The gardening week (February - Week 4, 2024)

The production line begins!

Feb 24, 2024

Gardening problems this week

Each week I will highlight any problems I’m having.

This week I’ve spent an hour in the kitchen garden and one of the jobs I’ve been doing is feeding all of the blueberries, I’ve already fed the rest of the fruit. Anyway the problem was two of the blueberries had rotted off at soil level. It seems even blueberries don’t like 3 months of constant rain
I’ve not lost any more lettuces this week, but all of my Asian greens have gone to seed, or are in the process. Most varieties of Asian greens go to seed in February, from a September sowing and as soon as that process starts they stop feeding their leaves, which rapidly decline in quality. Tatsoi leaves cling on to life better than most. Joi Choi doesn’t go to seed as quickly. The ‘problem’ I’m highlighting this week is getting my successions right. My replacement Asian greens were sown 12th December, they are only just big enough to take a light harvest, maybe I should have sown them 2 weeks earlier, but then would I have increased the speed at which they too went to seed? Getting timings right in winter can be tricky
Finally I was ‘admiring’ my new field bean bed at home, which a few weeks ago had been my penultimate parsnip bed. Then I noticed that it was in fact still a parsnip bed, lots of little parsnip leaves were poking up. These tiny parsnip plants had avoided detection because they were late germinating seeds. I typically sow 3 seeds to a location and snip off all but one. Sometimes - quite often it seems - some of the seeds don’t germinate until the earlier germinating seedlings are growing strongly and I then I miss them and they grow on hidden under the lush foliage. Sometimes my plant and forget approach to gardening catches me out.
Debbie has parsley growing on the kitchen windowsill, frequent watering of warm soil often results in fungus gnats and this year they haven’t disappointed. I’m quite likely to just throw this plant out now, because I have spares, but prevention is easier than cure. I always try and let the compost surface dry out between watering and that seems to help, but you only need one plant to be saturated and they can quickly spread. I also try to keep a production line going, start in the warm house, but quickly move anything that I can into the cooler greenhouse, they can’t survive in an unheated greenhouse. Inside I have yellow sticky paper up in all of my growing spaces, to help to spot any problems early

What I’d Change - non-standard beds

This is a new series - that will take me well into spring - where I will share all the things that I’d change about my allotment, if I had the chance to do it again.

When I first got my plot I made new standard sized beds for 80% of it and then got a friend to lug all of the old beds that I made for the garden, to the allotment and I re-used these.

Reusing those old beds saved me about £100 in timber, but they caused me so many problems over the years because they weren’t the same size as the new beds. This was annoying enough, but I knew that I would eventually replace them, because they were already a few years old.

What I didn’t think about at the time was what I would do when I replaced them. What I actually ended up doing was putting in two double sized standard bed, but of course, a double sized bed wouldn’t fit, so I ended up with new beds that are also non-standard. So for 8 years now I’ve not been able to use any of my standard low tunnels or cold frame tops on 20% of my beds.

What I’ve eventually done is made two smaller cold frame tops, which combine with my standard ones, to fully cover these slightly smaller beds, but it still annoys the neat freak in me.

What I should have done is:

Make standard beds right from the start, because that £100 represented just 1 week’s harvest value in winter and 3 days for the rest of the year, it really wasn’t worth thinking about
The non-standard wood could easily have been used to make the compost bins, or any number of other projects over the years
I should also have thought through, how my plot might need to evolve over the years

Right now I’m doing just that. I’m toying with lots of ideas for how my plot will change over the next decade or more. My objectives are clear:

Over the next 10 years I want to reduce the routine maintenance effort on the plot by about half, so that’s weeding, composting, watering etc. I also want to level out the work, so I can get through a lot of the drudge work in winter
I want to take some of the plot out of production and to create more work space for projects, more family space for meals and more play space for kids and grown ups
I want to gradually reduce the amount of food that we harvest from my plot and reduce - slightly - the number of permanently covered beds that I have and use more temporary covers
I will almost certainly end up planting more fruit trees and bushes
I’d quite like to eventually take down my shed and extend my polytunnel by another 3m. I should have really done this when I first put up the polytunnel. I will probably build another shed where the little greenhouse is

This is all part of my long term strategy to garden smarter, not garden harder as I get older. This isn’t because I don’t want to spend time gardening as I age, it’s because I see too many gardeners give up their plots because they can’t cope as they get older.

Improvements

A few more rainy days have allowed me to finish first versions of my growing guides for different types of garden. My objective with these is to provide good sowing dates for each type of garden and to provide guidance on looking after the seedlings and planting for each type of garden too. I’ve now written the guides for all seven garden types, in addition to the sowing date databases that I finished last week. Here’s the list of garden types and this link takes you to the actual guides in my eBook.

Heated conservatory (10c or above year round)
Heated greenhouse (10c or above from April until November)
Frost free greenhouse (above 0c, in practice above 2c to be safe)
Unheated greenhouse/polytunnel (as cold as outside at night, using fleece, using fleece when needed)
Unheated low tunnel/cold frame (as cold as outside at night, using fleece when needed)
Outside under fleece (generally frost free in spring)
Outside with no protection

The next stage in this little project is to add similar information into my database for sizes of garden, so that I can create prioritised lists of veg types for gardens of different sizes and types for each season. I’m not yet sure how achievable this will be.

Old new stuff

Here’s a few reminders of things that are already in the database, but that anyone who’s started to follow me recently might not know about.

My top ten list of veggies to grow.

Here’s the database view that goes with the video:

Yes, I know there’s more than 10 on this list, I hate sticking to silly rules, including self imposed ones!

Winter planning overview

In last week’s newsletter I included planning suggestions for what to sow and grow in winter, you can find that here. I’m working hard on my guides for spring and they will be greatly improved, now that I’m nearly done adding in the ‘infrastructure’ that I need in my database, so bear with me.

Sowings for February

Here’s my new sowing guide for February, significantly updated since the preview that I did last month. You can find my database for February here too.

Sowings for the week

Here’s everything sown to date, in more detail.

I’m pushing back my sowings for this week, until next week, because the sun’s out now and I’m busy enjoying it.

Not germinated yet

My big recent failure this year has been last year’s Zebrune seeds, but I had fresh seeds ready to go and I did a test sowing two week’s early too. So now my Zebrune seeds are finally germinating! So the only thing I’m impatiently waiting for are the early carrots, but I have loads of October sown carrots growing strong so I can afford to wait.

Germinated this week

I’m relived to report that all of my main crop onions and shallots are now breaking surface. I don’t know how well they’ve germinated yet, but I will in a week. I give them another few days in the house and then move them into the greenhouse where it’s cooler and bright.

Pricked out

Nothing this week, the peppers are ready now, but then

Potted on this week

I potted on these potatoes into their final 25 litre pots early in the week and they’ve already broken surface in the greenhouse. This bodes well for an early harvest of swift in early April. Harvesting this early is not usually a priority as I have plenty of last years potatoes in their pots, but the mild winter means these have broken dormancy and started to sprout. I doubt they will last all through March, so the race is now on!

Planted this week

Here’s everything planted this year so far.

Waiting to be planted out

As we approach March, my ‘read to plant’ list is rapidly expanding and will probably double in size over the next two weeks. Fortunately as we are still in February the plants will hold for weeks in the cold of the greenhouse, so there’s no desperate rush. I have a few beds that will come free my mid-March, so I think I will be ok.

You can see all of the details here, note the links to growing guides have been added.

Sowing’s for next week

Here’s what I’m hoping to sow next week. It’s going to be a busy week. Fortunately all of my seedlings have germinated, so my germination space is empty and I can keep moving. I think this is pretty much everything that I need to sow for spring now, so my focus will switch to summer soon!

March is by busiest sowing month and I’m looking forward to it, but March and April do feel like a bit of a production line

You can find all of the details for February here, make sure to look at the notes section, and the details of where I’m sowing and where I’m planting etc.

Growing guides for February

This link takes you to all of my monthly guides, where you can find a lot more than just my growing guides. I particularly like the list of videos produced in the relevant month in years gone by. Click here for February’s guides.

Because I’m always experimenting you might find me sowing a few things that are not on this list, but you can always look those up from the complete list of guides, which you can find here.

Downloadable resources

Last year I experimented with providing downloadable versions of my database, I’ve updated these below with the latest information. Please feel free to give me feedback on these.