Busy Weekend

Wow - What a busy weekend. We got a new barbecue which took a little while to assemble. And with today's sunshine we could not resist giving it a try out. Our favourite bbq recipe at the moment is chicken souvlaki - a great taste of Greece in the sunshine!

The girls certainly enjoyed it. The leaves in the salad were from the greenhouse too. Can't wait until more of the meal is from Matt's Patch (Tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, potatoes ... mmmm).

I managed to make a shelter at the end of Patch's run. What was a straightforward plan in my mind took a little longer to manifest. Once she got used to it, Patch loved it and was in and out all day long! Megan thinks it's great that Patch has a house to hide in!
Mrs Matt spent a good few back-breaking hours cleaning the paving slabs on the patio - there are a lot of slabs! She was removing any weeds and forking out all the crud that had formed in the gaps and putting in new sand. The areas that have been done look great!

On the vegetable front, the cucumbers and tomatoes were put in growbags. When we first moved in we found some plastic green hat-like things. I've since found that they look a lot like growbag pots so I put them in with some of the tomatoes. The idea is that it gives the plant a lot more compost to grow in and makes it it a whole lot easier to water. I'm sure there are some pieces missing but never mind.
While I was in the greenhouse I had a peek at the French Bean experiment where I'd covered them in damp kitchen roll after the dismal failure of my previous effort.
This is what I found - sprouted beans! I have not peeked at the ones I planted in the compost/sand mix (although I did remix the compost to about 4:1 compost/sand as I thought there was too much sand in the original mix).

Patch's Patch

As the weather is getting warmer, we decided that Patch the guinea pig needed to be out in the garden more. So over the weekend I bought some wood and a roll of wire mesh and made a rudimentary run for her. She loves it! Now she can nibble grass and the odd dandelion all day long.
I still have a bit more to do on it, like make a shelter section down one end so she has somewhere to go if it's too sunny. I also need to treat it with some pet-friendly preservative. Overall we're as pleased with it as Patch is!
Next woodwork lesson is making a planter ...

Potatoes are sprouting!
Had a quick look at the early potatoes that were planted in the containers and they've sprouted already! The Red Duke of York are growing faster than the Charlotte ones. Strangely I expected all the leaves to be green, but they're red (or purple) for the Yorks. Time to cover them over again soon!

Learning Curve

A bit of a set back on the French Bean side of things I'm afraid. A few weeks ago I planted some of said beans. I pre-soaked some overnight and but also planted some straight out of the packet. They were all then simply put into compost in their own little cells and watered.

Out of the whole batch only one germinated. Yesterday morning I had a quick poke around and found that the beans had rotted to squidgy white goo. Gutted.

A quick look on the internet seems to suggest that it's quite easy to get French Beans to rot. One suggestion was to add sand to the compost to help drainage.
I suddenly remembered that in the corner of our greenhouse is a bag of sand. Result!
Another suggestion was to try and germinate the beans in the same way as we all did cress at school - in damp kitchen roll.

Something else I have learned is not to use water from a water butt for seeds as it may contain bacteria which could be bad for them. I had been using our water butt for everything I've been growing and not noticed any real problems.

When I arrived home last night I had a quick look at the sand. It seems to be the proper stuff - Horticultural Silver Sand (lime free and all!). So I made a compost/sand mix in a largish pot. The ratio was about 2:1 compost to sand.
I filled about 12-15 cells with the mix, planted a bean in each and misted with tap water - not taking any chances. The beans are also just under the surface, not the 1 inch deep stated on the packet.

As a second part of the learning experiment I took the remainder of the beans (probably about 20) and wrapped them in damp kitchen roll. Then sealed it in a Tupperware box to keep in the moisture, hoping it's not too wet. This is now in the greenhouse as a mini propagator.

So, now it's back to the waiting game although it should be easy to check what's happening with the beans in the kitchen roll.

Beans are out

Over the last week our Broad Beans have been planted out by the raspberries with the fence as support. These were a special request from Mrs Matt as she likes them with gammon and parsley sauce. The rest of us prefer the squeaky French beans which have just been planted. Six broad beans germinated but Emily and I planted the strongest five. This gave us the opportunity to have a good look at the rejected plant and how a broad bean grows. As always it's very impressive to see how Mother Nature works (click on the picture for a detailed close-up).Emily's sweetcorn have also gone out in a little block. As they are wind pollinated it is best to plant them in a block rather than a line.
A few slug pellets sprinkled around them and the broad beans should give them a fighting chance while they get established in their new homes.

The raspberries are doing well with new canes growing strongly. They seem to get visibly bigger every day. and new shoots seem to come up all over the place. They may need controlling later but we'll let them do what they want for the time being.

The strawberries have reacted very well to their new home with all but one of them producing flowers. With a bit of luck (and fertiliser) they, along with the raspberries, might - just might - provide enough fruit for the two little girls who seem to devour them for fun these days.

First Harvest

Just a quick update to say we had our first harvest from Matt's Patch on Monday. Nothing spectacular but some fresh lettuce leaves and land cress. Megan and I went out to get the first crop so that Mrs Matt could complete the salad for dinner! The seeds were planted about 6 weeks ago so have done well. We all commented on how soft the leaves were - much better than shop bought stuff. In fact the only disappointing thing was the realisation that I'm going to have to plant a lot more of this type of lettuce as the individual plants are not that large. It pretty much took all the leaves that were ready to come up with this little lot.

Potatoes a go go

They're in! After a month of nurturing them, giving them the best start we could, the time came when our little potatoes had to go out into the big wide world on their own.

Emily and Megan helped clean out the old recycling boxes ready for the early varieties (Red Duke of York and Charlotte). I was going to put all earlies in the boxes but looking at them I felt the containers were a bit small so only a couple of potatoes went in each.

After a good clean to get rid of the traces of ketchup and other gunk we put gravel in the bottom and covered with about six inches of compost which had been mixed with bonemeal and super phosphate. Then in went the seed potatoes (very carefully) and we gave them a good soak.

Emily and I then dug up the corner of the garden near the raspberry canes. More bonemeal and super phosphate got mixed in and then the King Edwards and Desirees along with the remaining earlies. They're in there somewhere!

I made a little map of what went where which may come in handy later! I think I'm going to miss the little spuds. They've been sitting very happily on the window sill chitting away. However I don't think Mrs Matt will miss them as it means the blinds can now be shut without the risk of breaking off a tiny potato shoot!

Another job we managed to do was put out the strawberry plants into a reasonably sunny patch. In total there are 8 plants there - 3 Cambridge Favourite and the remainder are 'unknown' (thanks Hillary!)

April Fools

Well it seems like ages since I posted anything but time has not stood still in Matt's Patch - far from it. We're into April and have had a good few days of sunny weather. A lot of the garden has sprung into life and it's very interesting seeing what happens. Plants that we never knew were there suddenly burst into flower. Even one of our strawberry plants has gone mad and produced a flower! They're still in their pots as we have not had time to plant them out yet.

The sole courgette plant has been re-potted into something bigger. Out of a packet of 6 seeds, I initially planted 4. Only one germinated. Boo. So the other day I decided to soak the two remaining seeds overnight and planted them the following morning, just to see if that would help speed up the process at all.

I have also planted some French Dwarf Beans, some straight out of the packet and some soaked overnight. There were a couple of days between the normal ones and the soaked ones being planed so it'll be interesting to see what happens.

After what seemed like ages of nothing happening with the pepper seeds, they seem to have decided that conditions are now right and have come up quite well. Which is more than I can say about the cucumbers. There were only 5 in the packet so they all got planted. One came up (eventually) so I poked around in the other pots. A couple seemed to have germinated but either were too deep and could not get above ground level. In order to help them I removed some of the earth from around the yellowish leaves (yellow due to lack of light) and they seem to be moving on a bit now. I'll be lucky if I get three plants from that lot.

Better news on the Broad Bean front. There are some decent plants coming along now. I'm still staggered by how complicated the leaf structure is compared to everything else which just seems to have a pair of leaves initially. The broad beans are more like a complete plant folded up very carefully which slowly opens out.

The lettuces are also doing well. The first crop have been moved out into troughs along with a few of the spinach plants that came up. As a little present for them I've just bought some nitrogen-rich fertiliser to help their leaves! As for the other salad crops the land cress is going great guns and I have planted a 2nd crop of them. Well, when I say 'another crop' I really mean another pot. I put some rocket seeds down last weekend and within two days they had germinated. They're doing very well. With such speedy growth it's no wonder it's called rocket!

Last but not least all the seed potatoes have chitted very well and will have to go in the ground this weekend. I think some can go in the now-redundant recycling bins but the main crop ones will have to go in the garden beds somewhere. I've got some bonemeal for a slow release feed and also some phosphorus which had pictures of root vegetables on the box!