Ed's Simple Life

Following a month on the window sill in a very cramped old mushroom container I'm really pleased with how well the salad bowl lettuce has come up.  Last year I grew it in the potting shed, which unfortunately the aphids destroyed, this year I thought I'd try indoors with limited window space. In the same container at the rear are some mixed oriental leaves which don't seem to be enjoying the cramped conditions too well but still they should be good enough for a cheese and pickle sandwich or too. I'll sew some more next week but this time I'll try to give them a bit more space if I can find somewhere to put them.

Well the Carrot harvest the year was an interesting one. I'd steered clear of growing carrots due to stories about carrots pulsating with carrot fly which honestly made me want to vom.  I decided to face my fear and armed with my B&Q Value F1 Carrot packet of 1500 seeds it was time to plant some carrots. Above is the resulting crop from my seeds, I didn't plant too many as I was lacking for space and needed to fit them in-between the Chicory and the Broccoli in the cold frame so I wasn't expecting a bumper harvest.  I wasn't too concerned about the meager quantity because after all it was just a trial...but the size?! Above are the same carrots but this time with a tea spoon next to them...not a table spoon a tea spoon! They did taste great, but I was a little disappointed with how small they were.  I figured that I hadn't prepared the soil enough for them with the soil beneath the cold frame being too compacted. My solution to all of this (...

Last year when I got on the gardening band waggon I wasn't too sure what it was that I wanted to achieve...however I did know one thing...no matter what I wanted to achieve a raised bed would help me do it! So I waited a few months until I found a raised bed that was on offer from B&Q then with a bit of resourcefulness managed to get 20% off on top of sale price...happy days. I'd like to point out that B&Q is normally not my first port of call (primarily because you can get pretty much everything they sell cheaper somewhere else) and when it came to making raised beds this year I took a completely different approach. I decided in the end to purchase 2 raised beds and staked them out roughly going north to south which I had read that was what I was supposed to do. Once both were down I thought it would be a good idea to have one that was a bit more sheltered and protected that the other for the less heady vegetables and so brought some timber to turn it in to a c...

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.

I brought these last year and had limited success; I think mainly because I planted them out too late coupled with not knowing I needed to pollinate them and because I didn't pinch them out...all in all I didn't have a clue what I was doing. Having said that I still managed to get an ok harvest from them. This year I have opted to plant:   Moneymaker  Gardeners Delight   Beefstake  Tumbling Tom (yellow) It's still not warm enough to put them outside, so I needed to find something bigger to plant them in to once they out grew their propagator...I'd seen somewhere on the internet where they had used tetra paks so I've tried the same and guess we'll have to see how it pans out. I'm interested to see which will grow better the plants in the shorter but wider 1.5 ltr squash containers or the deeper but thinner 1ltr tetra pak.

Some time last year I started to keep some of the seeds from Chili Peppers when cooking, I guess I was marginally spurred on by the slight success of the lime seeds from supermarket fruit and the nectarine seeds.  As with the above seeds I was fairly convinced that nothing would grow.  I planted these seeds the same time as the ones that I brought from my usual internet seed shop , they haven't grown as well as the ones from the seed shop however I'm still fairly pleased that anything happened. From reading around a bit I'm pretty convinced that even if they do grow they won't fruit much/anything but it was worth a shot. I also grew some sweet peppers from seed from super market produce as well, they also seem to be growing ok.

Again another evening trawling the internet looking at growing vegetables led me to discover that you can re-grow those spring onions that you used in your stir fry last night.  I'm assuming that they might not grow as well as the ones in the garden, but I'm looking forward to seeing how this experiment pans out. Considering it started with little to no hope I'm quite impressed with the weeks worth of growth. The spring onions I used had been in the fridge for at least 3 weeks and were looking fairly dead, all the roots on the base were brown.  I placed them in a plastic cup of water and then on with window ledge in the kitchen which faces north so doesn't get a great deal of sunlight.  A week later and below is the result (the onions were originally chopped where the white ends, all of the green is new growth).  I change the water every few days.

On the kitchen windowsill (north facing) I currently have two varieties of broad bean growing.  They were planted in December (I think) and now seem to be a little out of control.  The two varieties that I have growing are: Broad Bean - Bunyards Exhibition Broad Bean - Witkiem Manita I'm not too sure how much more they grow before they start to grow beans.  I believe I'm meant to cut off the top bit of the plant with the two leaves once the beans start at the base of the plant. The first few from the left have started to flower as you can see below and I'm fairly sure that they're self pollinating so I don't need to do anything.

Last week I planted 6 all year round lettuce seeds that my friend had given me in one of our seed exchanges as there was no way she was going to plant 1500 lettuce seeds and like wise it was fairly unlikely that I'd have the room to plant lots of the seeds i had so we did a bit of a swap of our excess. I was really impressed at how quickly they came up I re planted them in to larger trays today to give the roots some space to move.  I'm hoping that they will continue to grow at this pace...although I'm guessing they may not. Does anyone know if when I replant them I'm supposed to bury them a little deeper so that just the leaves are above soil?