Garden stuff

[ewt]

I need to do a lot more weeding.

I wnat to put black plastic and newspaper (and rocks to weigh it all down) on top of some of the areas I want to turn into vegetable beds; doing this for a month should kill off a lot of weeds growing there and make it a lot easier to dig. If I can get it done this week then I should still actually be able to dig the ground.

I'm going to need a proper compost heap as well as the enhanced hot one. The enhanced hot one is lovely, and just about handles all our kitchen waste, but it isn't big enough to take any of the garden waste. There is a lot of garden waste to go into a warm-ish heap. I need to figure out where to put it, though, and get it set up.

There is one container in the back garden that I could use for retting nettles. It's full of various sorts of garden rubbish; it was full when I got here. At this point I think I might just end up taking the contents and putting them into a binbag for the bin men; they're all mixed up, some organic waste and some not, and I seriously lack the time to sort it out properly. Besides, there are probably spiders in there.

There is also a big plastic garbage bin (full of slits, unfortunately, so no good for nettle retting unless I can repair it somehow - duct tape maybe? or just lining it with a bag?) full of clippings from the quince tree. I think they're mostly too thick to compost, but I'm wondering about chopping them up small and using them as a mulch. That will be a hard afternoon's work with loppers I don't even own yet, but should be fairly useful.

The quince and the forsythia both need to be cut back hard. I'm vaguely considering getting rid of the forsythia entirely - I can't eat it, it isn't useful medicinally, and the back corner of the garden is no place for a hedge. There don't seem to be any birds or other wildlife living in it (that'll be down to the cats that frequent our garden, then - I've counted five different ones on various occasions), so I'm not too worried about habitat loss if I get rid of it. I would like to grow more useful things there. However, I'm not sure how to get rid of it.

I also have a bit in the front garden where there used to be hedge and it has been cut down to the ground but the roots have not been removed. This would be an ideal place for lavendar, but there are roots in the way. Any ideas on how I should get rid of these? I have a feeling it involves a small saw and a lot of sweat.

I'm very pleased with the butternut squash so far. It has spread out beautifully over the whole front garden, which has helped keep the weeds down. Also there is an abundance of female flowers now; if they all produce fruit I'm going to be able to eat a serious amount of squash this winter, which is not bad going considering what butternut squash costs from supermarkets and how much the seeds cost me.

I really enjoyed the courgettes ksta gave me from her garden, so I want to grow some of those next year too. I think trying melons might be a little ambitious.. having said that, I have four or five squash plants this year and the yield is looking like it'll be pretty tremendous, so maybe if I had one melon, one courgette, and a few different varieties of squash (including pumpkins, YUM) it would work alright and I'd have more variety. I think it would be fun to grow gourds and then hollow them out and dry them and use them as bowls, but I'm not sure where I'd get seeds or how well it would work in this country. It'd be fun though.

I'd like a second water butt, for the front garden. The one in the back got empty a few times this summer, it wouldn't have if I had higher storage capacity. Space is very limited and the back garden is really my main growing area because there is less paving, it would be ace to get a water butt in the front too though (it could go where the bin is and the bin could come forward a bit). If I had more space, I'd have a huge network of loads of water butts, but I don't have.

The landlady said she would get someone to haul the rickety falling-down shed away, but it is still there. I need to phone her about this (among other things), because the shed a) makes lots of shade and b) takes up a lot of ground space that would be better used for vegables. Maybe I can take it apart myself and stick it under the picnic table (which really also needs to go!), anyone want to help with this?

I don't know what garden equipment is in the locked shed, it looked like mostly DIY stuff to me when I saw it last.

The lean-to area beside the locked shed is still full of random crap; I'd like it to be full of my bicycle instead. Moving the stuff out of it is going to prove highly impractical until the falling-down shed is gone, though.

It's coming up to time to plant things like raspberry canes and blueberries. I need to prepare the soil and acquire the plants. I also need to look at some of the 'gardening calendar' things in my various gardening books and figure out what I should be doing at this time of year. I know I've missed the window for some of the winter things, already.

The three tomato plants continue to provide me with a small tomato salad once or twice a week. There are some really big ones coming up to ripening now. YUM.

One of the Scotch Bonnet chili plants has an actual little teensy tiny chili on it. This is exciting, I didn't know if I'd be getting any fruit on it at all. I think I will probably have to bring it inside to ripen, if the other pepper plant is anything to go by. I don't mind this though; Solanaceae are perennials in their native habitat.

I know growing potatoes is generally done from, um, potatoes. Is it possible to save seeds from the fruits (yes, potato flowers make fruits, and yes, mine have, no, they're not good to eat afaik)? Would it be safe to eat the tubers grown from such a plant? I'm curious. Seeds are a lot easier to store, and keep better, than potatoes.

Time for some lunch.

Comments

[zaniyah.livejournal.com]

We have a forsythia in our current garden. I think you can only get rid of it by cutting it down to the ground and then digging the roots out. I think they are used in chinese herbalism sometimes but they are quite poisonous and not used in Western herbal medicine AFAIK.

You are right, the only way of getting rid of those roots is a saw and hard work.

I've never heard of anyone growing potatoes from their fruits, only from the smaller tubas (the ones too small to bother preparing for eating). The fruits themselves are poisonous. (You probably know this already, but the potato is a member of the nightshade family, as is the tomatoe. You may have noticed that the fruits and flowers are similar to those of woody nightshade.) Usually it is best to just pluck off the flowers from the potatoes so that the plant puts all its energy into growing the tubas instead of the fruits.

I have a load of seeds I was going to put in my garden that I can't now - sweetcorn, peas, calendula, poppies, foxgloves, which I can post to you if you would like.

[ewtikins.livejournal.com]

Ah, I forgot about picking the flowers off the potato plants. I think I'd best do that tomorrow. Yes, I know they are nightshade blah blah blah, but thanks for telling me anyway.

Maybe I should save some of the fruit and see what happens if I do grow it from seed.

I'd be very glad of those seeds if you don't mind posting them.