GreenFriends™ UK

Gardening Corner: June 2009

Sharing your vegetables!

It is a fact that a large part of growing your own food involves trying to stop everything else from eating it first. As Amma says: "Children, when there are problems in our lives, we should not let despair overcome us. The silver lining of success will be right behind the dark clouds of failure. We must understand this and be prepared to forge ahead."

We are not the only creatures who consider the vegetables on "our" allotment to be "ours". So do large numbers of slugs, snails, wood pigeons, squirrels, mice and a whole host of other animals, all of whom have as much right to be here as we do. What do we do about this?

There does seem little point putting so much effort into growing just to let something else eat it all. And yet it seems wrong to deliberately cause harm to another living thing. Well, there is a whole host of devices and strategies which can be used to deter other life forms.

One of the most effective is using netting. This can help to keep wood pigeons, for example, off your young crops. Wood pigeons seem to love to eat everything that can possibly be planted, but the main problem is with newly planted seedlings, which they can wipe out very quickly. Keeping netting supported on low sticks even for a few weeks or a month over a new crop can make all the difference.

Fine netting is also very helpful for all members of the cabbage family (including cauliflower, broccoli, kale and several others), which are very prone to attacks from the caterpillars of cabbage white butterflies. Keep your brassicas, as they are called, completely enclosed in. Netting can deter them to some extent.

Probably the most difficult of pests to deal with are slugs and snails. I've personally never done a count, but I suspect the average garden or allotment has hundreds or even thousand of slugs and snails, and sometimes it seems as if all of them are out to get you! So what do we do about this particular issue. Well, it wouldn't seem right to kill them and we want to garden organically so slug pellets are out. We deal with this in several ways.

Firstly we put out plants when they seem reasonably large, having 5 or 6 leaves is a good yardstick. We also surround all newly planted seedlings with a barrier of plastic, for example a plastic bottle cut into sections with the planted seedling in the middle. This in theory creates an obstacle, but it doesn't always work. We also assume that there will be a certain amount of loss which we have to live with, so we plant more then we need. It is also good to do your own research on this subject on the internet for example.

There is More to Garlic than You Might Think

We learnt something new this week about garlic. It was completely accidental but nevertheless a worthwhile experience. We planted our garlic last autumn as usual, having bought some organic garlic from the supermarket, split it up into cloves and planted the cloves individually. This is what we always do. However this summer, just over the last few weeks in fact, the garlic has grown these flowering stems which are very twisty and very thick. Our garlic has never done this before. Having done some research, it turns out that there are in fact 2 main varieties of garlic, stiff neck and soft neck. We have normally planted soft neck, but purely by accident this year we have put in hard neck.

Allotment Diary

The greenhouse is coming along well. We have already harvested a couple of cucumbers and our tomato plants have a number of small green tomatoes on them. The sweet peppers and chillis have flower buds on them, the aubergines have been a little slower, but they seem to need particularly hot weather, and it has been very changeable recently with some cool spells.

Outside we are still finishing off last years leeks and spinach, but most of the emphasis is on the new crops. Onions are doing well, and the potatoes are flowering which is a good sign. Our runner beans are slowly climbing up their poles, and we may get the first courgette soon. It will probably be a while before the other gourds start producing (by other gourds we mean pumpkins and squash). We have a number of newly planted lettuces, peas and french beans which seem to be doing OK.

We will be planting out leeks seedlings and perpetual spinach seedlings in the next couple of weeks.  These have been on our window ledge at home so relatively warm and protected. In the outside world it is a different matter and we will need to protect the spinach from the above visitors.

We also harvested some elderflowers from our tree this weekend. These are then soaked in a sugar, lemon juice/zest and water mixture for 24 hours. What you get is a wonderful summery, refreshing cordial.

Happy gardening and see you all next month

- Richard and Kaivalya

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