I was shocked to open my bedroom curtains this morning and reveal this monster menacingly sat on my windowsill ! It's by far my most successful Alpine Red and White plant, grown from seed.
I've since transplanted it into a 9/10 cm terracotta pot so it might prosper even more!
Last week I noticed that 5 of my largest toms had well and truly outgrown their pots so I repotted them into 9/10 cm terracotta pots, possibly their final move for the year.
The five are a mix of Costoluto Fiorentina, Ildi, Orange Berry and Tigerella. I've thought of moving them outdoors but I want to make sure the last cold snaps are behind us.
My desk at work was feeling a bit barren and since I have a few dozen strawberry seedlings growing all around my house I decided to take one into work.
It may not be the most obvious desk plant but it gives me the opportunity to bring my current hobby-borderline-obsession into my often mundane 9-5.
I find them the most interesting infant plants to look at and they seem to change a bit everyday. Here I can nurture this one plant, I've also got a strong blue frequency light lamp that I've been treating it to to make it a bit of a science project and see of this boosts the growth at all.
Just a quick update on the state of my first attempt at raspberries! Massive growth since my last blog on the subject with an erruption of green coming from all 5 of my canes.
As I've never attempted them before and not done tons of research on the subject, I'll be keeping a close eye on these!
I'm sure I didn't see any flowers this early last year! But under a close inspection yesterday, there they were! Numberous little bell shaped flowers over my two well established standard blueberry bushes.
It'll be interesting to see when the Pink Lemonade variety's come in.
I must not have looked at them properly for a few days but today I noticed that my various blueberry/pink lemonade blueberry bushes have errupted with lots of green leaves sprouting everywhere.
I can look forward to seeing their interesting flowers in a couple of months. The 3 latest blueberry bushes are still very small but showing some green growth (I'm still not expecting any fruit from them in the first year).
Just a quick update on the Pineberry front! I had two more plant boxes full of plants that I grew from runners from my original plants last year. They didn't fruit but I cared for them all season and then overwintered them in my garage.
I pruned out all the dead leaves and removed the old mulch, revealing some lovely new green growth! Both boxes appear to have been successful. The only one that seems to have failed are from the plant that I gave my mum (in a hanging basket).
I was walking down the seasonal aisle of my local Asda and spotted this 9 compartment veg planter for £4.50! I was thinking about planting some veg today so this was the perfect option.
It's around 1m x 1m and 25cm deep, opened out it was bigger than I expected. I filled it with all the compost I had - 100 litres - but it could've easily taken more.
For now I've planted in 5/9 sections, leaving the rest open for planting more in a bit to keep the crops coming!
My choices here are: Mustard Bite salad leaves (which we very much enjoyed last year), Atlas Carrots (a small round variety), Bright Lights Radish (small, round and in an assortment of colours), French Breakfast Radish (sub shaped veg that are red and white in colour and very tasty) and Apache Onions (a deep red variety of spring onion).
Finally because this is on the ground and there's salad leaves involved, etc, I put a thin border of the bark mulch around the outside edges to deter slugs.
My other major birthday present comes from my lovely mum! I have wanted a cherry tree for a while now for a few reasons: I didn't previously have a fruit tree, I'm a big cherry fan, they are an expensive treat to buy in supermarkets and they are renowned for their attractive blossom.
But I couldn't just have a standard cherry tree in my garden! So when I was browsing Suttons Seeds' website and stumbled across a duo grafted tree that produced both Bigarreau Napoleon (red-skinned, yellow flesh) and Variks Black (a black cherry), I knew this was the tree I had been looking for.
I optimistically put it on the bottom of my birthday list, not for a minute actually expecting anyone to get it for me! But I must have been on my best behaviour this year as mum surprised me with it Thursday evening.
It came as a bare root plant so I added a little water to the bag and stored it in the garage until today. I prepared the ground where it was to be planted, removing all weeds (there were some healthy strawb plants there that I recovered) and turning over.
I mixed in some extra compost and a whole 50 litres of farmyard manure. I then soaked the roots for 4 hours as directed. I then dug a hole deep enough to bury the roots comfortably and then gently worked the finest soil around the roots first.
I topped the whole area with wood chip/bark mulch to keep in moisture, to suppress weeds and deter pests and to give it a nice look to the corner of my garden!
I couldn't help myself! I had promised myself that I wouldn't buy any more strawberry plants but when I walked passed some very healthy looking Honeoyes, I broke that promise.
I was flicking through my recently purchased RHS Good Fruit & Veg Guide and this variety caught my eye; not only was it an RHS champion breed but it is also an early-cropped with fruit appearing from early/mid summer (my others fruit a bit later on in the season).
They were £2.50 for three plants at Homebase so I bought a couple of packs and put all six of them in a long planter, planted with Miracle Gro multipurpose. One plant has already flowered and had 3 immature strawberries on it.
I had been meaning to do so for the last few days but it's been a busy week, so with the first sunny day off in recent memory, my wife & I hit the garden and tackled a backlog of repotting my alpine seedlings.
I had around 15 Alpine Red & White and 4 Yellow Wonder strawbs that were outgrowing the spots on my windowsill propagator.
I was a very lucky boy this year receiving a lot of nice pressies for my recent birthday. Among them were two great gifts for my garden project!
From my dad comes this new greenhouse which I finally got round to assembling today whilst enjoying the sun. It was fairly simple to put together with around 5 different types of rod and 3 or 4 sockets.
I found the best sunny position in our garden and pinned it down using the metal pins provided. It's a good size and I can comfortably walk in and stand up right. It comes with two shelves either side so I just need to decide what to stick in there first!
I bought my five canes a few weeks ago from the local Garden Centre. At £10 it was a bit extravagant but I had been dying to get hold of some All Golds as soon as I spotted them in a Suttons Seeds catalogue.
I planted them straight away and I had previously noticed a small about of green shooting through the soil but I spotted this today and was very excited. I still need to construct a support for them but my dad has promised to give me a hand!
Earlier this year I bought a couplr packs of interesting beans (Dwarf Amethyst and Fire Tongue) and tasty sugar snap peas.
The Fire Tongues can't be planted til next month but the others are fine from March and since it's a bit warmer, I decided to give them a go.
A couple of months ago I bought a six cane planter of ebay for around £6/7 delivered, not a bad price but this only included the container, no cases or anything else. I already had a stash but I went and bought a couple of big packs of Miracle Gro Multipurpose compost and filled the container, I added a layer of John Innes for seeds then I pushed in the six canes (I actually added a central 7th) and tied them all together with garden twine.
I planted the seeds in 2 rows, approximately 15cm between seeds. I did about 8-10 Sugar Snap & Amethysts.
I just had a mammoth repotting session whilst watching The Walking Dead. I planted a number of Spectrum Peppers seeds (Johnsons) that I purchased last year.
Most of them successfully germinated and grew well so now I have an abundance of mini pepper plants to accomodate! Hopefully I will experience the full rainbow of tasty peppers later on in the year!
Just another quick progress update. This is definitely my best boy so far on the tomato stakes! It dwarfs the other surviving plants from the same batch.
Just a small bit of progress. I planted around 6 Sungold F1 tomato seeds, they were an expensive purchase at 10 seeds for around £3.25 but I bought a couple of plants last year and they were the best tomato I had ever tasted.
Around 4 germinated, one poorly and these two were ready for repotting today.
With the sun shining for more than 5 mins, I decided to properly check on my overwintering strawberries. I trimmed away all the dead brown leaves and a lot of the straw mulch to see if they had survived and what re-growth had taken place.
To my delight I found that all of the regular strawb had survived the winter in my garage and it appears that it was worth my efforts watering them every 3 days or so for the past months. Another bonus was that I found a plant label so I now know the variety of half my plants - Elsanta - a highly recommended variety to try, considered by the RHS to be an improvement on the Cambridge Favourite. The most successful is pictured.
I'm not sure yet how two pots of strawberries have faired. I gathered a large number of plantlets from runners last year and repotted them up 5 to a medium sized square pot. I cleared them in the same manor but couldn't see any real green growth as of yet.
I also cleared a couple of pots of Pineberries, one was my original plant which still had some green leaves from last year and the other was entirely formed of plantlets from runners (which again had little regrowth).
Lastly for today, I also cleared my original Leo Alba White Alpine Strawberry which still had a lot of green from last season but also plenty of new growth, identifiable by reddish stems.
I decided to plant my next batch of seeds today. As I said in my last post, I had mixed results with the tomato seeds that I had planted earlier. A lot of the plant grew too leggy and had to be binned.
I wondered if the compost I had used was a factor so I went out and purchased a 25 litre bag of John Innes Seed Sowing Compost (£5.99, Homebase).
I planted a large selection of seeds in the spaces I had in my 4 windowsill propagators. The fruit/veg I planted included:
Toms:
Ildi
Red Pear
San Marzano 2
Tigerella
Orange Berry
F1 Sun Gold
Sweet 'n' Neat Yellow
Green Zebra
Tom-like:
Tomatillo
Strawbs:
Toscana
Yellow Wonder
Pepper:
Orange Baby
Gusto Purple (Chili)
Hopefully I should have some good action. I would love to be able to enjoy such a mixed tomato salad this summer!
I bought a multipack of tomato seeds last year to plant this year. I went for Johnsons Seeds 6 variety pack, which consisted of Orange Berry, Costoluto Fiorentino, Red Pear, San Marzano 2, Ildi and Tigerella.
I planted loads of them in a standard multi-purpose compost at the beginning of the season but had very mixed results. Most of them germinated but grew too long too fast and became 'leggy' only 8 of my original batch were worth transplanting to individual pots.
I will see what happens with them but I've set another batch of seeds in some better quality compost specifically for seeds to see if they fair better... See next post!
