Toms

It's that time of year again when I sow my tomatoes. Our absolute favourites are Garden Pearl - a determinate (bush variety) cherry that produces masses of sweet firm fruit. I'm also sowing 3 other varieties simply because I have the packets of seeds:

Duchy Originals Falcrosso F1 Hybrid - Large plum-sized cherry. I think this is a bush variety as no pinching out of side-shoots is required. Seeds in date.

T&M Black Cherry - The clue is in the title with this one! This is a cordon variety. Seeds are 7 years out of date.

D.T. Brown Bejbino F1 - Another cordon variety, seeds 5 years out of date.

Unlike some types of seeds, tomatoes will often germinate and grow on to produce healthy plants well past their sow-by date. I am sowing 5 seeds of Garden Pearl and 4 each of the others in 3 inch pots.

In other news we now have lots of seedlings in the pots on the windowsills. The leeks sown 19 days ago are germinating - I counted 5 this morning. To my absolute delight the spring onions sown 9 days ago are also germinating. In the chilli department we have 1 Cayenne pepper and 2 Aji Wrecking Balls. The lettuce are germinating and so is the parsley. It has definitely been milder over the last few days and is likely to remain so for the next week so maybe spring is just around the corner...

The last of the leeks...

This is the last of the Musselburgh leeks:

Leeks always do well on our allotment despite getting a bit of rust in the Autumn. So far there is no sign of any leek seedlings sown 12 days ago (or chilli seedlings for that matter). The purple-leaved basil is germinating though, and so is the coriander:

This year I thought I would have  another go at growing spring onions. Usually I sow the seeds outside in the spring. After 3 or so weeks only a handful germinate and then they die before getting to a useful size. This year I am going to sow a few seeds in pots indoors as I would for leeks to see if I have any success this way. I'm going to try sowing 2 different varieties:

Finally, I thought I would get some hearting lettuce started indoors. The UK's salad shortage is set to carry on for many months yet so I want to make sure we have our own supply asap! I'm sowing some mixed lettuce seeds (All The Year Round, Black Seeded Simpson, Catalogna, Iceburg 2, Lobjoits Green Cos, Lollo Rosso, Merveille des Quatre Saisons, Romaine Ballon) plus some Little Gem lettuce for good measure.

Little pots of joy (hopefully)

It is always exciting sowing the first seeds of the year, and I've picked a lovely sunny day to do it! The fact that it is only 1 degree Celsius outside and the compost was frozen didn't put me off: I had to bring the compost inside to defrost before sowing any seeds! I'm sowing my chilli seeds 3 weeks earlier than last year in a bid to try and extend the fruiting season. Here is this years selection:

My absolute favourite from last year was "Cherry Bomb" from the South Devon Chilli Farm. We also had 2 recommendations of easy-to-grow medium-hot chilli plants from Simpson's Seeds when we visited their stall at our local chilli festival last year: "Aji Wrecking Ball" (sounds brutal!) and "Red Cherry Hot". I also found a packet of Cayenne pepper seeds that I received at Gardeners World Live last year so decided to sow a pot of those too. Five seeds of each variety were sown into a 3-inch pot of compost and lightly covered with vermiculite. The Simpsons seeds recommend a temperature of 28 degrees Celsius for germination! I find that the warmth of a sunny windowsill is usually sufficient so it will be interesting to see how they do.
After scrubbing pots and trays for the chillis I was on a roll and decided to prepare some more pots for growing herbs indoors:

The above selection includes 2 types of basil ("Sweet" and "Purple Leaved"), 2 types of coriander (the usual type plus "Delfino" that has ferny leaves) and some parsley ("Plain Leaved 2"). These were sown into 5.5" pots.
Finally, whilst sifting through my tin of seeds I found an open packet of Wilko "Autumn Giant 3" leek seeds still in date and perfect for sowing now for an autumn crop. We grew these 2 years ago and they did really well despite having rust. I preferred them to the variety "Musselburgh" grown last year. I sowed the remaining seeds (probably 50 or 60?) into a shallow tray and covered with vermiculite. If they don't germinate there is still plenty of time to sow more.

Lawn in new build house mega-post

As well as cultivating the allotment, we have been making a back garden "from scratch" at home as mentioned a little while back here. One of the major things we have been trying to do is make a lawn (following the R.H.S. guidelines) which was not as straightforward as we may have liked given that the soil at the back was essentially a mix of clay, rubble, weeds and random construction waste / building crud:

First job was to dig the rubble and other crud out of the soil:

What is that blue stuff?! Most heroic chunk of rubble was a piece of concrete the size of a truck wheel (about 600x600x250 mm) which once broken up included these bits:

(note standard house brick buried under there for scale). Suffice as to say multiple ikea bags were filled with rubble. And many many weeds. One of the major tasks was to improve the drainage - over the winter we had a lot of water pooling on the surface as a result of the local "Oxford clay" geology. The major part of this was digging in this lot:

In total we put 10 x 850 kg bags of sharp sand in - the bags also turned out to be useful to collect up the rubble and other crap: we filled about 3. Next phase according to the RHS as linked above is to rotavate (also something of a challenge given the clay):

And then dig in organic matter (i.e. well rotted horse poo). [Interesting footnote: apparently this is not just to improve the nutrients in the soil - it also encourages worms which in turn improve the soil structure, which our experience would suggest is true.] We ordered this from the local garden centre and there were some seriously raised eyebrows when I asked for 60 bags!

Anyway this was where the rotavator really helped. Some time tilling later and it looked like this:

Getting to the point where we can start to lay some turf now. However did still need to rake and generally work over the soil (and weed ... again ... and again ...) before we could start. Ordered 50 rolls of turf from a local supplied (AWBS - who had supplied the sand etc. above):

Actually laying the turf was relatively straightforward if moderately back breaking work - first rake over, then put lawn fertiliser down, then water, then lay, cutting as necessary with old kitchen knife:

... etc. 50 rolls covered about 2/3rds of the area we wanted turfing so another order of 20 was needed, which arrived last Friday and was put down that evening and following morning. Interesting the turf put down a week ago already looks established. End result:

Looks something like a lawn - the "missing triangle" is deliberate as a space to extend the borders around to avoid boring rectangles of grass. Before and after panoramic shots - before:

... and after:

You can tell a lot of time has passed here - the neighbouring houses have been built! Now looking a lot like a back garden.

All about alliums

Two weeks ago we planted some onions. The below pic is so I have a reminder of the varieties:

Although not specified on the pack I think they are a mix of "Snowball", "Red Baron" and Japanese onions since these are the varieties that can also  be purchased individually from Wilkos. We have just finished eating all the Japanese onions from this years July harvest, some of which have gone soft and several had rotted. Perhaps not for long-term storage then. The Sturon onions harvested early August seem fine at the moment and the shallots "Topper" are also storing well.
Usually we don't grow garlic but since it is creeping more and more into our cooking I thought it would be fun to grow some. I chose a soft-neck variety called Germidour:

Reading about on the internet, soft-neck varieties are less prone to bolting in the spring than the hard-neck types (unless stressed) and also store better. The recommendation for clay/heavy soils is planting each clove 1 inch below the soil surface so that the tip of the clove is just below the soil (for sandy soils they can be planted deeper). I planted two rows between the leeks and spring cabbages and marked the beginning and end of each row with a cane. The row nearest the leeks has 10 cloves, the other row has 9:

In other allium news I have pulled the first of our leeks:

So far we have not succumbed to leek rust first spotted on 7th October last year. This years variety is Musselburgh, last year we grew Autumn Giant 3 -I'm not sure if that makes a difference? I have spaced the plants out further this year which probably helps.

Pumpkin Harvest

Pulled up the pumpkin plants (Jack 'o' lantern I think) yesterday - got a few decent fruit from them given that we have already harvested a couple to give away:

Also still getting courgettes... the largest pumpkin is around a foot across, so not too bad. Actually all these came from a single plant it turns out and was still flowering.

The lettuce we planted the other day are looking good & ready for harvesting:

We also planted out some winter veg - onions from Wilco's:

(literally a bit of a mixed bag - white, brown and red onions, 49 in total) and cabbages:

Should keep the plot looking busy while the weather is lousy...

Noteworthy that the soil which we improved to plant the spuds in is now really nice to dig over and plant stuff in - never underestimate the power of horse poo!

Flower garden

Back in April we sowed some flower seeds to create a border in our back garden that currently looks like this:

We will probably widen the border a bit more and are almost ready to turf - hurrah! Almost everything we grew from seed has done well including the sunflowers:

Above left: "Goldy Double", below pic "Velvet Queen":

 

The sunflowers have been vigorous and required lots of staking to prevent branches snapping off in the wind. Saying that, the weight of some of the flowers has caused some of the side branches to snap off anyway even with no wind! Most of the plants are about 7-8ft tall! Their vase life is not brilliant, approx 3-4 days. I plan to save a few of the seed-heads and have a go at extracting the sunflower seeds.
The Sarah Raven cut flower seed mix has been successful though many of the plants I have yet to identify:

Any ideas? I have been able to identify Coreopsis in the below pic but not the plant with pink flowers (also in orange in the above pic):

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I have no idea how many of the plants I have grown are perennials, although I believe Coreopsis is. I will cut them all down after they have finished flowering and see which pop up again in the spring! I don't think most of the Sarah Raven plants I have grown are ideal for cut flowers... many have lots of branching stems and are too short for cutting. The Cosmos "Psyche White" has been suitable for cutting with flowers in abundance! I only have the one plant but plan to grow more next year:

The white "frothy" plant in the foreground is Gypsophilia "Baby's Breath" and in the background is Verbena Bonariensis. The Verbena has done fantastically .... I bought a tiny plant at a charity sale at the allotment shop and it has grown to a very large size with many branching stems.
A favourite plant for butterflies (particularly the red admirals) is the Rudbeckia "Marmalade":

I think there are a total of about 7 plants here. One of my favourite plants that I picked up at Gardeners World Live in June was this Pennisetum "Karley Rose" that started off life with a single pink flower but has since filled out:

In the foreground you can see some lupins also grown from seed that should flower next year. Finally, a little triangle of soil between the patio and house has also been planted up:

 

In the above pic there are 3 Stipa Tennuissima (grown from seed), 3 geraniums (the pink one is called "Patricia" purchased at a charity plant sale, the other 2 are cuttings from a friend), a dryopteris fern (found growing in my blueberry container 2 years ago) and 3 aquilegias (grown from seed).
Now is a good time to think about sowing flowers for next year too to get earlier flowers. I'm going to sow these: