Cucumber News

I'm growing four cucumber plants this year which is almost certainly too many (I know the picture has five seedlings but one was a spindly outcast). But I'd rather have too many than not enough. Again I bought a packet of all-female plants to save the hassle of having to remove any male flowers. The variety is Passandra and is 'mini' type - you pick the fruit when they are about 15cm long.

After a few days in my home-made propagators this is the state of them on the 24th March:

Young Cucumber seedlings

Well, it's nearly 10 weeks on and now look at them! The cucumbers themselves are already a nice size. The biggest one at the moment is over 5cm so not long to wait ...

Loads of flowers on the cucumbers

They've been re-homed into the old recycling boxes and I've put up some netting in the greenhouse for them to climb up. Hopefully it should be able to bear their weight.

The Courgettes are getting bigger

And here they are in the very overcrowded greenhouse! My only concern now is that as they grow they'll start to block out light to the other plants.

Lots of pots in the greenhouse

If you look closely you can see the irrigation system which is part of another hi-tech project and will be reported on soon - once it's up and running!

Rain Rain Go Away

Most recent harvest - then it rained. And rained ...

This was our harvest from Matt's Patch last weekend. Lettuce, cucumber, courgettes, raspberries and some rocket that has come under attack from caterpillars. Not bad I think. Since then it has rained and rained and rained. I can't believe how much rain there is up there!

6 Pepper plants - all with peppers like these

In the raised planter I have 6 pepper plants which are doing quite well despite the efforts of the weather to stall their growth. They all have peppers of various sizes now but I know that if it warmed up a few degrees and stayed dry for a week they would come on tremendously.
I have toyed with the idea of putting perspex screens around the edges of the planter to give more shelter to the plants in there but it's just a pipe-dream at the moment.

First Cucumber

This is our first cucumber - with plenty more to come

Tonight I picked our first cucumber. I thought it was plenty big enough and when measured it was about 12 inches long (more if you take the curve into account - the EU won't be pleased). Looking at the plants there are plenty more to come so we'll be having cucumber sandwiches all summer. Well, I'm more sure of having cucumbers than I am of having a summer! The variety is Aurelia F1 and it's an all female variety which means there are no male flowers to risk the fruit getting pollinated and going bitter. Saying that I have not tasted it yet! The four seeds were planted on 7th May so have produced fruit in about 9 weeks. They have been getting regular feeding once the flowers appeared so that should have helped.

Along with the cucumber I dug up the remaining Charlotte potatoes from the recycling container. We want to eat them on the weekend and I've dug them up now to give their skins time to mature. The others we've had have lost their skins during boiling and I think this is because they are too fresh.
This is the last of our early potatoes. The rest are King Edwards and Desiree which are still going strong in their corner of the garden.

Today's harvest - Charlotte potatoes and Aurelia F1 cucumber

Cucumber Forrest

The cucumbers have gone mad! Since my last post a few days ago, the biggest cucumber seems to have had a growth spurt and must now be be about 9 or so inches long. It's getting fatter too!

Cucumber getting bigger every day

And while I was distracted with that cucumber, the others seem to have come on in leaps and bounds too. Every leaf junction has got a fruit on, and I have three plants! They are taking over the whole greenhouse with tendrils and side shoots going everywhere, grabbing on to what ever they can, be it French Beans or tomato plants! I'm going to have to do some serious moving about in there whilst I can still get in.

Cucumber plants are taking over the greenhouse

Red Raspberry

I went out this early this evening to water a few things and this is what I found. A bright red raspberry, almost glowing in amongst the verdant green leaves of the canes. After calling the girls out (there will be a lot more competition for ripe raspberries as everyone likes them, as opposed to strawberries which Mrs Matt doesn't like - not even in Pimms!) and a lot of build up, the raspberry was not quite ripe so refused to budge! Patience is a virtue as they say.

This is our first raspberry to turn red

French bean harvest
After the local school fete Emily helped me go round the French bean plants and gather our first harvest. They're sneaky things and hide themselves very well in the stalks of the parent plant.

Emily (as a tiger) helped me harvest our first French Beans

Cucumber update
This is the latest picture of the most advanced cucumber - it's about 5 inches long. It seems to be quite wrinkly, as if it has all its skin and is slowly filling it up!

First cucumber is about 5 inches long now

Charlotte potatoes
After the somewhat disappointing showing of the Red Duke of Yorks I had a quick look at the Charlotte potatoes that are growing in the patch at the end of the garden. I thought the foliage was dying back a bit so decided to get the fork and have a snoop under the ground. What I found reassured me that all is well! I found a few good sized tubers and once I'd found some I could not resist digging both the plants up! We have cold roast chicken, fresh new potatoes and salad with our own lettuces. Excellent. We have more than twice the amount shown in the picture but Mrs Matt had started cooking them before I could get my camera out!

Some of the Charlottes from the potato patch

Cucumber Update

Our three cucumber plants in troughs

It's been just over two weeks since I planted the three cucumber plants in troughs (there were four, the fourth being very weak and suffering from root rot. RIP). They've been doing very well and I'm trying to not water them too much. Luckily the weather's been helping me out by being rather cold and miserable!

This morning, however, I decided to have a close inspection of the plants to see what I could see. I thought cucumbers grew off stalks that in turn grow off the main stem (a little like tomatoes) but it turns out they grow right off the main stem, just where the leaves join. At the moment they are tiny. This one is about the biggest and it's about 1cm long. There are quite a few on all three plants, easily identified by the star-like flower bud.

Tiny cucumber - the flower's not anywhere near ready to open

Hopefully the weather will warm up a notch and they'll thrive.

Meanwhile, in another part of the garden - well, several parts of the gargen - there are the French Beans which are starting to flower now. Not very exciting flowers it has to be said. But so long as they do the job they're ok with me. This is the most advanced plant with maybe half a dozen pods on it, these being the biggest.

Slowly but surely, the arrival of French beans

First Courgette

Meet our first courgette! Picked this very morning. Ok, so it's a little wonky and wouldn't make it past an EU market inspector but hey - it's the first proper produce from Matt's Patch (lettuce doesn't really count). So, in anticipation of a glut of courgettes I've been looking up recipes. Obviously there's fritters, but I'm more interested in Courgette Cake (a bit like carrot cake but, you've guessed it, with courgette instread). Another recipe I've found was on a Waitrose card for Minted Courgette Soup.

First courgette - hopefully one of many

I also thought I'd show the progress of the broad beans - they're coming along nicely. I've found a recipe for these too that I want to try - from the Guardian's gardening blog. I haven't planted our French beans out yet, so broad beans are all we've got to look at at the moment.

Beans are getting fatter - won't be long now ...

What I have done is to give the 4 cucumber plants a bigger home. This is two of them in a trough. As for the other two (not pictured), one is a bit of a runt so may not make it through the stress of moving house! Let's hope they do better than the last lot, otherwise I'll just give up with cucumbers.

Cucumbers have been moved to bigger homes

Our tomatoes seem to be quite a way behind other people's. Never the less, they have started producing flowers which I am duly tapping when I pass by to help with pollination. I'm also pinching out the side shoots that grow between the main stem and the side leaves. This leaves a nice smell of tomatoes on your hands!

A little late but we have tomato flowers

Emily and Megan can't wait for more sunshine to help ripen the strawberries. They're so very close to being ready it's painful. Even with the mesh over them, something has still managed to get in and half-eat a couple. Why do they do that? If you don't like strawberries LEAVE THEM ALONE! GRRRR!

mmmmm! Strawberries. Gorgeous!

It Worked!

My new cucumbers have germinated! The packet said seedlings should appear in 3-5 days. I must admit I was sceptical. However after three days all four seeds have come good - so good in fact that I've had to get a bigger lid on my home made propagator! I'm going to leave them in there now for a few more days.

Germinated cucumbers in my home made propagator

Other News
This is the view of the potato patch. I've earthed them up twice but still they grow like things possessed! Maybe I'll do it one more time and then leave them alone. As for the ones in containers, they are full to the brim with earth so not a lot of choice with those!

Potatoes growing well

I have transplanted the best French Beans into their own individual pots (bottom of picture), along with 6 bell pepper plants (top-right). There is also one tomato plant which has not been used yet. The whole internet gardening fraternity seems to have gone mad on 'upside down tomatoes'. Here is another link. I may have a go at this - I've not decided yet, but it would be a shame to waste the plant by not doing anything with it.

French beans (bottom) and peppers (top right)

Cucumbers revisited

One of the first vegetable seeds we sowed in Matt's Patch were cucumbers. Now, I've never had much luck with growing cucumbers. The last time I tried I think we got one small cucumber before the plants decided to go to the big allotment in the sky.

This year I managed to get three seedlings growing and since I planted them in a growbag two have died. My luck with cucumbers continues.

So, with my enthusiasm still intact, I decided to get some more seeds on the go quickly. Yesterday I looked through all the different types of cucumber in the local seed shop. I've decided to go for an all female variety called Aurelia F1. They should be less trouble as one does not need to keep picking off the male flowers which is what I'll have to do with my remaining plant from the previous effort (Telegraph). I felt this new packet was quite expensive at £2 for 4 seeds, but then again, cucumbers are about a pound each in the supermarkets.

Reading the back it seems like they're quite demanding with regards to temperature, at least to start with. So to give them every chance I made a little propagator from a plastic strawberry punnet which I recovered from the recycling bin - better to reuse than recycle! I taped up most of the air holes on the top, leaving two open for a little ventilation. It's now sitting on the window sill in the conservatory. Please work!

Following on from my experiment where I germinated French beans in damp kitchen roll, I planted the sprouting beans in compost mixed with a little sand. This is what I was greeted with this morning - loads of beans all rising up out of the earth. I've counted over 20 which is a much better success rate. This is definitely the way to go!

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!

The Greenhouse Effect

The people we bought our house from were kind enough to leave their greenhouse complete with aluminium racks and even an old wireless thermometer which looked like it hadn't worked in ages. After fitting new batteries to the thermometer it burst into life. There should be another part to it so that the greenhouse temperature can be monitored from the comfort of the house. We've never found this part - maybe it died some time ago. Anyway the main bit is working and the other day it reported that it was 25°C. Toasty!

Over the winter the only thing in the greenhouse was a couple of bales of hay for the guinea pig. Obviously that had to change so just over a week ago (Sunday 22nd Feb) Megan and I set about planting our vegetable seeds. So far we have planted some of the following:

• Courgettes (Astia F1)
  
• Broad beans - Dwarf type (The Sutton)
  
• Tomatoes (Shirley F1)
  
• Salads made up of lettuce, land cress (which is like water cress only ... on land) and spinach
  
• Bell Peppers of various types although they were all in one packet. Hmmm.

The first to show their faces were some of the lettuce plants. Well done, we have a winner!

With the salad plants I'm going to (hopefully) plant some every 3-4 weeks so that there is a nice steady supply. Once large enough they will go outside in a planter. Probably to be eaten by slugs. I think the pecking order will be slugs, us, then Patch the guinea pig.

This last weekend I planted some cucumber (Telegraph) seeds - all five of them! According to the packet, if trained properly they could reach 50cm! Which just begs the question how exactly do you train a cucumber?

I still have French Beans to plant but according to the packet it's still too early - even in a greenhouse. What do they know - I may just put some in pots just to see ...