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

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