An Organic Lifestyle (Organic Growing Pains)

I popped out to the plot late in the afternoon, it was misty and getting wetter by the minute but I wanted to pick some rhubarb to make a Rhubarb and Orange cake which grandson Stephen had made.Stephen has taken to baking like a duck to water!The rhubarb had suffered in the recent downpours and frost and I had to clean the bed and pull lots of dead stalks hopefully it will make a comeback.I took a peek under the fleece and plastic of the strawberry bed and nearly fell over to see nice red fruit underneath.The slugs had chomped on a few but there were 5 nice red ones left for me!                                         With that encouragement I took a look around and discovered loads of gooseberries on our one bush, still small but lots of them  Carrots coming u...

We signed up with Suttons to trial some of their grafted plants , tomatoes,peppers,cucumbers and peppers.They were supposed to arrive mid March but did not arrive until nearly a month later. This Spring has been so unpredictable weatherwise that was not a bad thing as plants will not be going out to their growing positions for another few weeks.I still have not got to grips with the new Blogger to upload my photos correctly so these are actually in the reverse to the way I wanted them...oh well! This is a close  up of the graft on one of the tomato plants.When potting on tomato plants the soil is brought up to the bottom leaves to encourage new roots to grow to support the plant, with these it is advised to keep the soil below the level of the graft as the grafted plant can send out roots and cancel out the grafted root! Another grafted tomato plant.I waited for days wondering when our plants were going to arrive until one evening a neighbour came to the door bearing a b...