Ed's Simple Life

In my never ending quest not to pay for plant pots I've now taken to using pop bottles to grow broad beans in (working on the sq ft gardening assumption that the roots in compost will tend to grow down and not out meaning that depth will be more important).  I've placed some drainage holes in the bottom. I'm not too sure how much of a success this will be growing the board beans inside, below is a picture of the beans that were in the kitchen a month on.  Earlier this week they were relocated to the potting shed and their small individual pots replaces with one larger pot. Below:  On the Left the Broad Beans from the Kitchen, on the Right a Lonely Broad Bean planted outside at the same time. These were sewn in December and have been flowering for a while but as of yet there's been no fruit.  Up until this point I thought that they were self pollinating however having now read around a bit it appears that they are not which would explain the ...

In this previous pos t I was looking at newspaper seed pots and sewing some seeds in them which seems to have on the whole worked to varying degrees of success. The Chard, Cabbage and Brussels Sprouts seem to have come up ok ... however I've had less luck with the Sweet Pepper (Spanish Mixed) the pots don't seem to offer much in the way of drainage which I think has been the downfall of the Lettuce and the germination of the Peppers.  Reading around a few people have said that the ink used in the newspaper printing can have a damaging effect of the plant too. It was a nice experiment and I might do it again sometime later in the year when they can dry out better but for now I think I'm going to stick the old tetra paks.

A few weeks ago we went to ikea and picked up some stuff for the kitchen including: Two cheap rails A couple of 10 Pack Hooks Different sized hanging containers The aim of the purchases was to create the following: Once the containers were on the wall I decided to have something growing in them, as I haven't got my hydroponic kitchen herb garden set up yet I thought that some salad greens and herbs would be best. Finding a tray to fit inside the hanging container was a bit of a mission impossible so I cut up some of those clear plastic containers that you get fruit in from the supermarket and then glue gunned them back together so that they would be a snug fit, once I did this I spray painted the outside of it black (although I don't think that this step was really necessary).  In the larger container I planted some Chives, Salad Bowl Lettuce and some Mixed Oriental Leafs, hopefully they'll come up well. In the mean t...

Unfortunately today I ran out of gardening supplies but had seen a tutorial on the internet about how to make "seed pots" out of newspaper ...I was and still am to a certain extent quite skeptical but decided to give it ago as I had ran out of room in the propagator and had no more cups from work. Following these instructions I made three seed pots to start off my Sweet Peppers in (Spanish Mixed) in, although I halved the size of the paper as the pots that the instructions created were about 4 times bigger which my windowsill just didn't have the room for. I'm a little concerned that at some point the base is just going to fall out, but time will tell.  It looks like many people literally plant the pot outside and let the news paper degrade in the soil, we shall see.

As well as the All Year Round lettuce that I planted last week I also planted a few varieties of cut and come again lettuce. The main varieties that were planted were: Salad Bowl Red Salad Bowl (left over from last years B&Q Multi Pack) Mixed Oriental Leafs (also left over from last years B&Q Multi Pack)  All of these like the all year round lettuce came up stupidly quick, I planted a fair few seeds as I didn't think that the seeds would have kept too well...how wrong I was.  I needed to transplant them in to something where they would have more space so I used an old mushroom container to put them in as a temporary measure...seems to be working out well so far.