Thursdays Top 10 Tryouts (Or Show Us Yer Tips 23)!!

1. If you are troubled with deer eating their way through your garden or plot, try planting Rosemary plants or sprinkling Rosemary oil around your planted areas.

2. This is an addition to a previously posted tip. If you are putting runners from Strawberries into pots, for later planting out, when you peg the runner down, use pegs that are longer than the depth of your pot. Push the peg through a hole in the base of the pot. This will anchor the pot down as well as the runner.

3. If you are growing greenhouse Tomatoes, remove some of the lower leaves from the plants. This allows more air circulation, more light to the plant which aids ripening and lessens the chance of soil borne diseases being splashed onto the plants whilst watering.

4. If your legumes bed will lie empty over the winter prior to using it for brassicas, try sowing  Winter tares as a green manure. ( sow July to September). Winter tares will fix nitrogen into the soil. Work the Tares into the soil about 4 weeks before sowing your Brassica crop.

5. The Devils Coach Horse, (Staphylinus Olens) a long black beetle is a good friend (predator)  to have in the garden or plot. It will eat such things as larvae, slugs and insects. If it is disturbed it will adopt a scorpion like stance. It's bite can be painful.

6. Adding lime to compost heaps is not beneficial and can actually kill off beneficial bacteria which are active within the heap.

7. To stop your growing Pumpkins from splitting, provide them with some shade as they develop and get larger.

8. It will soon be Christmas but some vegetables to sow in August are, Carrots, Cress, Kale, Lettuce, Radish, Pak-Choi, Rocket, Salad onions, Swiss chard, Turnip. Certain varieties will germinate better than others at this time of the year in average UK weather conditions.

9. Don't forget to "deadhead" your garden flowers now, as many perennials will re-flower into Autumn.

10. Pick your Runner and Dwarf french beans on a regular basis. This will prevent them from growing tough and stringy.

Ten Days to Christmas

The recent almost relentless rain held off yesterday afternoon, so I ventured down to my plot to check things out. The allotments were misty and quiet except for the squawking of several Crows and Magpies which were flying around looking for something to eat.  The ground was well saturated and even the grass paths were turning to mud when walked on. I picked enough Sprouts to fill a large plastic tray and cut 3 cabbages. The Sprouts will be kept back for Christmas dinner, if the wet weather continues I might not get back to the plot until after Christmas, I thought.
 Due to the wet ground I didn't bother to pull any of my remaining Carrots. I had a chat with one of my fellow plot holders, the usual topics of course,wet weather, arthritis, botritis and when not to buy a hosepipe. I will try and add some photographs to this post over the coming weekend. Bye for now. There's always tomorrow. 

Breezy Wednesday 7th December

A strong cold wind was blowing when I ventured down to my plot on Wednesday morning. I stayed in the shed for a while waiting for the wind to drop and shelling Runner Beans which I had left there earlier to dry out.
I laid the Beans out in a couple of trays and put them in my shed cupboard out of the reach of any mice or other vermine that might intrude into the shed over the Winter looking for food.
The wind had died down slightly by the time I had finished the beans so I forked over the bed recently used for brassicas. Despite the recent torrents of rain, the soil was workable and not as sticky as I had suspected, although much of the clay about a spit down was well wet. The remaining Sprouts at the end of the bed were looking well formed and should be great with Christmas dinner. I added some more compost & kitchen waste to my Runner Bean trenches. By this time the light was fading and it was quite chilly again so I called it a day.
 There's always tomorrow!