteveH]

Rather disappointing crop of spuds, especially 'Salad Blue', from two 15' rows. The 'Pink Fir Apple' were better, but not great. Possibly due to inadequate watering.
Better crop promised of dried beans from the 'Scarlet Emperor' runners and the French beans I can't remember the name of. The runner seeds are the big purple ones, the French seeds the small white ones, which are the haricot beans used in baked beans. This is just the first batch: there are lots more beans ripening. I've had some green and whole as well, but they're all a bit tough and stringy now, so I'll leave the rest to dry out and harvest the seeds.
PS - can't save the photos as attachments, for some reason: maybe they're too big. Will upload them to a Flickr album and post the link.
https://flic.kr/s/aHsmWSpgUR

[Spud]

New hedge is in - 12 yews, each about 2 feet high.

[Spud]

With the hosepipe ban now in place, I thought I'd dig around the roots of the 12 yew trees we planted in the spring, so that any rain and water from the watering can will seep into the soil rather than run off.