Our allotment garden looked productive in the snow today with onions, spinach, kale and parsley growing well. In fact, the parsley in my hotbox is doing very well indeed, which is most encouraging.
I added the two "Christmas tree" rosemary plants bought from Morrisons for my New Year's Day table-top photography. An all white flower setting with Christmas roses, primula obconica and hyacinths and my two rosemary pots So my setting has lasted very well and I'm jolly pleased. And at least I could feel busy with my indoor plants and think my gardening year had already started.
We dug over and prepared the lower part of our main allotment site, adding top soil and a mass of gathered leaves, which have now mostly been taken down by in-house worms. I hope our soil will be greatly improved from this work. Of course, we've not had a hard frost yet but with the present weather in mind, presumably this will happen sometime soon.
Other areas of the allotment still need attention ie clearance and digging which I hope to start working on soon. In the meantime, we're picking spinach, kale and parsley. The top two composters have rotted down well and we've made this year's first addition of kitchen scraps, thus t he process can begin all over again.
A bo
Saturday 22 September 2018
This is me everyone xxx
GrowGirl gets growing in her garden xxx
I love to have flowers and herbs in my life. They
are a passion. Their colours, scent, forms and history excite my curiosity and
imagination. I love colours, the whole dazzling spectrum, and particularly
complementary opposites like purple and that glorious pinky-peach-orange
combination. Terracotta is another top favourite for me - just think of all
those terracotta flower pots, of all shapes and sizes - simply fabulous.
Vegetables and fruit are great for colour
combinations too - aubergine, carrots, beans, red onions, tomatoes plus plums,
gooseberries, raspberries, strawberries and rhubarb. Oh and quinces !
Gardening and growing veggies is both exciting and
disappointing and always hard work. Little and often is the rule for allotment
keeping so daily visits are a must, whatever the weather. Flower gardening
needs are demanding too - all that deadheading, tying-up, staking and picking -
just fabulous.
You even get to bring your work home - flowers to
enjoy, herbs to sniff and appreciate and veggies to eat . Just perfect. And
totally forget about the digging and resultant backache. My response to this
problem of aching back is to do away with as much digging as possible, just
follow the “no-dig” gardener Charles Dowding, who’s done very little digging
for quite some time now. Monty Don, my favourite gardening guru is a fan, I
believe.
My grandfather Harry, had a Victoria Plum tree as
his prize garden possession, which stood on a small area of grass in the centre
of his long garden In season, he counted the fruit daily and woe-betide anyone
caught picking his precious fruit. There are plum trees in my veg garden and
the golden fruit is delicious, apart from those infected with a nasty pest. I’m
very busily clearing away fallen fruit from around the tree in a vain attempt
to lessen the pest’s impact on next year’s crop.
I’m currently experimenting with Perlite and
Vermiculite in my compost mix for new cuttings I’m attempting to strike, am
very keen on making good compost and have for the first time ever, grown a
squash weighing-in at 10lb. 9oz...and more are growing rapidly on my veg. site.
So that’s what GrowGirl is all about - growing,
having fun on my allotment sites, my veg. garden and greenhouse plants and
planting...and growing wild flowers. I have completed a horticultural and
agricultural course, have gardened for many years and love to write about my
green-fingered activities xxx
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