In the northern hemisphere Spring is coming.  The snowdrops and crocuses have in many places already burst out into flower.  Maybe this has set your mind working, and you’re wondering what to do with that spare plot of earth at the back of your house.  Well how about a vegetable garden?

Vegetable gardening for flavour

I’m not sure whether it really is true, in any scientifically provable way, that my home-grown veggies from the kitchen garden taste better than what my wife buys in the local store, but I know it feels that way.  There’s certainly something special about eating what you’ve grown yourself.  What’s more, you know it’s fresh; you picked it yourself just an hour or so ago.  And if you have children in the household they will know that food does not come from a plastic bag but from God’s good earth.

How was it grown?

Personally I’m not opposed to chemicals.  Why?  Because everything we eat is chemical.  Even the cleanest air we breath is chemical.  The freshest, most unpolluted water we drink is chemical.  The materials of our bodies are chemical. The green leaves of a plant are chemical.  It’s not that chemicals are bad in themselves, otherwise everything around us would be bad, but it’s a question of what kinds of chemicals.  Plants need food, and they often need protection from pests and diseases. When you grow your food yourself you know exactly what has been used to fertilise the soil, what has been used to guard the growing crops from insect damage and plant disease.  The uncertainties are removed.  You know what you’re giving your family to eat.

Good food and good exercise

For many of us our modern lifestyle does not make it easy to keep our bodies in good condition.  Obesity and slack muscles are all too common these days.  Half an hour a day looking after a kitchen garden can make a major difference to a person’s physical fitness.  The variety of movement involved exercises many different muscular groups including legs, arms, back and more.  It won’t be long before you start to feel the difference.

So why not?

Whether you’re looking for more flavourful food, trying to save the planet or aspiring after a better-toned body, a vegetable garden could do you good. Spring is coming. It’s time to be clearing the earth and sowing the seed. You’ll not regret it.

Tags: Kitchen Garden, Spring, vegetable garden

Last Autumn I wrote an article under the title, This Year’s Leaves … Next Year’s Mulch, which was well-received by a lot of people.  It came back to mind today so I thought I’d follow it up.

This past year has not been a good gardening year for me.  Firstly a long period of indifferent health kept me away from anything very energetic, then a plague of apparently insecticide-resistant white fly followed by blight decimated much of what I had managed to grow, both vegetables and flowers.  I have not even been keeping this blog very much alive.

One thing that did grow well, however, was the harvest of leaves from both our own trees and the neighbouring churchyard.  Although that does at this time of year generate something of a chore, clearing them away from the lawn and the borders, there is a silver lining to the cloud.  As last year’s title put it, this year’s leaves can become next year’s mulch.  At least, they can!  It all depends on a bit of effort now.

Leaves left at their full size will often (depending on the local climate) take two or three years to fully degrade to give a nice mulch, and I’m not satisfied that last year’s are yet quite ready.  The process can be speeded, however, by shredding them.  I do own a leaf blower and vacuum but that also has succumbed to some dread disease.  Once again its engine won’t start. So today I raked leaves into piles, got out the lawn mower, raised its blades to their highest position and used it as a vacuum cleaner, “hoovering” up the piles of leaves.  Last year I manage to run out of petrol at this stage, but this year all went well.

Leaves compact into much less space when they’re shredded but I decided today that after the first run they were not small enough so created two heaps of the shredded material and ran the mower over them again.  So now I have a still smaller heap of more finely chopped leaf, now safely transferred to my leaf mould bin - actually just a wooden frame surrounded by chicken wire to stop everything from blowing way.

Next year at this time I should have a really good heap of mulch to spread on the borders.  Don’t waste those leaves by dumping or burning them.  Mulch them.

Tags: autumn garden, compost, leaf mold, leaf mould

We’re all familiar with the fact that herbs are good for you - at least, those that are not poisonous! Many culinary herbs provide not only enhancements to the flavour of our food but also are health-giving. A wide range of plants in the herb garden outside the kitchen door are also medicinal, and indeed for many people that is the primary reason for growing them.

However, research at an American government food research centre has shown that some herbs, including oregano, cloves and thyme, are effective in attacking the E. Coli pathogen. Other troublesome organisms such as Salmonella have also apparently found new enemies in these popular natural food flavourings.

Or maybe they’re not “new”. I wonder whether there is any correlation between countries in which these herbs are widely used and a low incidence of sickness outbreaks caused by those food-borne nasties. I don’t know. Maybe there’s some research somewhere that shows it. Meanwhile, I’m happy to know that in addition to the already well-known advantages of flavour, odour and health there are still further benefits to be gained from the herb garden.

While on this subject of health and healing, there’s a new book about to hit the shops.  Jill Henderson has produced what is described as “equal parts gardening guide and healthy living sourcebook” in The Healing Power of Kitchen Herbs (Published by Ball Publishing ; ISBN-13: 9781883052621; ISBN-10: 1883052629).  It should be in the shops in the UK at the beginning of September, but you needn’t wait to order it.  You can order here from Foyles of London and your copy will be mailed as soon as it becomes available.  Click either on the book graphic or on the title above.

Finally, for now, in the past few days we have launched a new site in the Gardening-Notes.com family called, “Herbs and the Herb Garden”. We didn’t wait until we had it full of dozens of pages but started with just a few, and will be building it up over the weeks and months ahead. Take a look at Herbs and the Herb Garden.

It’s July already!  In fact we’re almost half way through the month.  Where did June go to?  And my next question, when will Summer start?

Here in the English Midlands and North we’re not suffering the floods of last year, when thousands were left homeless, but we are getting a lot of dull wet days.  It’s great for the weeds, but the sun-loving plants are feeling rather deprived.

As I look out from my desk onto the vegetable patch I can, however, see my four golden yellow courgette plants flourishing.  No large fruits for the kitchen yet, but things are looking good for the next few weeks.

I decided to leave my broad beans last month as they were not quite ready, but yesterday we had a great meal including freshly picked beans.  It seems a long time since sowing them in one of the raised beds in January, but the wait has been well worth it.  There are many more good pickings to come.

On our bookselling site we have a great selection of kitchen garden books. Take a look.

Happy growing …. and eating.

- David Murray -
Gardening-Notes.com

ps.  Switching away from vegetables, don’t forget to take a close look at this excellent Fuchsias DVD.

Tags: broad beans, Courgettes, Fuchsias, Kitchen Garden, raised bed

When we moved into our present house I was adamant that I wanted a kitchen garden. It didn’t have one, but with a bit of effort I managed to get family agreement to digging up the part of the lawn area outside my study window. It’s been a great blessing. (See here just a few of the crops we’ve produced from it). And now this makes it possible for me to participate in a practice which has been popular here in England for getting on towards four hundred years. That is, it’s mid-February (2008) and I’m about to sow my tomato seeds.

I suppose those early Spanish conquerors of Peru could not have guessed that their transportation of this red fruit to Europe would result centuries later in a major international food industry and a widespread kitchen gardening hobby. After all, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries many people still believed that tomatoes were poisonous and grew the plants for decoration.

So then, which varieties shall I sow this year. I usually grow a few of the small and juicy Gardener’s Delight, but in recent years I’ve lost a lot of the outdoor plants to blight so am going for a change this year. A couple of years back I grew some Ailsa Craig, which gives a medium-sized fruit with great flavour and although I wouldn’t go so far as to claim that it’s blight-resistant my experience with it then was very good so I’m planning to have some this year in the greenhouse and few outdoors as well.

On the larger side I’m thinking of a return to Costoluto Fiorentino, a great Italian beefsteak variety with fruits anything up to four inches across. At the smaller end of the spectrum I’ve sometimes grown the bush tomato Balconi Red, and the cherry-sized fruits have been beautifully flavoured. Unfortunately, though, I find it such an ugly plant so this year I’m switching back to another bush variety, Garden Pearl, with which I had good success a couple of years ago growing them in plastic troughs with the plants about fifteen inches apart. Moving away now from the red varieties I think I might give blacks a miss this year, but do plan to sow some Golden Sunrise to give a little colour variety to the summer salad plate.

I’ll not turn this into an article about tomato fertilisers, but I’m hoping to experiment a little with fertilising this year. Mind you, nothing quite matches the fruits my grandfather used to produce in the 1950s. Those were the days when the milkman, the coalman and lots of others still delivered their goods from horse-drawn carts. Grandad would be out at any opportunity shovelling up the manure. I never did quite work out what else he put into the mix, but certainly his tomatoes were fed with water from a forty gallon barrel into which had gone great shovels of horse manure, soot from the chimney sweep and who knows what else. Completely unscientific, maybe, but what results! I was only about ten years old at the time, but can still almost taste the fruit as I think about it now.

Just what nutrients I’m going to feed into the compost for my tomato-growing buckets this year I haven’t yet decided. For the time being I’ll focus on the germination stage.

Click here to buy tomato seeds on-line

And here’s a very special guide to tomato growing from Australian authors whose advice has helped both hobbyist and professional tomato growers around the world.

I’ve two main points today, one relating to our general gardening site; the other to our specialist fuchsia site. Gardening-notes.com now has some additional shop pages for (i) Plants and Seeds and (ii) Raised Beds.

As Spring approaches (although given the temperatures these past few days one might be excused for thinking this to be along way off! ) the mind has to turn to seeds. A week or two ago I dug out my small seed trays and propagator, and gave them a good wash. They’re now ready for sowing and placing in my heated propagator cabinet. It’s around this time that I usually sow my tomatoes so as to give them a good start and get an early Summer crop in the greenhouse. I know that many people will have sown their onions at the end of December, especially if there’s any intention of growing for size and exhibiting in the local shows, but mine are simply for transplanting outside in the garden and growing for general family consumption, so about now is OK.

While we’re thinking about the vegetable garden it’s worth mentioning also that we’ve now included a shop section on raised bed equipment. You can, of course, build your own from timber, brick or other materials but many people like to buy ready-made structures so we’ve added this page to point to some useful products. Gardening-Notes.com also has an article on raised bed gardening.

The-Fuchsia-File, our specialist fuchsia site, is steadily growing. I still have to find more photographs to illustrate the various cultivars for which there are separate pages, but the written content is being added without waiting for these. Recent hardy fuchsia additions includes cultivars such as Preston Guild, Army Nurse, Empress of Prussia, Hawkshead and Sleepy.

That’s all for this time/ Enjoy your preparations for the coming Spring.

- David -

I’ve been promising for some weeks but things have gone very slowly. It’s a much reduced version compared with the one I’d intended to upload around now. I’ve been working very slowly recently. Click here for www.the-fuchsia-file.co.uk

It currently has brief notes on a dozen cultivars which I wrote in a relaxed style while staying with my son at Christmas time. There are some others drafted at that time still to be checked, and these should be added quite soon. Also, I’m planning to add more photos very shortly.

On the site you’ll also find links to fuchsia books, and on the home page I highlight a DVD on fuchsia cultivation produced by Thompson & Morgan in the UK. (I’ll try to find an equivalent DVD for our North American visitors shortly).

That’s it for now. Enjoy the new site as it develops,

- David -

There’s not much to say about my own garden today as apart from a quick brushing of leaves from the lawn yesteday I’ve done nothing in it for ten days.

“Disgraceful!” Yes, I can hear the chorus of condemnation coming through the screen. But don’t be too harsh on me. I really have a good excuse. For a week I was almost four hours flying time south of here, on a small island in the Atlantic off the coast of North Africa - Madeira. My wife and I have been visiting there for almost twenty years now, and enjoy the winter warmth even if it is only for a few days.

“OK, but what about some gardening? ” Well I thought I’d put up a photo for those of you who like me live in what is currently a wintry part of the world - just to make you jealous, you understand.

Yes, this was just four days ago, in the last week of November, on a very ordinary street close to our hotel about seven miles from the capital, Funchal. We didn’t visit the Botanic Gardens this year, but last year at roughly the same time I took a number of photos there of fuchsias in full flower. Since our first visit to the island in 1989 we’ve loved the place, and hope next time to be able to visit in the Spring when the full glory of its colour bursts out.

What a contrast this is to the state of things back home - all the colour gone, the winter clearing of the borders still not finished, and the greenhouse currently emptied for cleaning and fumigating. At this time of year in the English Midlands gardening is a frequently damp and dreary combination of duty and hope. Duty because it has to be kept respectably tidy and to be mulched to protect precious plants from the coming frost; hope as one looks forward to the as yet invisible benefits of all this work when the Spring comes.

It was nice to experience once again a country in which floral colour does not all but vanish for four or five months of the year. By the way, for anyone who doesn’t know much about Madeira, politically it’s an autonomous region of Portugal, “discovered” by Portuguese sailor-explorers in 1420. Funchal is due next year to celebrate the 500th anniversary of its being granted a city charter by the then king of Portugal. Geologically it’s a volcanic (long-inactive) island with rugged mountain scenery, gorgeously green, with a history of producing sugar, bananas and wine. Can’t wait to go back.

All for now,

- David -

It’s Monday evening. With my responsibilities as a church elder and lay preacher I can’t say that the typical Sunday is anything like a “day of rest”, so when at all possible I take Monday off to relax. It’s one of the advantages of being self-employed, although today I’m not sure that “relaxation” is quite the word.

Looking out of the window this morning I realised that although I’d cleared the leaves off the lawn a week ago it was again more than ankle deep in places. The leaf blower is out of action so out from the garden shed came the lawn mower. I set the blades as high as they’d go, as I didn’t want to cut the grass again at this time of year, and started to “hoover” up the leaves down the long grassy avenue of trees which runs to the road from the main body of our garden along the full length of the fence dividing us from our neighbour, the village churchyard. We have trees on both sides, ours to the right and the churchyard trees to the left, and so an enormous volume of leaves.

I’d scarcely started when “chug, chug … chug ….. chug” and the motor stopped. Out of petrol! After a cup of coffee I thought, “No, I don’t feel like going for petrol; I’ll do it the old way; I’ll sweep the leaves.” Hard work, yes! But I suppose it will have done me good to use muscle instead of brain for a while.

The other, longer-term benefit of this strenuous activity will be seen in about a year’s time when I can use the mulch from the composted leaves. I decided that I needed a bigger place to compost the leaves this year, so back to the garden shed for the reel of wire netting which has been sitting there for a year or two waiting for some constructive use, and now I’ve got an eight foot long leaf mould “bin” with netting walls and three quarters full of leaves, with more still to fall. It really doesn’t make sense to waste the leaves and lose all the lovely leaf mould that should now be produced over the coming year.

More on leaf mould at www.gardening-notes.com/articles/ .

Tags: compost, leaf mold, leaf mould, leaves, mulch

As I sit at my desk typing I can look out of the window at my vegetable plot, its raised beds and greenhouse - at the moment with a brown blizzard of leaves falling in the breeze from the horse-chestnuts . The part that I want to mention specially now is, however, just out of sight unless I lean to my left and look out at an angle. It’s the cold frame. I built it two years ago using 8-foot lengths of 6″x1″ timber and two old glazed window frames for the lid. It has served me well.

One shortcoming, though, has been its lack of insulation … until this past weekend. I managed to lay my hands on several 8ft x 4ft slabs of 2-inch thick polystyrene foam, cut in half into 4ft x 4ft pieces for ease of transport in the back of the car. They were intended originally to go in the greenhouse as internal winter walls, but there was some spare.

Cutting it to the right dimensions was quite an easy task. My old Swiss army knife came in useful once again along with a 3-metre steel rule. A cut about an inch deep across a slab, followed by a sharp snapping motion, gave clean straight edges and the sheets fit nicely between the 3″x3″ uprights of the frame.

Of course, the transparent top is not double or triple glazed, so some additional insulation was needed there, and a double layer of transparent bubble wrap worked wonders. I fixed it to the under sides of the two window frames using a staple gun and a technique I’ve used previously with good results - cutting 6-inch plastic plant labels into shorter pieces and using them as “washers”, stapling through the plastic strip into the bubble film and the wooden frame (see above); this avoids the problem of the metal staples cutting right through the thin polythene and allowing it to float free.

So, I’ve now got a freshly insulated frame, and into it very shortly will go a lot of the potted plants which are hardy enough to survive our typical English-Midlands winter under cover but not fully out of doors.

For more on preparing the garden for winter see www.gardening-notes.com/articles/autumn.html