Holidays and lockdowns over, time to get in the garden!
This is a busy month. Tomatoes are coming to an end and preserving is happening apace. I just stick with the basic recipes of tomato relish, tomato sauce and bottling tomatoes to add to cooking in the winter.
Our lettuces are getting some shade from the warm late summer sun and thriving as a result – just a piece of shadecloth pegged to the bird netting works a treat.
The sweet potato patch is running away, so that’s had a trim – if you cut off excess foliage, the plants put more of their energy into the tubers. I’ve also given them a feed of liquid fish and seaweed.
The rest of the garden gets liquid seaweed on its own as a tonic. It’s quite a good idea to do this on a monthly basis throughout the year. Easy to make your own if you can gather seaweed from the beach.
The pile of sweet potato leaves went into our biomass pile which I figured was high enough to make a hot compost out of.
My pile had
– broken down wood chips as the first layer, then
– grass clippings,
– egg cartons,
– biomass (which is the remains of crops and flowers which are too big to go in the worm farm – they pile up happily for several months without attracting anything unwanted),
– rock dust and chicken manure as the activators, and finally
– soil
I watered the biomass at every layer as much of it was dry and dusty, then watered again after every soil layer. I repeated this layering 4 times, finally covering it all with black plastic.
Hopefully we’re up to somewhere near 70°C in 48 hours’ time.
48 hours later and it was steaming… if you can’t read this, it says 63.9°C. I think it would have been hotter in the middle, but I just had a kitchen temperature gauge.
Check out Rob making a hot compost with a little more explanation.
The strawberries are done for summer and the plants are putting out runners to reproduce themselves.
I have 18 plants in the garden this year, so I’ve found 18 nodes to pot up so I can replace this year’s plants completely. You can leave strawberry plants in the ground for up to 2-3 years, but new plants will always be more vigorous and produce better. It also means I can plant them nice and early in November and they’ll start fruiting early. Plant shops don’t sell them till around the end of December. Fill your pots with potting mix and plant the nodes in them. Undo paper clips to make a little pin and pin the runner down – this is so they don’t accidentally disconnect from the pot. Leave the plants for at least 3 weeks and when they’re obviously rooted and shooting away, that’s the time to cut the ‘umbilical cord
See Rob making new plants out of the runners in this video.
Our Agria potatoes are looking great – will there be a bountiful crop there or not?
Leeks have revived themselves since their trip in the courier van and are coming along nicely – looking forward to a good crop this year.
I cut back the powdery mildew leaves of our first zucchini and have had a couple of nice zucchini from the plant since then. Just keeping it in here till the new pup starts producing.
This month we also start planning for winter. Get out your pen and paper (and rubber!) and work out how you’ll rotate your crops for winter. The ideal rotation is
Nitrogen-fixing – root – fruiting – leafy green
BUT, it’s very difficult to stick to this perfectly as crops all take different times to mature – and you don’t have fruiting plants in winter. Best effort is good enough!
And I’m sowing brassica seeds – broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage (red and green) – ready for planting out in April…
– wash and sterilise old containers in white vinegar
– sieve potting mix
– make labels with the date of sowing on the back
– use piece of dowel or similar to make indented rows
– sow seeds
– soak in diluted liquid seaweed bath to get off to a good start!
Just a reminder that heading Broccoli ‘Marathon’ and Cauliflower ‘All The Year Round’ are good varieties for a climate that has a mild winter.
The beauty shot spot this time goes to the new cucumber!
Enjoy the beginning of Autumn!
From Jan, Rob and the Team at OEG!
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10 Responses
Hi Jan, Rob and team,
I just wanted to say thanks for this news letter. I appreciate the effort you must have put in to pulling it all together. So much great advice, and the photos are wonderful.
Kind regards
Phil
Thank you Phil. Much appreciated 🙂
Lovely helpful informative post thank you 🌱
Appreciate your feedback, thank you 🙂
This is such a good informative newsletter especially showing a great way to make a compost heap.I have just started one and now I can see how to make it step by step.Thank you so much.
It’s such an efficient way to recycle garden waste and really not that hard. All the best 🙂
Thanks team!!
🙂
HOW BIG SHOULD YOUR COMPOST PILE BE?
Ideally one cubic metre or as close to that as you can get.