Well my thoughts turn to seeds anyway.
I’ve finally ordered seeds from Real seeds * today and while I’m waiting I’ve sown some tomatoes, chilli peppers, parsley and cress.
I’ve so many tom ‘Marmande’ seedlings that I’ve given some away on freeshare and I’ll take some to work too as there’s a few keen gardeners who swap plants there. I also intend to grow a few different varieties of toms and see if I do better this year than last. In fact I’ll do a list of my veg growing last year:
- Potatoes – salad types charlotte and pink fir apple, these were great, I didn’t buy a spud all summer but we did get a little blight.
- Tomatoes- gardener’s delight: was a disaster, after the previous hot summer I tried to grow these outdoors and got virtually no fruit. Tumbler, a hanging basket type: got better crops but not tasty enough to be worthwhile.
- Leeks- musselborough excellent, self sufficient in leeks.
- Parsnips- lovely, when you lift them out of the ground they just smell so – parsnipy!
- Dwarf french beans – kinghorn wax, not a great sucess I suspect it was too cold try again with more protection.
- squash – utter failure, slug attack
- courgette- grew two in gro-bags, bigs crops as usual.
- Sweetcorn – Started them off in April, they grew away smashing, pollinated but just didn’t ripen, chopped them down in November and fed then to the guinea pigs, who loved them. I’m going to start them off a lot earlier this year.
- Salad- various things such as red salad bowl and rocket, good, self sufficient from April to November.
- Onions- grew a red variety from sets and although they bolted I was happy with them. Spring onions however failed to germinate don’t know why.
- Garlic- planted this in wee spots all over the place- good crops
- Sweet pepper (Capsicum)- california wonder Didn’t find Renfrewshire wonderful! Took the one surviving plant inside in September and managed to ripen one pepper, it was lovely tho’
- Strawberries- cambridge favourite mmm, tasty, gorgeous about 6 plants grown from an original 50p sad case rescue’s runners well worth it. Six more plants of an unnamed variety from Lidl which were exceptionally tasty. These probably benefited from a very hot April last year. I’ve loads of runners of both of these so looking forward to a good crop.
As for other fruits, my dear OH usually takes care of that. We have blueberries that are 10 year old plants and they were dug up and came with us when we moved house. In their second season here they gave us huge amounts of fruit. The varieties are collins, bluecrop, herbert, goldtraub, chandler and eek I can’t remeber the others. I think it’s chandler that’s my favourite, truly blue berries and really huge as well. In the past we’ve tried top hat in patio pots but I wouldn’t recommend it, small fruits which are pretty tasteless. I want to add ozarkblue this year as ken muir says it’s the best.
* Way-hay finally worked out how to do that, only took 3 months!
Filed under: Gardening | Tagged: allotment, fruit, Gardening, grow your own, vegetables
