A scare!

Got home last night and noticed that my onions appeared to be wilting. I knew I'd been giving them plenty of water through the sunken bottles and was worried they might be poisoned. A few weeks ago I'd applied a powder to the soil that kills off any soil pests and diseases but it's lethal stuff and you cannot plant into the soil until at least 3 weeks after application. I wondered whether I'd got my timings wrong and this had attacked the onion roots, causing them to wilt.

As a desperate measure I gave the whole bed a thorough soaking and went into the house to sulk. Returning to the greenhouse an hour later all the onions had perked up and I realised what the problem must have been. Although I'd been giving plentiful water through the sunken bottles they must have been leaking water below the level of the roots so that it wasn't actually getting to the plants. The plants were merely stressed from all the hot weather we've been enjoying.

You live and learn and I certainly won't be making that mistake again in future! The pic shows how I support the foliage by way of a metal loop attached to a small can. This makes the onion grow straight and central, giving nice, even, flask-shaped bulbs (in theory!).

The way I grow shallots

I mentioned before that I 'plant' my shallots in large pots which are buried in the soil (Initially they are grown in smaller pots in the greenhouse from the New Year onwards). I started doing this a couple of years ago and find it has quite a few advantages for the 'show man'. Firstly, it allows me to grow them in a finer growing medium than planting directly into the soil, meaning that they won't come into contact with any hard lumps or stones that may make the thinned out bulbs go out of shape.



This method also makes thinning out easier I find especially as I grow them in my raised beds bringing them to a more manageable working height. In the next 2 or 3 weeks each bulb will have divided into 5 or 6 smaller bulbs. If growing for kicthen use only these would simply be left to grow onto harvest but the showman needs to get bigger and better shaped bulbs. I will carefully reduce each clump down to 2 by peeling back the outer skins and snapping off the ones I don't want. These thinnings will be planted next to the pots and watered....they will bulk out into nicely shaped shallots for the pickling classes for bulbs that must be under 25mm dia.



As soon as each shallot is planted they are fed with Miracle Gro. A slow release fertiliser is mixed into the pots but go easy....shallots don't like too much feed. After thinning, the 2 remaining bulbs quickly grow and will be ready for harvesting from the beginning of June. I will explain what I do next nearer the time.

Carrots coming through

What a beautiful weekend.....hottest April day since 1946! I went walking in Derbyshire yesterday so didn't manage to get anything done as such, although I did check the carrots when I got back and they are now poking through the compost surface......so they're bang on cue. I just need to keep the surface of the sand in the drums evenly moist until they are growing away well and the tap roots are well down. Then I can safely ease up on the watering and leave them to their own devices (more or less). Each 'station' will have several carrots growing in it and in a couple of weeks I will select the best 2 and carefully snip away the rest with a pair of scissors. You mustn't pull them as this may disturb the root of the ones you are leaving. After a further week I will select the best one and cut the other away.

It was so hot in the greenhouse that the brussels were suffering so I've put them outside to harden off before planting in a week or so. My blanch leeks are also outside now and they too will be planted against stout canes, with horizontal canes to support the foliage. The vertical cane will support the barrel during the blanching process. I'll illustrate this nearer the time also.

The 'large' onions in the greenhouse seem to be growing well and I have also placed a cane against each one with a metal ring to support the foliage. This encourages the onion to grow upright thus preventing lop-sided bulbs later on.....seems a bit of a rigmarole but such are the lengths we showmen go to to try and gain the upper hand on our competitors.

Gladdies !

As if I don't grow enough (veg/dahlias/roses/fuchsias/cactus) I've also decided to have another go at gladioli this year. We had a talk from Martin Bryans at our Hort.Soc. the other evening and it's inspired me to try again. I've often thrown a few corms in over the years and won the odd class but usually when there were no other 'spikes' to compete against! I must admit a nice set of well-staged glads is a wonderful sight to behold and no other flower offers the colour range of gladdies!

One thing Martin did say is that they need to be grown on different ground each year on a rotation cycle of about 4-5 years. Also, growing them on land that has previously had spuds in the last 15 years is a complete no-no. Apparently they go yellow and die and no-one knows why!

You need to be planting the corms about now 5" deep on a 1/2" layer of grit or sharp sand. As soon as they poke through start feeding either Maxicrop foliar feed or Phostrogen in wet summers to harden them up a bit.

When the flower spike 'throws up' then (and only then) they are tied to a cane pushed into the ground. If the bottom floret is out on the Tuesday before a Sunday show then the whole spike needs to be cut and put in a dark place. Apparently it will be perfect by show day ! A perfect show bloom has 8 florets fully out, the next 8 showing colour and the top 8 (or more) in tight bud. It's perfectly acceptable to cut off the lower floret if it has gone over however. A good supplier is www.showglads.com

Now......where the hell am I going to plant these corms?????

It's all gathering pace now.....

Well.....I'm back after a week's holiday and what a lot I've got done. All my carrots are sown and my parsnips are through.....I hope they turn out as good as the ones above that I grew a couple of years ago.

My large exhibition onions were planted in the greenhouse border soil......I've sunk watering bottles into the soil next to each onion so that I can keep the surface of the soil dry and hopefully keep any fungal spores from spoiling the surface of the bulbs.

In my greenhouse I've pricked out my cabbages and brussels and my standard fuchsias have been root trimmed and repotted. My blanch leeks are growing strongly and will be planted in another week or two.

Next on the agenda will be the stump rooted carrots and potatoes that are grown in plastic pots. More on these in next few weeks.

From now on the hobby becomes a morning/noon and night thing as there is always something that needs doing NOW.......from pricking out seedlings to planting and spraying. The work I am doing now will determine how many 'red cards' I pick up in the shows in August/September and October and as I mentioned at the end of last season I don't want to have to cut corners again. You get found out in the end. Therefore, I'm taking more care with my mixes and bed preparation than I have done in the past. Other things such as making sure every thing is tidy and in its right place are important too.....I've found a pair of secateurs, a trowel, a knife and and a bottle of slug pellets in amongst the undergrowth as I've been tidying the beds and borders ! If I'd put them back after I'd used them last season things would be much easier !

Home made compost

I know I've mentioned my 'contraption' in a previous post but it's proving so successful I just can't talk about it enough....my missus and kids think i've gone compost mental. ('It's just mud Dad!')

I've always created loads of compost in 2 large wooden bins in the lane at the bottom of my garden but when you empty it out inevitably it has lumps in and bits of undecomposed plant material and other 'cruddy' matter. By sieving it in my new machine (which isn't really that hard to do) I get a lovely friable mix of compost out that looks lovely when added onto the beds and borders. The rough bits left over that won't go through the sieve are just thrown back onto the compost heap. Brilliant!

The season so far

Thought I'd write where I'm at with my sowing and growing for looking back upon in future years!

Conservatory
Tomatoes (Cederico) - through and need pricking out
Peppers - one variety (Sweet Spot) to be pricked out. 2 varieties still not through after 2 weeks
Aubergines - need pricking out
Parsley - need pricking out
Cabbages (Brigadier&Kilaxy) - just poking through
Cherry toms (Sungold & Gardener's Delight) - just poking through

Greenhouse
Kelsae onions x 20 (plants bought in)
Leeks x 20 (plants bought in)
Tasco onions - 3 trays pricked out
Centurion sets - planted in cell trays and showing green shoots
Brussels - Brilliant & Rubine
Shallots - own saved sets potted up (need planting in next 2 weeks) and Matador grown from seed.

Garden
First 2 parsnips just poking through in their prepared stations
All other veg beds dug over and ready for planting

Garage
Seed potatoes in trays chitting.



Apart from that it's still fairly early days but this weeknd will see me 'boring' holes and sowing my long carrots in drums. I have 5 large drums and grow 7 'stations' in each one. I'm off for a whole week so need to use the time wisely and get as much done as possible in the garden.....there are loads of niggling maintenance jobs to do..........in order to get ahead of myself so that I can enjoy the rest of the season.

Scrapped!

I bit the bullet at the weekend and scrapped all the onions and leeks that I bought in January. They just hadn't ever 'taken off' despite being cossetted and quite a few had keeled over and died. I can't put my finger on why they failed.....the ones I had from the same supplier last year were fine.

So, I went over to a guy in Derby (the same chap I get the seed potatoes from) and purchased some more and was amazed at the size and quality of them. And they were cheap too!

So I now have 20 leeks and 20 onions of a decent size that should go on to become excellent specimens for the show bench. The leeks had a pipe lagging 'collar' put over them to start drawing them and to keep them nice and straight , tied to a small cane. The onions will be planted in my newly prepared greenhouse border soil in a month or so and the leeks will go outside in early to mid May. Both beds have had a strong fungicide applied to kill off (hopefully) the onion white rot spores that have plagued me for several years.

Medwyn Williams

Spent an interesting couple of hours last night in Derby at a lecture by Medwyn Williams MBE. He told us how he went about gaining 10 gold medals in a row at Chelsea Flower Show. He certainly is quite a character and kept us all enthralled with the stories of his trials and tribulations in trying to get a display of autum maturing veg ready in time for late May.

If you have ever been to Chelsea and seen one of his displays the thing that strikes you most is the vast array of different colours that can be achieved using different veg, from yellow carrots to purple cauliflowers and blue potatoes.

He's retired from doing Chelsea now but still 'shows' at the larger veg shows run by the NVS, and is actually President of the Society as well as being on several RHS committees. He's 'THE MAN'.

Poor parsnip germination?

Parsnip seed is notoriously slow to germinate when sown outside, and can take several weeks to show through leaving you wondering whether it has failed altogether.

When growing for show those extra few weeks can be vital for the end result (i.e. what you display on the show bench) so I germinate my seed on kitchen towelling indoors.

I put some paper towel at the bottom of a tupperware container, sprinkle some compost over that and water lightly so that it isn't saturated. The seeds are placed on the surface of the compost so that they are just moistened by the wet compost. After a week or so the white root radicle will pop through the bottom end of the seed casing and at this point I put them (very carefully using tweezers) into the prepared stations in my raised beds, covering them over with 1/4" of sieved compost.

2 seeds are placed in each 'station'....the weakest one will be cut away if both come through. The seed leaves should be through the surface of the compost within 2 weeks, and I then place an upturned plastic bottle with the bottom cut out over each seedling to act as a mini-cloche. They soon romp away at that point and growth can be phenomenal if the weather is decent.

Progress report

I was hoping to get my parsnips sown this weekend but it has rained non-stop and meant I've had to postpone it for another week. In fact I've never seen so much water in my garden and my garage floor is flooded. However, it won't hurt to wait another week as I've got everything ready......the soil and compost mixes are sieved and ready to go, and the various fertilizers have been weighed and stored. There's little point in working rigidly to calendar sowing dates if conditions are not right.

I've made a special contraption to make compost sieving easier on my back.....and quicker. I did my compost sieving in about 30 minutes when it used to take me a whole afternoon. I'm actually now looking forward to sieving compost for the carrot mixes in a month or so. It consists of a wooden box with a (6mm dia. hole) mesh bottom, mounted on wheels that run on a wooden frame on a metal table. A polythene 'chute' funnels the sieved compost/soil into a bin (See pics above). This will save me hours and hours in the coming weeks.

Today I also sowed my red cabbage, brussel sprouts, some peppers and some seeds of shallot 'Matador'. These are in my conservatory as it's a little cold to be putting them in my greenhouse yet. The only things in my greenhouse are the shallots, onion sets and onion and leek plants that I 'bought in'. However, now March is here things will really start to gather pace and the main sowing season will soon be upon us.

Same parsnip bed June 2006

This is a picture of the same parsnip bed in June of 2006 and you can see the young vigorous plants through the green netting. The netting helps to keep aphids off and also filters the wind and prevents breakages.

The glass panes over the top serve two purposes...in the early days they stop cats from digging the sand and leaving their deposits (I like cats.....but when they do that in my well prepared beds I could quite happily kill one....even ours!) and also keeps off excess rainwater. The idea is to keep the bed as dry as possible so that the tap root of the parsnip goes down in search of moisture. As the sand is a supposedly sterile medium the roots only stay in the compost mix that you trickle into the bore holes (see yesterday's post).

There should be no need to feed during the growing season as the compost mix has various fertilisers in it. I don't usually suffer from parsnip canker growing them in this method either and the roots do tend to come up quite clean with the minimum amount of cleaning required.

In 2006 I got 22 'station's in this bed but some of them turned out far too small so I'm going to decrease the amount I grow in this bed in the hope that the extra room will help them swell out a bit more.

Preparing Parsnip beds

This weekend will see me sowing my parsnips in raised beds and the pics above show the sequence of events that will take place.

Top left: I have constructed a raised bed from slabs on end with a timber frame on top of that. The whole thing has been filled with coarse sand and sterilised a few weeks ago in order to give it time to settle. Conical holes are bored with a stout metal rod about 4" diameter at the top and some 3-4 feet deep (Top growers will bore twice this depth!). I get about 18 or so in this bed but they're really a bit close for top level exhibiting, and I never seem to get heavy specimens.

Top right: The compost mix will have been prepared beforehand and sieved to remove any lumps. Carefully trickle it into each hole in turn......

Bottom left: ...........prodding with a cane every now and then to make sure there are no air pockets lower down.

Bottom right: The completed bed with all stations ready to accept the seed.

The seed is in my kitchen on moist tissue paper. As soon as the tiny white root radicle is showing through I will carefully place them into each station. This way I KNOW the seed has germinated. Parsnips are notoriously slow to germinate and if I sowed straight outside I could be waiting for weeks thereby losing valuable growing time.

I have a cunning plan........!

I've done what I said I was going to do and made a cropping plan of my veg plot so that I know exactly what I'm going to grow in each bed and where. That way I won't be tempted to grow too much and any plants that are left over will simply be given away. Too often in the past I've fallen into the trap of squeezing in those extra few seedlings that I've grown because I couldn't bear to throw them on the compost heap. It's false economy and you have to be ruthless.

Last night (after watching Man U's glorious victory against those mardy French gits) I sowed a pot of red onions. They don't usually win in the quality onion classes but I have a plan to grow as many red/purple veg of different types for entry into the 'trug of veg' classes. I think a basket full of dark coloured veg could look quite striking. So as well as red onions there'll be red tomatoes (obviously), radishes, purple carrots, aubergines, purple sprouts, beetroot, purple french beans, red potatoes etc etc.

I hope it'll look stunning and catch the judges eye. But there's a long way to go yet!

Long time no post!

Been a busy few weeks at work and socially so it's a good job the weather's been against me as far as getting any gardening done.

I have however managed to empty the sand out of my parsnip beds and refill it, sterilising each 8" layer as I went along with Jeyes Fluid. I'll be sieving my mixes (more on this soon) in the next couple of weeks so that I can sow them early March.

My exhibition onions and leeks came last week from Vin Throup the legendary onion grower(saves having to grow your own and keeping them under lights and heat). They were all potted up into 3" pots and put into the greenhouse in a boxed off area to keep the frost off. A grolight over them keeps them ticking along nicely.

Apart from that I have only the shallots and a few potted up onion sets in the greenhouse. I'm hoping to empty my carrot drums out tomorrow and refill them, weather permitting. This afternoon I'm driving over to Ockbrook near Derby to collect my potatoes from Exhibition Seed Potatoes (ESP). The varieties I'll be growing this year are Winston and Nadine (whites) and Kestrel, Amour and Maxine (coloureds).

I've also just completed a 5 page 'showing hints' guide for publication on the website of my local show, as well as racking my brains for ideas for different classes.....we like to mix it up a bit each year to stop things getting stale.