An Organic Lifestyle (Organic Growing Pains)

We have finally dug out the last corner of the plot, its been sitting under plastic sheeting for months to break down the high grass.The plastic was removed and the dead grass could be easily pulled away making it possible for a fellow plotter to come in with a rotavator to break up the ground.  We then dug it over thoroughly and removed the scutch grass roots and the stones.  I went on a road trip near Kinsale on Mon and brought back 4 bags of seaweed in the boot of the car! Wellie boots are compulsory for this task. I did'nt want to get seaweed from the harbour area as it is possibly polluted with diesel from boats and various other unmentionables. The seaweed was not loose at the waters edge so it meant  collecting it at low tide, and taking conservation into account. I took a large scissors and  cut approx half of each plant leaving the roots still attached to the rocks.The 4 bags only covered about 1/3 of the proposed potato patch for next year so at le...

I have been on holidays abroad, enjoying the summer sunshine here at home, spending days on the plot  and while taking some photos did not turn on the computer to upload so, not to bore anyone, collages are the way to go. Various harvests, you will notice courgettes feature in all of them, but getting more colourful as the season progresses! Beetroot,carrots, courgettes,cucumber, chillis,Kale,lettuce,Mange Tout,onions,sweet peppers,sweetcorn and potatoes, not bad for such a late start on a new plot! The onions drying in the sunshine.Chilli peppers (our first attempt ever at growing these)!Tomatoes reddening on the vines at last, our first red pepper is in there too! I love how colourful the harvest gets as the season unfolds. The  story of our pumpkins. they were started off in pots at home and repotted as needed, they were  finally planted out on the plot in early June.Clockwise from top left is their progress, it was slow until we got some heavy downpours ...

The Pumpkin patch after the recent heavy rains. There are 4 plants here and at the moment romping all over 'their' patch.I have usually planted pumpkins where I would have dug up the first early potatoes but this year we didn't have any earlies so seconds and main crop are still in the ground and the pumpkins needed their space out of the pots. This is a patch which was under plastic to kill off the overgrown grass, it has just been roughly dug to loosen the earth and some compost from the Municipal site put down. Some of the grass is beginning to come through again but hopefully the pumpkin foliage will keep most of it down. They are stretching out at least 4 to 5 feet now from where they were planted with loads of flowers and small pumpkins along their length. This is the largest at the moment, about tennis ball size, the rest are less than golf ball size. We are now wondering how many to leave on the stalk to mature and will we cut the stalks at a manageable leng...

The best thing about garden shows is you can see any new developments and ask questions, these are some I saw while browsing around the Mallow Garden festival.They are also interesting as 2 of them are completely Irish made and even further recommendation is they are based in Cork!      The first one is Wormcast,  I have not  used but intend to use it soon.It is 100% pure wormcast and a natural organic fertiliser.It is also child and pet safe, very important if you are using it around the garden at home.  They are on Facebook (who isn't these days)?! www.facebook.com/gsfertiliser Their website for more info is www.gsfertiliser.ie I have mentioned this before and have also used it, its a bit pricey but I have to say an excellent product. it was also available at Mallow at a special show price but it is also in all good garden centres. I was not aware this was manufactured in Cork and is owned by a cooperative of about 30 farming families in...

A short post, we have had much needed rain for the past two days and the sun has come back out this evening. A visit to the plot was on the cards, while it was raining lightly when I went out , by the time I came home the sun was shining from a clear blue sky.  The Courgette and salad bed is becoming a jungle as the plants jostle for space, the inter planted lettuce has come on as much as the lettuce planted in the polytunnel. There are 5 courgette plants but so far this yellow one is the only one bearing fruit. This one is Parador F1, recommended as probably the best yellow courgette available, high yielding with a nutty flavour. Its a first for us so not sure how large they will grow or even how large to allow them to grow?  The green courgettes plants are reliable Defender but no fruit or even flowers to report as yet despite the hot weather! We have a Pumpkin patch! These 4 are Rouge Vif d'Etampes.Bright orange skin and can grow up to 10kgs and can be used fo...

The weather has suddenly become glorious, sunny days with temps up in the late teens and forecasting early 20s! It brings its own problems  with watering young  plants, especially in the polytunnel or greenhouse. The tomatoes have found their permanent home at last, I think they are smaller than they should be for this time of the season, they are setting blossom and have only one truss to each plant?! This Celtic Gold is being touted as the new wonder compost, guaranteeing stupendous growth !It has been enriched with worm cast, a bit pricey at €17 for 2 bags. I bought 2  at The Pavilion Garden centre in Ballygarvan and added it around the tomato plants and lettuce in the tunnel. I will be expecting a huge improvement immediately! After the Blight scare of last week the potatoes actually have recovered and grown new foliage and there has been no further discolouring of the leaves. The Charlotte have sprouted  lovely lilac flowers so heres hoping it was j...

We had been warned of possible Blight conditions on last Sat and the optimum day for spraying was thurs but as we had a yellow weather alert for up to 30 mls of rain on fri that did not seem to be a good idea.  I bought the mix for Bluestone, which is what is in the off the shelf spray Bordeaux mixture which is a recommended organic remedy. Ravenscourt garden centre supplies the ingredients  ( Washing crystals & the blue Copper sulphate) and the mix ratio, it suited me as we only have a small amount of potatoes and of them only the Pink Fir Apple are not Blight resistant. The rain stopped on fri evening and I thought I would go out and spray as the weather had turned humid and misty, ideal blight conditions. I was stopped in my tracks as soon as I reached the plot as the leaves on the Sarpo Axona were discoloured and seemed to be getting worse as I was looking at them! The worst affected were at the right hand side of the potato patch, a few were affe...

Another photo to compare to the header pic, taken from roughly the same angle!there are now 4 raised beds completed and in use plus the potato section and the polytunnel.  Son Billy made the bed for the sweetcorn on Sat morning and filled with compost. I have discovered an organic local compost supplier, our local City Council !`I took my own bags and you fill yourself and pay €2 per bag. It is composted completely from green waste brought to the recycling centre, still affectionately known as 'The Dump' on the outskirts of the city.  I topped it up today with 2 bags of Farmyard manure  ( bought prepacked). The Sweetcorn was sown in seed trays then potted  on into 3" pots then into 6" pots, if the bed had not been ready in the next few days then they would have been repotted into even larger pots.My rule of thumb for repotting is, if any of the roots are visible through the end of the pot then it is time to move on as it holds back the plant. S...

The onions were moved out to a bed and were covered with plastic for a night or two but are now facing the elements but its not too bad as the weather has really  improved . We don't have a lot of onions this year as they were planted in modules awaiting a plot!I left a bed of autumn sown onions on the old allotment, I am sure the new owner will appreciate them. Another bed up and running!The onions went into what was going to be the courgette bed but at Billy's suggestion we made yet another bed and popped in the courgettes, sugar snap peas and random lettuces as they were all in pots in the polytunnel and needed their own space.They are draped with fleece overnight and left to enjoy the sun for a few hours during the day. They were planted out yesterday morning and this morning one of the peas was nibbled down despite the fleece and netting around the back of the bed, definitely rabbit damage! There are 6 courgette plants, 3 green and 3 yellow. We did not h...

A couple of hours spent on the plot today, yielded an onion bed or almost an onion bed.Digging out skutch grass is back breaking and time consuming, not to mention the stones! We have a lot of plants in pots waiting their turn to get a home but with our time constraints its slow going and time is running out for the plants.  All of the potatoes are up and have now been earthed up twice, they may have been late going in but the recent combination of heat and rain has driven everything up. The onions loved the polytunnel but today they have been put outside to harden off. They are in the shelter of the polytunnel as this new plot is a very windy spot.The modules have worked well and the onions will planted out with very little if any root disturbance. This pic was taken last week when they were inside with the tomato plants and sweetcorn which by today had really put on a growth spurt.  Lettuce was transplanted into the border and a row of ...

The allotment is beginning to take shape albeit very slowly, due to time constraints and the weather, but today the sun shone and I had time to spend there even though it was a bit wild and windy.The top third of the plot is now productive! The carrot bed in the centre was remade as the boards of the previous one was nearly rotten so leaving the bed more or less intact, new boards were put in place around the sides.There seemed to be an awful lot of earth so most of that was shovelled over on top of the potato drills this morning. I got 2 bags of sharp sand and a bag of compost from the home compost bin and dug it into the bed and removed what seemed like hundreds of stones from the bed.Carrots like light sandy soil which is loose and as stone free as possible, they are the divas of the vegetable world! I planted 2 rows of 'Carrot Purple Haze' which has a purple hue to the skin, and 2 rows of Early Nantes from Quickcrop. I had space to plant 1 row of beetro...

I took the weekend off so decided this evening once the rain had dried off to get some onions started. I know they should be in by now but the area earmarked for them is under a sheet of plastic until we get time to clear and dig it out for them! I planted them into compost in module trays so they will not have their roots disturbed when planting out. The modules are in the empty tunnel for the moment, it may as well start earning its keep. The heat may bring them on as they are behind other onions I have seen planted already. There is condensation in the tunnel each time we open it up which will create humidity which may or may not be a good thing?! Its our first time using a tunnel so this season is going to be a learning curve. All of the seedlings on the windowsill are well up and will need repotting into separate pots now from the seed trays, more about that soon.

The polytunnel is in place but the ground needs to be dug out and enriched before bringing out our tomato plants.They will not be ready for another few weeks anyway as they are incubating on one of the bedroom windowsills. I had been on Done deal a while back looking for a polytunnel and after investigating various models re: prices etc I settled on one and when  I clicked into their website I found the company was based a few miles away from me!I phoned them up, got directions to their store and son Billy (who is growing with me again this year) did a road trip and picked up our tunnel for €129.00. We got it erected in about 2 hours on Sunday .The measurements are in metres but it is approx 9'x6' in good old Imperial! If anyone is interested the company is based just outside Carrigtohill, Co Cork and their website is www.inthemarket.ie .    The two raised beds are being replaced as the timbers are really rotted and while we would probably be able to use them this ye...

Jack came to the allotment with me on  Wed, it was sunny but cool. I told Jack there was pirates treasure buried in one of the raised beds and it kept him occupied for ages digging! One side of the overgrown plot had been dug over by a mini digger and sods were piled up roughly around the edges. I spent the time digging a trench around the edges and sinking some tiles I had found languishing in my shed at home, hopefully it will deter some of the skutch grass roots from finding their way onto the plot, fingers crossed anyway! We bought some plants to fill up a pot which we found buried under the grass, they are to attract and feed the bees who live..... here at the end of the line of plots! The Beekeeper paid for the plot just to keep one hive on it, I hope it will be a case of live and let live for the summer months. The bees seem to be dormant at the moment with just the odd one buzzing around. The weather has changed drastically today with strong winds and lashing...