winter blues

Ruby Goldstar — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 19:07:38 +0000

i took a wee wander out to our sad looking garden today with it’s sodden lawn and half cleared out greenhouse to think about where i would ever start to get it producing some veggies again.. i have done a lot of flicking through seed catalogues over the past few cold wet weeks but when it comes to doing anything about it, i can hardly face it. i’m all talk and no action. so maybe if i compile a plan then next time the flicker of an idea to go into the garden pops into my head i will have a place to start…

I need to clear away the decaying, probably putrid vines from last years tomato plants (which became decidedly overgrown and produced very little in the way of fruit).

Same for the cucumbers.

I could do with cleaning up all those little pots i lovingly planted seeds into last Spring and which bore such delicate and beautiful seedlings (before the rather flimsy pre-Greenhouse construction blew over in a gust of wind and sent half of them to their deaths).

I would like to top up the raised beds with the lovely compost which i hope has come from the wormery (however i feel terrible as the worms have likely all died as it had become so infested with flies that it could not be opened or used for many months..) i would then like to clean the wormery out, ready for some fresh worms and some lessons from last years attempts..

the hip gardener?

Ruby Goldstar — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 17:38:21 +0000

I feel the title ‘hip gardener’ might be a tad over stated, in both the ‘hip’ and the ‘gardener’ sense of the word. Two of my reasons for doing the blog are as follows…a) I have nothing else good to blog about b) I think it might help me organise my gardening thoughts and actually make some good progress in the garden… I have always had a bit of an interest in growing veggies – must have come from my farming roots.When I was doing an A Level Biology project I decided to do a trial testing whether Miraclegro would help my pea plants to grow better. It did of course – the tested ones were more fruitful, stronger and taller than the others. Of course now I’m grown up i’ve gone all organic so i’m more into wormeries than chemical based fertilisers.My lovely kind husband built me a greenhouse and tore up part of our lawn for some raised beds last Easter and we grew quite a few things, but now is the time to consider what to grow this year and when to do it..