The Hackening

It's been a busy weekend in the garden, tidying things up and trying to ripen fruits before the first frosts, harvesting what we can, and building the big raised bed for next year. I'm super excited to show that to you, it's another garden upcycle and I'm pleased with how it turned out. But it's not quite finished yet, so I'm going to be sharing that one with you next week [edit: find it here!] If you're planning on growing along with me next spring, now is a great time to start thinking about where you're going to plant things, because a little work now will save a lot of work later. We'll talk more about that next week though. 

Despite the growing season starting to wind down, there's still lots to be done in the garden in September. 

Another Tiny Harvest

We've been busy harvesting. Even our toddler was able to help with that, and he really enjoyed pulling up the carrots.

I grew them in a raised bed made from an old drawer this year. It was great in that the fine, less compacted soil prevented forking, and they were ridiculously easy to pull up. I didn't space them brilliantly, and I could've easily grown another row. I'll definitely do them in my raised bed next year, but I'll plant a lot more, and space them more carefully.  We didn't have any signs of carrot fly at all; whether I can attribute that to the fact I didn't bother thinning them, or if the height of the beds helped, or if we just got lucky, I can't say. 

Another job this week was to clear the dead sweetpeas from the cot bed frame and collect their seeds, ready for the overwintering peas to go into that bed next month.  I cut them down with scissors, leaving the roots in place to slowly release nitrogen into the soil over winter, picked off all the brown seedpods, and dumped the trimmings on top of the (now empty) old bookcase beds. I'll be adding some other bits and bobs over the next month or so to help the soil recover and replenish nutrients over winter.  Again I'll talk about that next week, when I show you my new beds, and how to fill them with nutrient rich soil for very little cash.

One of the things I did add though, was tomato leaves. It really pained me because, as you know, I have a fear of pruning, but it needed to be done. 

Tomatoes - The Hackening

The unseasonably warm weather has been great for my tomatoes. They've produced brilliantly despite basically being neglected completely since being planted. They laughed in the face of cane supports and decided to explore the garden instead, rambling off almost as much as the squashes

 They are (or rather, were) still producing flowers even though September is nearly over and the nights are getting cold. The trouble is, the plants are putting so much energy into producing leaves and new flowers and teeny new fruits, they have none left to ripen the green tomatoes already on there, and I'm worried the frosts will arrive before they have a chance to ripen.

You can ripen green tomatoes indoors using a banana or a sunny windowsill, or make green tomato chutney, but they're sweeter if they ripen on the vine and my children will eat them as if they're sweets. So it was time to get over the pruning fear and get them chopped.

By removing most of the leaves, all of the flowers (*sob*) and the tiniest fruits (*further sobs*), the plant will (hopefully!) start putting all of its energy into ripening the fruits it already has so that the seeds mature. The added light to the tomatoes should help too.

As you can see in the above picture, I just used normal scissors to trim them. You could use a sharp knife or clippers designed specifically for the garden, just so long as whatever you use is clean.  I tried to cut diagonally across the stems so that any moisture could run off instead of hanging around creating the perfect habitat for bacteria to breed.

Again we were very lucky with the tomatoes this year and have had no signs of blossom end rot or major issues with pests.  Even the pigeons have left them alone (so maybe overfeeding them has helped a little). That may be more luck than judgement, but it's possible that the eggshell I added to the compost I had them in as seedlings helped too, so I'll be doing that again next year.  I save up our eggshells through the week, then bake them for 10 mins in the oven to kill off any salmonella type bacteria that might be hanging around and stop them getting smelly, then crush them up and keep them in a jar til they're needed. You can use a pestle and mortar to crush them, but I don't have one of those so I use a mug and a rolling pin. 

Once I had massacred my tomatoes I felt a bit more confident about pruning, so I removed the dead leaves from the butternut/cucumber trellis to give the fruit some more light. I didn't realise until I did that we even had cucumbers still, but I found 2 tiny little ones hiding under the dying leaves 

We've had one butternut already (and delicious it was too, I've never eaten butternut squash before, but was given the seeds and decided to try it. I'm so glad I did, hassleback butternut is lush) but there are a couple of small ones still on the plant, and one tiny one, the size of my little finger. I probably should cut it off for the same reason I cut off all the tomato leaves and tiny fruits,  but I just didn't have the heart to. I'll leave the teeny ones and give them another feed, and see how they do.

Garden Jobs This Month

I'll be talking more about this in my upcoming post about sharing your space with Mother Nature, and getting a hand from her in return, but if leaves are falling and grasses are going to seed in your garden, you might be tempted to give your garden a big pre-winter clean up. Don't do it! Relax, put your feet up, and start planning what you want to grow next year instead. 

Leaf litter provides much needed habitat and shelter for all kinds of garden friendly bugs, and in turn that helps feed the birds over winter. The leaves also provide much needed nutrients to the soil as they rot down. We'll be collecting some of them up for our raised beds over the next month, but a tidy garden is rarely a wildlife friendly garden,  so I won't be fretting about raking every last leaf up. 

I will be planting some peas next week to have a go at overwintering them (I'm using the variety Meteor, because I've heard it's very hardy,  but I'm not very optimistic. I'll the you know how it goes), and cutting back most of the dying perennials, like the giant daisies and fireweed.

 The fireweed has been spreading its seed everywhere, so I've cut some and taken them to areas I want it to grow in next year. I'll leave a few stems when I cut them back to the ground for ladybirds to shelter in. 

The stems I do cut will be going into the raised beds, to enrich the soil and act as a mulch. If I didn't need them for that, they'd be going into the bug hotel - a (now giant) pile of garden trimmings, cut grass, leaves dropped by nearby trees and bits of wood in various states of decay that's tucked behind our compost bin under the hedge at the back of our garden. There's an old rabbit hutch somewhere under there (rabbit removed beforehand) which is an ideal hibernation spot for local hedgehogs. The birds use it as an food source and shelter all year round, and in spring it's alive with ladybirds, a very welcome visitor to any garden. If you have even a tiny space to keep a pile like that, go for it. Our wildlife needs all the help it can get, and in return, it'll help you.

I'll be harvesting the last of the apples around the autumn equinox too. We've had a lot this year, so I'll be baking apple pies for the freezer and maybe trying to work out how to dry apple slices, if they last that long. My children think the best place for long term food storage is in their bellies and when it comes to fruit and veg I'm inclined to agree with them.

And of course the most important job this month: enjoy the last of the warm weather and sunny days before the dark half of the year. 

Half the fun of gardening is in stopping to smell the flowers.

Merry Mabon my lovelies, happy growing x

In The Beginning...

The Kitchen Witch's Garden

Most of the people reading this blog will have come over from twitter, where my kitchen garden journey began under the hashtag #VsBoringGardenTweets. Those folk will have to forgive me for going over old ground here while I catch you all up with the story so far.

I moved to my current home about 10 years ago. Before this place we lived in a tiny flat with a shared garden we weren't allowed to cultivate, so when we were given a small front yard and medium sized back garden we were really excited. Ha!

We planted three "dwarf" fruit trees (more on those later) out back, then focused on trying to make the front garden neater. I had visions of restoring what had obviously once been a beautiful cottage garden. My dreams were quickly swallowed by bindweed, brambles, and ground elder. In the end I rescued what I could (a few of the giant daisies and the fuchsia) and plonked them in the back garden, then ripped up what was left, covered it in weed suppressing material and topped it with gravel. I was gutted - I try hard to work with Mother Nature rather than against her, and a sea of stone chips isn't exactly environmentally friendly. It felt like a huge fail, and that my dream of wandering through my kitchen garden, deciding what was for tea based on what was ripe, was destined to stay just that-a dream.

Disgruntled, disenchanted, and more than a little daunted, I ignored the back garden completely. For about a decade.

You know what happens when you ignore a garden for 10 years? Mother Nature gets to work.

The pic above shows about a quarter of the garden before I started working on it, but the photo doesn't really do it justice. The brambles were taller than me (I'm 5'3") and as thick as my wrist. I had no money, no skills or expertise, and no tools to speak of.

The advantage to starting with an absolute mess though, is that whatever you do, you can't really make things worse. Armed with some kitchen scissors, a small hacksaw, and a lot of determination, I went in. A full-on smallholding wasn't going to create itself (and a fully self sufficient one is likely not possible on the little land I have) but I could make a start.

I didn't know I was going to be blogging our journey to a kitchen garden when I started, so unfortunately I didn't take many pictures of the clearing out process.

I chopped everything to the ground with my trusty kitchen scissors and an elderly hacksaw. It won't lie and say it was easy, it was horrendous. A few days in though, I was lent an electric hedge trimmer. That made the process much quicker and, despite having a budget of basically nothing, I decided that was an investment worth making, so I bought one of my own. That made the whole process much easier and quicker and, despite having cut myself to ribbons on brambles and not having a single speck of my body that wasn't covered in nettle rash, I managed to get most of the brambles, ivy, nettles, and bindweed cut to ground level. I felt like a superhero, and my garden felt huge.

I had no idea what to do next, so I appealed to twitter to give me no-budget garden tips. Turns out, the gardening community are absolutely adorable and love nothing more than helping a clueless novice like me get growing.

I was inundated with advice, and given some seeds, gloves and even some gardening tools. Definitely easier than trying to dig with a tablespoon and prune with kitchen scissors.

My shed is currently full of old junk that I couldn't take to the tip, so I decided to reuse what I could, both to save money, and as an attempt to make less of an impact on the natural world. I didn't take pics of the process (although I'll try to make you a step by step guide for a future post) but I turned a couple of broken drawers and old bookshelves into raised beds/planters, and turned my youngest's old cot into a pea trellis.

When I was done clearing and building some beds, it looked something like this:

Hard to believe it's the same section of garden, isn't it?

The path was already there (which was news to me), but the rest if it was built by me, over the course of a couple of weeks.  In the top left of the picture, you can see the base of the cot leaning against the house. I dug the bottom of it in to stabilise it and that will (hopefully!) be the trellis for my jasmine plants to climb up.

Below that in the pic, still on the left, you can see the old bookcases I made into raised beds.  The bed next to them is where the giant daisies and fuchsia from the front garden were dumped, and you can see a planter with some strawberries in, and a green bag that has seed potatoes in.

On the top right of the image is the pea trellis I made out of the cot sides (I'll do a detailed post about that in the near future) and below that is the raised beds made of old drawers. It wasn't too bad as a quick bodge, but I'll be doing my future raised beds differently.

The garden is a huge work in progress still. We've learned what works, what definitely doesn't, and why, pretty as it undoubtedly is, we hate bindweed. We've had some excellent crops and some epic fails, and learned a lot about the needs of our particular garden. I'll try and catch you up with the story so far in future posts.

Next year, I want to go all out, and turn about half the garden into a fully functioning allotment. I till have no idea what I'm doing (although I feel more confident in my ignorance now), I still have no money, and this very "helpful" beast

has decided that he really likes digging too. But the benefits, for my mental health, for my physical health, for my children's newly found tolerance of vegetables, and for the local wildlife, far outweighs the nettle rash, bad backs, and epic pintrest fails.

I've loved growing some food this year, and feeling closer to the earth. Hopefully now I have the skills under my belt to scale everything up -or learn a few hundred more ways that don't work.

Come along with me as I battle bindweed and brambles and try to turn my neglected garden into a functional kitchen garden on a shoestring, without upsetting Mother Nature too much.