Category: grow your own

Super Scarecrows

Post author By greenbenchramblings
Post date August 17, 2011

We have a real champion creator of scarecrows at our lottie site, Bowbrook Allotment Community. Every year Mrs Anna as she calls herself, crafts splendid characters for us to enjoy. Last year we had a scarecrow version of Shrek but this year she produced three wonderful characters based on her family apparently. The old couple who doze in the shade under our sycamore tree are based on her parents while the pink beauty is herself 10 years from now. Incredible!

Tags allotments, scarecrows

allotments fruit and veg gardening grow your own

First tomatoes

: A few Gardeners Delight ready to pick.

It is a poor year for my tomatoes. The plants look very healthy, deep green leaves free of blemish but few flowers and not all have set fruit. The first to ripen are the Gardeners Delight looking like shining red marbles. Few of the other varieties have any colour on the fruit.

The peppers – sweet, cayenne and chilli – are much better. They have plenty of fruit developing both in the greenhouse and outdoors.

The cucumbers – my usual failures – are also setting fruit better than the tomatoes.

I need to look at my tomato growing technique, as something is letting me down.

The tomatoes, peppers and cucumber are all grown in Vital Earth Organic Peat-free compost and fed with my own comfrey feed with the addition of regular foliar feeds of seaweed liquid.

I underplant them with French Marigold so the plants are free of White Fly.

: The cucumber are just setting fruit behind their golden yellow blooms.

So, where are things going wrong. Perhaps the tomato flowers are simply not being pollinated.

Tags greenhouse, peppers, tomatoes

allotments fruit and veg grow your own

A basket of fruit

Post author By greenbenchramblings
Post date July 22, 2011

: All in a day’s picking.

Is fruit picking the most enjoyable part of gardening? It is so satisfying getting sticky and sweet-smelling hands and defying the wasps who are after you. Just look at today’s produce – golden plums with red and green gooseberries. The huge green goosegogs are from a self-seeded bush in a shrub border at home, the tiny red ones from the allotment. How is it that the pampered bush produces berries half the size of the neglected bush? Simply another case of mother Nature knowing best I guess!

The chucks get any bruised or over-ripe fruit. They watch intently as we harvest and get wildly excited if we approach their run, ready for the race to the plum. The Sussex hen usually quiet and reserved becomes a thing possessed, a hen on steroids, the olympic 100m champion of hens. she gets to the plum as it lands and disappears deep into the Buddleia bush growing in the pen. The others see but a streak of white and black plumage and miss out yet again.

Meanwhile, we return to the kitchen for a bowl of ultra-fresh rose-tinted yellow plums topped off with ice-cream and fromage frais. We allow the freezer to look after some for the winter and for jam and chutney brewing.

Tags gooseberries, grow your own, plums

grow your own

Crested Chucks

Post author By greenbenchramblings
Post date July 19, 2011

: Camera shy Fenton Blue

My flock of chucks is back up to eight with the addition of a Fenton Blue and a Fenton Rose. These are hybrids bred from Cream Legbars which are very flighty birds. My two tend to live in the trees in their run watching their flock comrades below them. They are normally very nosy birds but show them a camera and they disappear. Hence so far this is the one and only photo I have. But I shall keep trying.

We hope to get eggs from them in a month or so. they come into lay a few weeks later than most hybrids but the eggs should be worth waiting for – they lay blue ones!

They are beautiful birds, the blue having a salmon chest contrasting with the blue/grey of the rest of her feathers whereas the rose is a lovely mottled rose red.

Tags chickens, hybrids

allotments community gardening gardening grow your own

National Garden Scheme Open Day

Post author By greenbenchramblings
Post date July 19, 2011

On Sunday 17th July we opened our site for the National Garden Scheme, the famous Yellow Book. Allotment holders had worked hard during the previous week cutting grass, tidying borders in the green spaces and sprucing up plots. The site looked wonderful – even in Sunday’s rain! And rain it certainly did! We were pleased though when over 100 visitors came along with brollies braving or perhaps defying the weather. I believe that gardeners get good at defying weather – others merely brave it out. Many of our visitors stayed for several hours, leaving only when they had drunk gallons of tea and consumed masses of cake, and promising to return next year. I had hoped to show how good the site looked with photos of glowing flowers and shining veggies but that will have to wait until the weather improves. These photos though depict the reality of the day.

Tags NGS, open gardens

gardening grow your own

New Chucks

Post author By greenbenchramblings
Post date July 8, 2011

I have acquired a couple of new hybrids to add to our flock. We are getting fewer eggs these days as our bantams are now rather elderly as bantams go. The Hybrids which we have had now for nearly a year are still laying well but these new girls should boost production as the originals begin to age and slow down their egg laying activities. The new chucks are a Sussex cross, who is mostly white apart from her black tail and hackle and a Bluebell, with strange airforce blue and grey plumage with a contrasting amber chest.

Bluebell - still shy in front of the lens.

Tags chickens, garden livestock

allotments garden photography garden wildlife gardening grow your own

The Green Bench

Post author By greenbenchramblings
Post date June 16, 2011

So what will the greenbenchramblings be? The green bench is a rather old faded green plastic garden bench. It is a little brittle now and suffering from age. Its feet are chipped and cracked but it is where I sit to write in my special notebook. This notebook is a “Moleskine” with inviting cream pages inside its soft black cover, and in here I write my thoughts on “green things” – my lottie, my garden, wildlife and conservation.

The green bench currently lives on our allotment at Bowbrook Allotment Community on the outskirts of Shrewsbury, and it moved with us when we gave up our lottie on the far side of town.

It is where I take my rests, drink my tea and coffee during my very frequent breaks and where I nibble my fruit at lunchtime. When I sit I look and think and when thoughts come to me I pencil them into my “Moleskine”.

I have been making greenbenchramblings for a few years now so sometimes my ramblings will be retrospective. So welcome to my ramblings – enjoy them.