Tiggy’s Garden

The current hot weather that we have been having in London over the past 10 days is doing wonders for the garden. The sweet corn have been the ground for almost a week and are doing really well. They were grown from seed using a super sweet variety in individual compartments in deep trays in the green house until they are ready to planted out. All the books that I have on vegetable gardening suggest that they should be grown in pellets or degradable pots to limit the root disturbance. But I have found that growing it in trays seems to help keep them watered longer and they grow on perfectly in the ground with a little help from some compost.

They usually take about six to eight weeks to grow depending on the weather. Once the cobs are fully grown we keep them on the plant until we just about to eat them. The longer the period between picking and eating the more sugar is lost from the corn and subsequently they are less sweet. For about a month in the summer they are eaten as a snack just before dinner. Yum.

Last year I tried to use the corn as supports for other climbing vegetables like peas and beans. Unfortunately it didn’t plan out as well as I wanted. I think that this year I’m going to try and grow French beans up the sweet corn plants. I have no idea whether this will work, but I’m going to give it a go.

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I love the bank holidays when the weather is good. It means plenty of time in the garden. I started by tiding the front garden and then on to tackle the dandelions on the lawn with my new trowel. This has left a lot of holes on the lawn which I will hopefully get round to sorting out tomorrow. My next aim was to get the beds ready for the summer veg and flowers. I started off clearing the weeds from an area which I have designated for the sweet corn. This was going really well until I hit something in the soil. I thought that it was a large rock until I found that my fork would only go down 8 inches over a a large area of space. I was hoping to find a large treasure chest but as I started to dig I found a huge lump of cement. After an hour or so of hitting the thing with every heavy weight tool I could lay my hands on it finally broke into pieces. At least now the sweet corn will have somewhere to grow.

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Haruki is a young cat and has a lot of energy, but how the hell do I stop him from running all over my flower beds. Up until this morning he had been quite good and only knocked the heads off a few of my lillys. I didn’t mind this because they were in his path and he is a little bit clumsy for a cat. But this morning as Mish was getting him inside for the day she found him inside one of my cloches. The stupid cat had managed to get himself inside the plastic cloche but could not get himself out. Apart from raising everything in a greenhouse (which is not pratical) or electroshock thearpy, does anyone have any suggestions about how to stop the jack in a box from ruining all the plants in the garden.

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Last year towards the end of the summer I started to build a raised bed which eventually turned into a cold frame. Once the raised bed had been build I planted a number of spring onions only to find that local cats were using it as a litter tray. Subsequently I had to give it a roof which was not the easiest of tasks. The frame for the roof was very simple. A slanted roof made out of a frame. Finding the right material for the roof was the tricky part. Having bought some plastic sheeting from B&Q I tried to cut it using a stanley knife which did next to nothing. I then tried to use the jigsaw on the plastic and found that not only did it cut the plastic but also shred it to bits. It was time to abandon the plastic and find another material. Eventually I found in the shed a packet of polythene sheeting that was thin enough to be stretched across the frame and nailed down.

Finally the cold frame could be used. So towards the end of January I planted some Italian red lettuce leaves, which have flourished. The use of the cold frame also means very few pests. So when we picked some lettuce for the first time last weekend I only found one slug. The leaves were great, mainly because they were slug and hole free, but I was a little disappointed that they didn’t have as much flavour as I would have hoped.

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So last weekend we were having all our family over for the Jewish festival of Passover. As part of the festival we have a large meal where we eat a spring vegetable called in hebrew Karpas. Now Karpas usually comes in the form of curley leaf parsley.

As we are preparing for the meal we realise that we don’t have any parsley. So I go into the garden and growing from last year is first sprouts of this years parsley. The Passover meal was saved by last years parsley.

I didn’t even know that it grew back each year. At the moment the parsley is chopped down to nothing, but in my herb box the parsley seeds that I planted back in Feburary are finally starting to grow. So my fish pies will hopefully have some parsley in the not to distant future.

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Currently there is a new fur ball that is making the garden his own. Let me introduce you to Haruki (named after the author Haruki Murakami) who we picked up from the RSPCA a couple of weeks ago. But it was only last weekend did he finally make his way out into the garden for the very first time. His name was not originally Haruki, no it was Tabby. Haruki is only 8 months old so we figured he was young enough that we could change his name.

So in the last three days he has managed to pierce a hole in the plastic cloches, knock the head off a small lily and not do any sort of a poo in the garden. No he prefers to do a poo in the kitchen in his litter tray. This was even after putting some cat litter down on the soil to give him a hint. Once he does start to relive himself in the garden hopefully he will add as much nutrients as Tiggy did and we will get some tremendous vegetables from his fertilisation.

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I always like this time of year. It is start of spring, the clocks change, the day gets longer and everything starts to grow. It was this time a couple of years ago that I first really started to get interested in gardening. I can not remember whether I got “The Great Vegetable Plot” by Sarah Raven and then bought a packet of mixed vegetable seeds from B&Q or the other way around. Either way while planting this years spinach, beetroot and radishes, it reminded me of how it all began.

These days my seeds come from Ebay. I found this guy (Norman) who sells 15 packets of Suttons and Thompsons seeds for a just £6 including postage. The best thing about buying off Norman is that he lets you choose a selection of seeds which means I get the seeds that I want for a vastly reduced price.

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Today was the first day of my two weeks off that I had a chance to be in the garden. I have always had this ambition to create a beautiful over flowing flower bed with a perfect combination of colours and plants. Today was my first atempt at serious planning for the flower bed. In previous years the bed was made up with a lack of thought and I think that it showed.

As a result this year I have tried to use height and colour as the two main themes. For the colour I’m using a mixture of reds and purple flowers. Gladioli and iris and sweet peas make up the back wall of the flower bed with poppies, petunias and a country cottage seed mix making up the rest of the bed. With a bit of luck come June and July we will have a which is a visual delight, that won’t look awkward or cluttered.

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So after eight months in my last job I have finally quit to move on to something which will hopefully be more exciting and rewarding. I have managed to sort out a couple of weeks in between the two jobs where I can spend some quality time getting the garden ready for growing season. After the recurrence of the greenhouse falling down I think that my first job will be securing it to the fence and as a result not losing any more plants (the early peas where a victim to the strong winds and a heavy green house over the past few weeks).

Next on the agenda is getting the ground ready for the seeds that I planted in January. Last summer a crop of purple sprouting broccoli were put into the ground quite late not really giving them enough time to develop. So I think they are just going to have to come up and the ground be prepared for the sweet corn and tomatoes. Over the next couple of weeks I will be uploading pictures so you can see the progress the garden is making.

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Ok, so I probably should have started off with letting you know about Tiggy in my first post, but my excitement over sweet potatoes kind of got in the way. Tiggy was our cat who unfortunately we had to put down last December. The vet found a growth on his bowel which meant that he couldn’t poo any longer. Anyway it was Tiggy who spent the most time in the garden and as a result we figured we would name the blog after him.

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