An Organic Lifestyle (Organic Growing Pains)

I have been on holidays abroad, enjoying the summer sunshine here at home, spending days on the plot  and while taking some photos did not turn on the computer to upload so, not to bore anyone, collages are the way to go. Various harvests, you will notice courgettes feature in all of them, but getting more colourful as the season progresses! Beetroot,carrots, courgettes,cucumber, chillis,Kale,lettuce,Mange Tout,onions,sweet peppers,sweetcorn and potatoes, not bad for such a late start on a new plot! The onions drying in the sunshine.Chilli peppers (our first attempt ever at growing these)!Tomatoes reddening on the vines at last, our first red pepper is in there too! I love how colourful the harvest gets as the season unfolds. The  story of our pumpkins. they were started off in pots at home and repotted as needed, they were  finally planted out on the plot in early June.Clockwise from top left is their progress, it was slow until we got some heavy downpours ...

The weather has suddenly become glorious, sunny days with temps up in the late teens and forecasting early 20s! It brings its own problems  with watering young  plants, especially in the polytunnel or greenhouse. The tomatoes have found their permanent home at last, I think they are smaller than they should be for this time of the season, they are setting blossom and have only one truss to each plant?! This Celtic Gold is being touted as the new wonder compost, guaranteeing stupendous growth !It has been enriched with worm cast, a bit pricey at €17 for 2 bags. I bought 2  at The Pavilion Garden centre in Ballygarvan and added it around the tomato plants and lettuce in the tunnel. I will be expecting a huge improvement immediately! After the Blight scare of last week the potatoes actually have recovered and grown new foliage and there has been no further discolouring of the leaves. The Charlotte have sprouted  lovely lilac flowers so heres hoping it was j...

Another photo to compare to the header pic, taken from roughly the same angle!there are now 4 raised beds completed and in use plus the potato section and the polytunnel.  Son Billy made the bed for the sweetcorn on Sat morning and filled with compost. I have discovered an organic local compost supplier, our local City Council !`I took my own bags and you fill yourself and pay €2 per bag. It is composted completely from green waste brought to the recycling centre, still affectionately known as 'The Dump' on the outskirts of the city.  I topped it up today with 2 bags of Farmyard manure  ( bought prepacked). The Sweetcorn was sown in seed trays then potted  on into 3" pots then into 6" pots, if the bed had not been ready in the next few days then they would have been repotted into even larger pots.My rule of thumb for repotting is, if any of the roots are visible through the end of the pot then it is time to move on as it holds back the plant. S...

The onions were moved out to a bed and were covered with plastic for a night or two but are now facing the elements but its not too bad as the weather has really  improved . We don't have a lot of onions this year as they were planted in modules awaiting a plot!I left a bed of autumn sown onions on the old allotment, I am sure the new owner will appreciate them. Another bed up and running!The onions went into what was going to be the courgette bed but at Billy's suggestion we made yet another bed and popped in the courgettes, sugar snap peas and random lettuces as they were all in pots in the polytunnel and needed their own space.They are draped with fleece overnight and left to enjoy the sun for a few hours during the day. They were planted out yesterday morning and this morning one of the peas was nibbled down despite the fleece and netting around the back of the bed, definitely rabbit damage! There are 6 courgette plants, 3 green and 3 yellow. We did not h...

A couple of hours spent on the plot today, yielded an onion bed or almost an onion bed.Digging out skutch grass is back breaking and time consuming, not to mention the stones! We have a lot of plants in pots waiting their turn to get a home but with our time constraints its slow going and time is running out for the plants.  All of the potatoes are up and have now been earthed up twice, they may have been late going in but the recent combination of heat and rain has driven everything up. The onions loved the polytunnel but today they have been put outside to harden off. They are in the shelter of the polytunnel as this new plot is a very windy spot.The modules have worked well and the onions will planted out with very little if any root disturbance. This pic was taken last week when they were inside with the tomato plants and sweetcorn which by today had really put on a growth spurt.  Lettuce was transplanted into the border and a row of ...

The allotment is beginning to take shape albeit very slowly, due to time constraints and the weather, but today the sun shone and I had time to spend there even though it was a bit wild and windy.The top third of the plot is now productive! The carrot bed in the centre was remade as the boards of the previous one was nearly rotten so leaving the bed more or less intact, new boards were put in place around the sides.There seemed to be an awful lot of earth so most of that was shovelled over on top of the potato drills this morning. I got 2 bags of sharp sand and a bag of compost from the home compost bin and dug it into the bed and removed what seemed like hundreds of stones from the bed.Carrots like light sandy soil which is loose and as stone free as possible, they are the divas of the vegetable world! I planted 2 rows of 'Carrot Purple Haze' which has a purple hue to the skin, and 2 rows of Early Nantes from Quickcrop. I had space to plant 1 row of beetro...

 I have been up to the allotment for some time each day, watering & weeding.I had noticed some of the peas being chomped not from the bottom as in slug attack but the tops and edges of the leaves. One of the other plotters informed me its being done by a cock pheasant who lives in the next field! I have seen him in the allotment field but not near the plots, he obviously bides his time! I covered the entire pea and broad bean beds with netting, hopefully he will be stopped before he does too much damage and they will have time to recover. The other plot has the peas in a row and he has decimated the whole row of them maybe past recovering. The raised bed with 4 courgette plants, 3x green and 1x yellow, this got a dressing of horse manure from the Hydro Allotments to create a hot bed  for them and they are putting on a growth spurt with the brilliant sunshine warming them up. I sprayed the potatoes against blight yesterday, maybe I'm paranoid but this spell of re...

 Lettuce of varying colours and stages of growth under the plastic cloche. Spinach at the very far end is coming on slowly.  Blossoms are coming out on the broad beans, these have really taken everything the very unseasonable weather has thrown at them.They are not quite as tall as I would expect but hopefully they will continue growing while producing blossoms and pods. Semi permanent brassica cage in place today, not a very pretty sight but hopefully (a word we seem to be using a lot of this year) a useful one!  More rain with some sunshine today, other parts of the country  have thunder & lightening so we shouldn't complain down here! I have worked out an easy method of uploading photos and text, just do one photo at a time, Simples! Networked Blogs have been sharing my blog onto FB almost as soon as I hit the publish button. I found with the last post it took nearly 24 hours to do it?! I think it is now one of the services on FB payment plan!

The plot is taking shape but the weather is not helping, which is everybody's complaint on this windswept isle.In view on the left side are onion beds, 1 red baron and 2 white then potato beds.Across the back fence are raspberry canes ,rhubarb and globe artichoke ,all moved from the previous plot at the Hydro Farm. White fleece, back left side is covering one of Billy's raised beds. I sowed carrots, Pak Choi and beetroot in the bed today and covered with enviromesh, even the carrot fly may be deterred with the cold weather, but covered the bed 'just in case' ! The second raised bed is empty awaiting top soil and manure to sow courgettes which are on the bedroom windowsill as I speak hoping the weather will improve before June to put them outdoors. There is a space left beside that bed to take the Sweetcorn which are struggling in the back garden at the moment. I had moved them outdoors at home to harden off but had to cover them today with fleece to protect th...

 Posts in position for the wire fencing because we have been told that rabbits are also a big problem up here!Billy dug a trench along the fence line to bury the end of the wire to stop said rabbits from tunneling underneath. Windbreaker was then added for extra protection for plants as it is a wide open field! It is hard to see in this pic but the first permanent bed is in place across the back fence. I slipped 4 raspberry canes, 3 stools of rhubarb and 1 Globe Artichoke from the plot in The Hydro Farm. The shed has to be put into place this weekend before digging out the other beds ASAP! Potatoes are still chitting in the shed. Onions are waiting to go in. Seedlings are backing up at home waiting to be hardened off  Seeds planted today were Sugar Snap.These handy little seed trays had grapes in them, nice and high with air and drainage holes already in place and a  lid to act as an incubator Two of them just fit nicely into another reusable...

Cauliflower & cabbage plants, these were bought and potted on into larger pots and will be repotted probably twice more before going out into their permanent plot.They have been netted against the birds which would love a taste of some nice green veg to vary their winter diet.  Our seed potatoes chitting in the shed, not a whole lot but we don't have a lot of space and it will be late by the time we get them in  The rhubarb which I broke off  the big plants we had on the Hydro, I have one in the garden here which is growing fine these got 'a touch of frost' the other night and are looking a bit sorry for themselves I set to on the seed box last night and discarded out of date seeds and opened packets.I had been tidying out one of the spare rooms and came across a gardening journal which I had started last year. I start one every year but then forget about it! I was amazed at the amount of seeds I had already sowed by this time of the year so we will have ...