Waark!com – A self sufficientish blog

Every year we’ve left our fruit out with no worries and to be honest, we’ve not had much in the way of bird damage.  But everyone else seems to, so to see whether we’ll increase our crop we’ve decided to cover over the majority of our raspberries and loganberries.  That’s why we’ve got cages! (Though the fruit one isn’t finished yet!)

Another item I’ve decided to cover is our brocoli.  Last year we were blighted by whitefly which inhibited our brassicas so much it pretty much dropped dead.  So what we’ve done (as you can see by the cobbled together white pic above) is stick four sticks in the ground and wrap liberally in netting which has such close weave whitefly just can’t get through it.

The next weekend innovation is our bean bed.  What I’ve done is dig a small trench and line it with pond liner.  This has a few holes in it and is back filled with sieved soil, fresh compost, blood fish and bone & poultry manure.  The pond liners purpose is to conserve water which beans love, but without water logging the roots.  My wife made the well built pole structure a few weeks ago and I had to be very careful not to destroy it…

Loads of stuff got potted up in the cold frame.  We got a frost last night, so we’re keeping stuff under for a few more days (but things are getting tall so not for much longer!)  The blossom is just starting to fall off the apple tree – so I’m hoping I get some better apples this year.

The gooseberries seem to be cropping heavily at the moment, last year I lost almost all of them after the sawfly got to them.  I’ve not netted them, I’m hoping that it won’t happen this year, but we’ll see.

Finally the potatoes – planted so late this year!  We’ve added grass to the furrows between the potato lines in a hope that it’ll conserve more water from the hot summer sun.  London clay sets hard as rock when wet and weeds grow where it’s moist, so why not stop both with a good layer of fresh mulch?

Whilst we got our first set of flowers on the strawberries a few weeks ago, these are the first on the planters which we’d left a bit late.  Now most of our strawberries are showing signs of flowering so we should have a bumper crop.  On the planters we have about thirty plants and in the beds at the lottie, probably another hundred or so!

I only get a few comments, but hundreds of readers, so I’ve had a look at the posting settings and changed it from a registration process to free (but moderated) postings – so let me know how your strawberries are doing below!

What have I been upto? Planting stuff? Nope, I’ve been building treehouses

Check out the instructable here

Ack! Yet again those slippery slugs have managed to get at our beans!  Here’s a list of six things you can do to combat slugs:

1. wait till dark and go hunting with a torch
2. run copper tape round the base of plants – no point nailing them to wooden boards as they can travel through the soil
3. put porridge down around vulnerable plants – slug love it and it dries them out
4. beer in jam jars (just make them higher than the surrounding ground, slugs get in, but beetles don’t fall in) suckers them in to drown drunk
5. slug pellets – least liked, but best to put them under logs etc
6. nematodes – small worm like creatures that squirm up slugs back passages and eat them from the inside out.  Take that slugs!

Pictures from left: First pic – of bean growing through the side of paper pot, 2nd pic slug destroyed bean plants, 3rd pic fresh asparagus! mmm tasty… 4th pic latest view of the smelly fertiliser decomposing!

So who did you  vote for?  Having closely followed the debate between the three main parties, I decided I didn’t want any of them.  I did like the pirate party, thought they had some good ideas especially relating to the latest labour blunder – that was the icing on the cake which made me switch sides off labour, the ID cards scandal being the other privacy issue I really just don’t get.

I was underwhelmed by the amount of information in the press regarding the green party – a shame really because they’ve got some good ideas but to be honest I’d prefer some green policies in their manifesto – it’s quite a bit of greenwash really… and I’m bitter about the benefits people get, because I work and my previous property barely anyone did.  One such chap got a brand new car every three years, a flat (which was then renovated to similar standards which cost me three grand) and he also got an updated boiler – whereas I’m still stuck with my old boiler.  He winged when his benefits were cut to push him back into full time work because it wasn’t worth it! Grr.

Anyway, best of luck for whomever you vote for, just don’t vote BNP.

If you’re going away this summer and want things in pots to still be alive, you can take inspiration from RomanH‘s instructable on a Self Watering Mini Garden.  There’s plenty of self watering pots so the principle is pretty similar.  The only thing you need to bear in mind is that many plastic boxes will not be UV resistant and become brittle over time.

Click HERE to see the instructable

I’m sorry, I’m about to to mention the ‘C’ word even though we’re in May – it’s time to think of CHRISTMAS (you were thinking Chutney was going to be it didn’t you…)

The recipe is “Christmas Spiced Apple & Rhubarb Chutney”, and the current batch (and infact all batches as I’m not a big chutney fan) were made by my wife.  It’ll be ready just in time for Christmas as chutney takes a while to mature.

Ingredients:

1.5KG Rhubarb
500g onions
500g red eating apples
1.5 cups sultanas
1KG soft brown sugar
1.25L apple cider vinegar
4tsp salt
1tsp cayenne pepper
1tsp ground cloves
1tsp ground cinnamon
2tsp ground ginger

Instructions:

Peel & thinly slice the onions, core but don’t peel the apples but thinly slice them.  Cut the rhubarb into chunks (1-2″).

Put it all into a stainless steel or enamel pot and bring it up to the simmer.  Simmer for two hours, stirring every 15 minutes as it reduces it gets thicker.

Wash and sterlise the jars & lids.  Pour the chutney into a warm jar & place lids on straight away.  Leave to cool.

The original recipe was taken & adapted from a member (frizz1974 originally taken and adapted from a link from Minerva) of the Jamie Oliver website.  Enjoy

My second trip to the allotment this year (though my wife has been down many more times than me!)

First pic is the chili and pepper plants I’ve planted up from reduced price plug packs.  Second pic is the current herb and salad bed.  The third bed is the remains of the leeks from last year as well as the new brussel sprout plants.  4th is the onion bed planted in september/october time.

The fifth pic is the rhubarb bed.  You’d probably not realise that we’ve actually had about 18-19KG of rhubarb from here.  Scary stuff, that’s a lot of rhubarb to chomp through.  My wife spent Saturday night skinning the rhubarb and chopping it into 1-2″ chunks which is now in the freezer.  Freezing is one way to deal with the glut, but there are others!

Sixth pic is our fruit bed.  My wife made a good decision which was to put the old walk in greenhouse over the fruit bed.  We can now stretch netting over it to make a handy moveable cage.  The strawberries have been moved from the old bed which was over run with couch grass and the rest had been relocated from the garden path.

7 & 8 are a view from the bottom of the plot, and nine are our new purple planting brocolli

I’ve had an awful lot of search requests for the selsey herb and spice co – I assume specifically relating to their ginger beer product.

It is my opinion that it is unlikely to be a true ginger beer plant as it seems to be a product offered by a supplier to other businesses as a traditional ye old English product.  Since it’s not a great idea to leave a ginger beer plant wrapped up in plastic or unrefrigerated, it’s likely to be just plain old yeast.

There’s nothing wrong with all these yeast recipes, just be aware that it’s not a true ginger beer plant.  A real ginger beer plant gives a much more complex flavour, but the yeast varieties tend to be sharper (a bit like the commercial varieties you can get in store)

There’s so many boring paving slabs out there and I thought I’d have a go making my own for my allotment.

This particular slab is actually for aesthetics only,  You can making this for stepping on, you just need to apply a couple of inches more thickness than I did and add a bit of chicken wire.

Click HERE to see the instructable