An Organic Lifestyle (Organic Growing Pains)

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...

I cannot believe I have not blogged since 31st July?! Where do the days and weeks go? Being very busy on all fronts takes up a bit of time but I have been on the plot and I have to say after such a late start we are very happy with our veg from the 'new' allotment. There is no point in back tracking so this is Mondays harvest, courgette,sweetcorn,globe artichokes and tomatoes and a few raspberries also. The 3 courgette plants had romped away producing to such an extent we were giving them away and had done all we could with them.The plants had grown to ginormous size at this point and then stopped producing. I cut back all of the huge old leaves, leaving only the newer ones at the top of the plant, fed them with the Comfrey tea and lo and behold they are now producing again at a much slower pace I might add, each plant now has two fruits and some new flowers. The courgette bed after being stripped, you can see how much they grow in length from the base! The leeks a...

 This is son Billy's first year plotting with me, he had said they use quite a lot of courgettes and was looking forward to seeing them grow and picking fresh ones.I thought you will have some job coping with a glut so just put in 3 green and 1 yellow courgette plants.They have been very slow with the cold nights we had been experiencing but this week they have been reaching glut proportions! The smaller ones were almost overnights and the larger one was deemed a bit small the previous day! I wanted to make some Comfrey 'tea' to feed our new plot. We always had it on the Hydro Farm  so while I was in Blarney recently I paid a visit to catch up with plotting friends. I met Zwena, Rosie & Tom and came home with an armfull of Comfrey which grows wild  there and some rhubarb ! Comfrey should really be used before setting flowers when it is at its most potent but as with everything else this year I am like the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, I am ...