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I can’t believe I didn’t blog in February OR March.  I’m very sorry.  I will try harder in April.

Here’s a quick update on the garden.  I will blog properly this week when we have done some more planting.

• Carrots shooting up nicely
• Turnips and parsnips were sprouting but the slugs got them.  I’ll try again and use slug pellets
• Lots of onions and garlic are coming through (my son asks to plant an onion every time we go in the garden!)
• Our peas are still not doing anything so I will plant some more but keep them in the kitchen to make sure I water them every day
• Son is very excited about gardening!

My son and I have been pottering in the garden over the last few weeks and there is lots going on.  We have just been too busy to update the website.  Sorry.

Our carrots are doing really well.  There are lots and lots sprouting.  In fact, we now have so many, my son is not particularly impressed anymore.  I am though!

We also have turnips OR parsnips shooting up.  The fact that I am not sure which is which shows the importance of labeling when you plant seeds.  Ah well.  We’ll find out when they grow!  If I had the energy I would look it up… I will try for my next blog!

Our peas have done nothing.  I think it is too cold for them.  To be honest, I am amazed anything has started shooting this early.  I hope if I plant some more this month, they will grow.

The most dramatic development is that our onions are shooting.  My son was particularly interested because they have strong thick shoots that he can touch (gently!) without me telling him off.  He also found a worm in the pot, which caused lots of excitement.  We planted some more onions today to keep the excitement coming!

I’m too exhausted from gardening for uploading photos but they are waiting on the camera.  I will do a super photo blog very soon.

I wanted to write a piece with some hints and tips about how to care for a wormery. It took ours about 6 months to get going and during that time I was worried that I wasn’t looking after it properly. In fact I do not do much to it at all and it produces lots of worm wee (apparently it is actually worm sweat) and lots of lovely compost for the garden. There are a few important tips that I have picked up along the way. If you stick to these, there is no reason why your worms won’t produce lots of healthy compost.

WHAT WORMS LIKE

Worms will compost most organic waste but here are a few things they really like:

1. Tea and coffee
2. Vegetable peelings
3. Cardboard and non-glossy paper
4. Garden waste, providing it is not too wet
5. Lime mix to neutralise any acid (Wiggly Wigglers sells a good Anti-Acid Lime Mix)

FOODS WORMS DISLIKE
There are a few things that worms do not like.  You should not put these into your wormery, as worms will either avoid them, or be harmed by eating them.

1. Citrus fruits
2. Onion and garlic
3. Fat
4. Vinegar
5. Meat
6. Animal manure (in case the animal has recently been wormed – this will kill your worms!)

I have put odd bits of the first five in our wormery with no adverse affects but I do now try to avoid them as much as possible.

TEMPERATURE

I do not worry at all about how hot or cold my worms get.  I keep them in a sheltered, shaded spot at the bottom of the garden and they stay there all year and are doing well.  They slow down in the winter and are very active in the summer.  If it is frosty, putting a blanket over your wormery will help keep them warm but I never bother.  Worms like shade and if they get too hot, they can die.  The ideal temperature for worms is between 10 and 30 degrees centigrade (if you have the energy to monitor them that closely).

MOISTURE
It is important that the wormery is moist enough.  If there is no condensation on the inside of the roof, then you will need to add about a pint of water to the wormery.  Ours always has plenty of condensation, probably too much!  We get through a lot of vegetable peelings and I am not very good at remembering to add dry items, like cardboard (I have to keep my toilet roll innards for planting seeds!). If our wormery is a bit too wet, I add ripped up egg boxes and shredded paper, as very wet worms tend to slow down and not produce compost as quickly.

THATCHING

Having researched worms, it is apparently important to prevent a thatch forming on the top of the wormery, as this can suffocate the worms.  Ours has never had that problem.  I regularly add fresh food waste and when I do, I leave the lid off the wormery for a few minutes to give the worms a breath of fresh air.  If any parts of the compost are looking a little slimy, I stir it around to allow the air to circulate.

FURTHER INFORMATION

If you are looking online for more wormery resources, try searching for vermicomposting and vermiculture, as these are the grown-up words for it!

I am very excited by how successful we were in our first month of gardening. We managed to potter in the garden at least twice a week, despite some pretty miserable weather. Even our house rabbit is getting more comfortable outside and doesn’t always sit next to the back door desperately waiting to be allowed back in.

On the last day of January, I checked our diary for the year and realised we had not planted any onions or garlic, as we had planned. We didn’t have any garlic ready but we did have onion sets so we quickly went out and planted them. Phew! Just in time! We will plant extra garlic in February to make amends.

We have seen a robin, a blackbird and a wood pigeon in the garden, eating the leftover dried rabbit food (although my son calls them all pigeons). The worms have been cleared out and given an airing. We have lots of carrots, peas, turnips, parsnips, butternut squash and onions lined up in their reused toilet rolls, hopefully getting ready to sprout. We even have some tiny little carrot seedlings already. The peas look to be closer to the surface than they were but no sign of life yet. Our water butt is half empty because my son insists on watering the garden, even in the rain but we have had lots and lots of fun.

We plan to do even more gardening in February and will post regular updates on new things we plant, along with updates on the seeds that are already in. I foresee a busy month. I’m convinced my son is about to go up a shoe size and we needs to get our money’s worth out of his wellies before he does!

I hope you all managed to get planting in January but if not, please do join us in February!

Here come the carrots!

I am bursting with excitement and had to share it.  Can you see our little carrots peeping through the soil!? Take a look!  WOW!  They grew!

It’s tempting to keep them out of my son’s reach and not let him even look at them until they are ready to be harvested but that wouldn’t really be in the spirit of things, would it.  So, I waited until my son was distracted with filling his watering can and I quickly took a picture.  Then when I had both hands free to protect my little beauties, I brought him over to look.  Do you want to know what happened?

“Look darling!  Carrots!”
“No.”
“Yes.  Those little plants there are carrots.”
“Why?”
“Because we planted the seeds.  Do you remember?  And we watered them and so they are growing.”
“Why?”

Then he wandered off.  Maybe when they are visible to the naked eye they will get him excited. The only problem is I planted them a bit early so it is still too cold.  Fingers crossed everyone!

The other day, while I had some time without my son, I emptied our wormery.  It is a bit of a lengthy job if you try to save every single worm, which I do.  I haven’t really changed much from the 6 year old who cried for days because she cut a worm in two when she was digging the garden.

Here is what is supposed to happen:  You put your kitchen waste, little and often, in the bottom tray with all the worms.  Once that is full, you add your kitchen waste to the next tray up and keep going with however many trays you have.

Here is our reality: we generate too much kitchen waste and I am lazy.  This means that all the worms rarely make it to the top tray.  There are usually still quite a few hanging around in the bottom tray.  Of course I could just use the compost and leave the worms in there but it would be scary for them out of their home and away from their friends.  So, like the worm-obsessive I am, I sit there and sift through worm compost for an hour, plucking out every single worm and putting them safely back in their wormery.  I know.  Don’t say a word!

I clean out the wormery at the most once every six months.  I once left it for almost a year and it was a far easier job, as the majority of the worms were in the top tray.  I like to do it on a sunny day because the sun helps send the worms to the bottom and makes it easier to sift through.  Also the worms are more awake in warm weather.  Today was definitely not a sunny day and it took a lot more effort picking out the worms.  My fingers were blue by the time I had finished.  I would definitely recommend doing this during the summer.

I removed all the trays and placed the top tray, where the most recent kitchen waste has been added, on the base unit that collects the worm wee.  Using gloves, I then set about picking up clumps of worm compost and sifting it into flower pots.  I try to pick out every worm that I come across.  Worms do not live long and if your wormery is healthy, they reproduce quickly so there is no need to do this, unless you obsess about the welfare of your worms!

Today it took me an hour to go through the wormery.  I now have one tray full of partly composted kitchen waste and all the worms.  The other two trays are empty and ready to be filled with lots of new waste.  As a special treat and as an apology for turning their house upside down I added a few handfuls of worm treat food (which is meant to make worms happy and compost more quickly) and a handful of lime mix (which reduces odour and neutralises the acid in wormeries that worms do not like).  If your wormery is doing well, you do not to worry about worm treat or lime mix.  I am a bit lazy with mine so I put in a few handfuls whenever I clear it out.  It is actually recommended that both mixes are added every few weeks.

And that’s it.  An hour of work every six months to a year and you will be rewarded with the best compost that you could ever dream of and plenty of worm wee for your plants.

Our wormery is a  CAN-O-WORMS from Wiggly Wigglers. I would highly recommend them.

I will post more about how to care for your worms.  This blog is simply to give an idea of the work involved in clearing it out.  The clearing out is the only effort that I put into mine.

This week we planted our turnip seeds.  We followed the same plan as the carrots and peas.  We stacked the toilet rolls in plastic mushroom containers, piled in the soil, added the turnip seeds, put a little more soil on the top and then watered them with worm wee.  It went very smoothly.  My son and I are getting quite adept at our planting regime.  Perhaps I shouldn’t speak too soon but it really does seem to be going well.

I haven’t grown turnips before but I am hoping they will be simple.  We will see!  I have read that they thrive if planted near members of the onion family.  I am assuming that applies to when they are planted out, rather than when the seed is first sowed.  But just to be on the safe side, the next seeds we sow will be onion and garlic.

One thing that I had considered changing was to use rolled up newspaper instead of toilet rolls for planting the seeds.  There was a comment on an earlier blog that they rot down better.  The only reason I didn’t try them with the turnips was because we had a spontaneous planting session and I hadn’t prepared any.  That has taught me an important lesson about planning ahead when gardening with a toddler.  When we plant our next batch of root veggies, I will try to get myself organised and make up some newspaper rolls for planting.  I am not sure exactly how they work so if anyone has a picture of some that they have used, let me know and I will post it on here.

I feel I need to make a confession.  There is one job that I have set aside for doing on my own, without my son.  I need to clear out the wormery.  It can be a little time-consuming if the food has not been left in there long enough.  (If I wasn’t so paranoid about killing one of the worms, it would probably be a much quicker job!)  I cannot remember when the first layer was put in.  All I know is, I am running low and need some more compost if I am going to pot up some more seeds.

So, the next post will be a bit of a cheat because I will not be gardening with my son.  I hope that’s allowed.  I suppose it is my garden and my blog so I can make my own rules!  It does feel very naughty though!  My son would be fascinated by the wormery but his fascination probably wouldn’t last an hour and I expect it to take that long to clear out.  I will take lots of photos so that you can see how the wormery works and how much work is involved in maintaining it.

In case anyone wants to try the newspaper pots and need the tool, they sell them on Amazon.

Kitchen vegetable and fruit scraps buried for composting

We needed to go into the garden today to check the peas, carrots and squash were all watered.  I thought we would have a little potter, seeing as we had gone to the effort of putting on our wellies.

Here is a round-up of our 20 minutes of gardening.

The seeds were given an extra bit of water.  We gave the worms a little bit of fresh air and had a chat with them.  Mainly lots of “Night night worms”.  We had a big bag of kitchen scraps for the worms but the wormery was full.  So, I dug a hole next to a shrub and buried them.  It was getting dark by the time we did that so apologies for the poor photo.  Apologies that it isn’t very interesting to look at, but what could I do with a bag of veggie peelings, a hole in the ground and some soil?  I figured a weird photo was better than no photo!  My son was a bit dismayed that the worm food was being buried and not put in the wormery but I explained that our ‘pet worms’ had plenty of food but that the ‘wild worms’ in the garden might be hungry.  He was ok with that.  He then went to find the bird food and threw some of that around.  We saw a wood pigeon eating it almost as soon as we had gone inside, which made my son’s day.

Little gardening sessions are definitely best with a child.  I’m glad we started when it’s cold so that I learnt that lesson by accident.  If we had started when the weather was warm, I would have wanted to stay out there for hours.

So there you have it, our 20 minute pottering session in the garden.

The Garden on a miserable January day

My son and I are gardening in a small courtyard but at least we do have borders.  I appreciate that lots of you may only have space for a few containers, so this is just for you.

In many ways it is easier to grow veggies in containers.  Although you must water daily, avoid waterlogging and feed regularly, at least you know you have to.  When you grow veggies in the ground you can become a bit complacent (read lazy) and then when you do bother to visit them, they have died.  Pots are also great for kids because they are easier for them to manage.

My top tip is to use mulched veggie peelings mixed in with the soil.  As it continues to rot down in the pot, the soil is fed with goodness.  It also saves having to wait for your veggies to rot down completely in a compost heap, which is important when you are short of space.

You can pretty much grow anything in a container but here is what we will be growing in containers this year.

HERBS

We are going to try growing mint and coriander pots.  We have never successfully grown coriander before but if nothing else, it will teach my son that not everything that you plant actually grows.  Mint on the other hand is really easy to grow.  We bought a few pots of it from a supermarket years ago and after they were cut down, we left them on the kitchen counter and a few days later, we noticed the little stalks were shooting new leaves.  Two years later we have more mint than we know what to do with.

SALAD LEAVES

We have previously grown salad leaves in troughs.  The great thing about salad leaves is that you don’t have to pick a whole lettuce to use.  You just pinch out the leaves as you need them and they keep re-growing through the summer.

TOMATOES

Tomatoes actually grow better in a pot or grow bag than in the ground because they thrive on nutritious compost.  I have been saving the odd split tomatoes that you find at the end of shop-bought tubs of tomatoes.  Rather than throw them away, I have let them dry out.  I will sprinkle the seeds directly into pots later in the year.  I learnt this by throwing some rotten tomatoes into the wormery and then using the worm compost months later and accidentally growing tomato plants that were full of really tasty tomatoes.

TURNIPS

We have never grown them before so we will have to see whether they are an easy grower but having done some research, they are suitable for container gardening.

CARROTS

Carrots are great in large pots.  The pots need to be quite deep for a standard carrot but you can get dwarf varieties for smaller pots.  We successfully grew them last year.  We should have left them longer to get bigger carrots but the leaves looked so bushy and healthy, I could not resist harvesting them.  Also, we have a house rabbit and I was impatient to feed him something homegrown that wasn’t a dandelion!  This year I will try to be more patient.

PEAS

I have friends who have successfully grown beans and peas in pots and none of them are what you would call gardeners.  I have not grown peas before but they look very pretty and they attract butterflies and bees and any successful garden needs its insects.

ONIONS & GARLIC

I have tried both in pots before and they started well but we neglected them so the onions did not grow very big and the garlic rotted.  This year my son and I will look after them properly so hopefully we will see good results.  Garlic does not need much room but if you put them in tiny pots, they can be starved of nutrients.  We fortunately have an abundance of worm wee to constantly top up the nutrient content of our pots but I will still use slightly larger pots than I did last year, to ensure the garlic thrives.  To get a decent crop of standard onions, a larger pot is needed.

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So there you have it, our plans for container gardening.  Is anyone trying other veggies in pots?

My top tip for helping your seeds to grow is to WATER THEM!  I went into the garden today to visit our peas and carrots, which I had only watered yesterday.  The peas were bone dry already.  It isn’t exactly hot out at the moment so I was only intending on watering them once a week.  Good job I checked.  My son wanted to see his carrots.  Bless him!  He saved our peas!

While we were out there I noticed some toilet rolls with compost in them.  They were last year’s failed peas that I hadn’t watered.  There was me thinking I had a poor packet of seeds.  Water your peas, people, WATER THEM!  I also noticed a big mouldy flower pot of butternut squash seeds.  I cannot remember when I decided to save the seeds but I obviously only got as far as putting them outside.  I thought I might as well give them a chance in the second hand toilet rolls.  I wasn’t intending to grow any squash this year and I doubt very much the mouldy seeds will grow.  The problem is, I have become a little addicted to planting seeds!  I didn’t have the camera with me to take a picture but to be honest, although I can tell all my babies apart, most of you will probably think that one toilet roll with soil inside looks like any other.

So, you heard it here first.  If you want your seeds to grow, they need watering!