Is that your pile of dead leaves?

Well, the net result of spending 2 months on the frontline at the other end of the country was that everything in the tunnel and everywhere else pretty much died except for the runner beans.

The runner beans had a bumper year on the other hand and clearly benefited from the lack of supervision.  We had soooo many beans.  I even salted some, tho to be honest, looking at them now, I really hope we never get that hungry.  They've kind of turned into a vegetable 'dwarf bread equivalent'.

The bottle of beans apart, last year was pretty much a bust so on with the motley, a new year beckons.

I haven't ventured out into the garden yet,  there's a bit of a pile up in the utility room and I don't have any mountaineering gear to hand.  I have, however, recieved the first of the gardening catalogues and spent many happy hours leafing through it and deciding which seeds to go look for on the internetz.

So after extensive research (playing on the net) and cross referencing (googling stuff) and considerable agonising, I have put in my first order for this year's seeds.  I am attempting to be more disciplined about it than usual by making a list of things I want to grow and dividing it into sowing months.   Thus all the seeds on the order are sowable now.  In theory this will stop the usual May bottleneck where I suddenly have more plants than space LOL.

So here it is:

	Tomato Black Russian 50 seeds
	Tomato Gardener's Delight 100 seeds
	Tomato Roma VF 100 seeds
	Aubergine Black Beauty 200 seeds
	Hot Pepper - Habanero Orange 25 seeds
	Hot Pepper - Tepin 10 seeds
	Sweet Pepper D'asti Giallo 50 seeds
	Onion Braunschweigi 300 seeds
	Cauliflower All The Year Round 200 seeds
	Mangetout Pea Oregon Sugar Pod 200 seeds Strawberry white soul Strawberry regina

Keep on swimming, swimming, swimming....

This one fits in  around the end of last May.

You probably know the title from Finding Nemo, sung by Dory, the very absent minded fishy freind of Nemo's Dad.  Why fish on a gardening blog? Well, that's kinda where my head is at right now.  Since my last post some idiot has put a bunch of holidays all close together and what with processing up and down the country to various relatives and working and whatnot, my brain forgot my blog password. Duh!  But I've remembered it now, as you can see.

Many things have happened, stuff has grown, I put my growhouse out in the yard and we had a gale and it fell over so many things are now randomised, which is always good for a laugh at planting out time.  I can identify things generically, but I have several varieties of tomato, some experimental, and a bunch of different cucurbitae that I can no longer tell apart (Joy!).  Suffice to say, the growhouse is now firmly attached to the fence, but the damage is done, and I should have tied it down in the first place, it's not like it didn't happen last year (just keep swimming.....that's a nice castle!.......)

The polytunnel, however, is being an absolute life saver, my beans are romping away and it's starting to look like a little enclosed jungle.  I've been short on time of late, trying to earn a living, so everything all needs potting up and planting out now and I haven't even ventured as far as the allotment yet.  Still, I saw this really cool thing about making pots out of newspaper on the Chelsea Flower Show so I'm going to give that a try.

So much stuff, so little day.  I can hear you saying 'Well stop blathering on about stuff and do some gardening' and I totally agree with you, so if you want me I'll be in the polytunnel..............

The End of the World, Part 2

The one or two people that actually read any of my blogs will be aware that I have not updated them for a while.  This was sadly due to a family bereavement which basically took the rug out from under us for a while.  I am hopeful that as the world returns to normal updates will resume.

Germination for the nation.....

Wow, this is what I love about gardening.  Three weeks ago the yard was a dusty brown wasteland.  Well, it still is truth be told, but the tunnel is an explosion of fresh new green! 

I read up some on the whole thing with tunnel gardening, I have discovered that the consensus is that you are gaining about 10-12 weeks on the season, 6 at either end which makes a considerable difference in this dodgy climate of ours.  I've had so many seasons where I've lavished 6 months care on everything only for much of it to fail to ripen.  I've tried starting earlier but that just leaves everything either drowned or frozen. 

Most of the stuff is in trays at the moment, I like to get things started off like that, it's easier.  I used the shelves from last years growhouse for staging and also bought another one which will also be useful later to stack pots for hardening off etc.  They're both only 2ft by 1ft by 5ft tall and only the new one has a cover. 
Everything looks rosy :)

Even a girl can do it.....(Well, two, anyway...)

So Polytunnels, I've had a greenhouse before, but sadly, had to abandon it during a house move (it may to this day still be behind Taff's garage, I really don't remember).  At this point, with little space and less money, I wanted something different.  So I was wandering around the garden centre when I spotted this bijou poytunnel style growhouse that was big enough to stand up in and offered quite a large footprint.  Being a child of the information age, I immediately knicked off home to Google it.  As luck would have I found it for less than half the price on Garden Selections - http://www.selections.com/GF2091/garden-tunnel-1-9m-x-3m/.  They're getting mentioned in despatches because they sent it quickly and it's exactly the same as many I have seen for up to £100 odd  online and locally.

The instructions were a bit sparse but happily, more than adequate for erecting it.  I had asked my eldest to stay and help cos she's tall, but she wandered off somewhere as teenagers will, so that left me, (short) and my youngest (very short) holding, as it were, the baby.

It would be much, much funnier if the build had been a re-run of our camping holiday in North Devon last year, where the girls and I attempted to put up a 3 bedroomed, semi-detached, dome tent, on top of a cliff in a horizontal force 9 drizzle offensive.  Sadly for my blog, nothing could be further from the truth, nobody got yelled at, or grounded for the rest of their natural lives, I didn't end up on my knees weeping and nobody went home early because we were all getting pneumonia. So almost entirely completely unlike a family holiday in Berrynarbour.  More like a day on the beach in Barbados, or a walk in the Park.

So this is how it went:

Big Fish, Little Fish.......Cardboard Box

A new perspective on my beautiful young assistant!

It slots together just so

See?

Easier than a dome tent!

Just a bit of gentle stretching to chuck the cover over and viola!

The powder coated frame slots together with springy pins really easily and the cover was quite manageable even for us short folk.  In fact we went from getting it out of the box to planting in under an hour which I would say is pretty damn impressive.  It's quite sturdy and hasn't yet blown into next-doors garden despite the weather's spirited attempt to test it. The only downside is the chickens using it as an escape route (going over the top) but that's not the tunnels fault.

As for whether it does the job, well I'm impressed so far, for once seeds seem to be behaving exactly like it says on the packet, so for garden geeks I'll submit my records on a stand-alone-page when all the results are in.

Not a scale model of the Somme.......honest!

There are few things more depressing to the avid gardener than watching their garden disappear before their very eyes but that has been my experience since I adopted some chickens last summer.  In July last year, it looked like this:

By February 2011 it looked like this:

On the upside, everyone loves a clean palette, so I'm not going to cry about the many plants that lost their fight for survival against both the chickens and the snow, I'm going to rebuild it.  I have the technology...and this year it will be bigger, faster, stronger and will make a funny noise. 

So here is the Plan (yes, I have a plan on this blog too but it isn't as cunning as the other one!) Buy a polytunnel, plant loads of seeds, have enough to rebuild the garden and some left over to stock the chunk of allotment I share.  Then everyone will be happy, me, the chooks and the buns.

And how far have I got?

Well, quite far actually, so next time I will be mostly talking about polytunnels.