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Sally Nex

~ Sustainable food growing

Sally Nex

Category Archives: container growing

Plant yourself a coronavirus veg garden

30 Monday Mar 2020

Posted by sallynex in container growing, kitchen garden, new veg garden

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

container growing, coronavirus, new veg plot, quick crops, raised beds

So here we all are, stuck at home with time on our hands, chaos in the supermarkets, trying not to think about an uncertain future.

What better time to start growing your own food!

This is the first installment of a series taking you setting up your first veg garden week by week – starting with getting your plot ready, plus a few seeds you can be sowing now for ridiculously quick harvests! https://www.learningwithexperts.com/gardening/blog/starting-a-veg-garden-during-quarantine

Herby adventures

10 Saturday Sep 2016

Posted by sallynex in container growing, herbs, videos

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

container growing, herbs, herbs in containers

I have been planting herbs. More to the point, I have been experimenting with herb containers: a gardening marriage made in heaven if ever there was one, as herbs like it dry and hot, and conditions in containers are generally…. dry and hot. And you can put your herb container right outside your back door so all you have to do when you want something for your cooking is open the door, reach out and… voila! You don’t even have to put your shoes on.

Anyway, I made a video of it (in which you also get to glimpse my house and bits of the extremely woolly garden too). Here you go – courtesy of the crocus.co.uk Youtube Channel. Enjoy!

Pick of the month: June

25 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by sallynex in container growing, kitchen garden

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

gluts, mangetout peas, Oregon Sugar Pod, peas, preserving crops

Pea ‘Oregon Sugar Pod’

To quote a well-known advert for a certain shop which used to sell clothing but now seems to be a supermarket for posh people:

[cue 1970s lounge lizard soundtrack and sultry voiceover of the sort I can only manage when I’m still bleary and half asleep]

This is not just a pea. This is a mangetout pea.

I never used to bother growing mangetouts. They didn’t appeal to my ever-practical nature: you can’t freeze them, you see, or make them into pickles, or do anything really except eat them as fresh and crisp as possible. What use is that come the apocalypse?

Then a couple of years ago I was given a packet of the sumptuously-coloured ‘Shiraz’, a purple mangetout so beautiful it’s a shame to pick it. The flowers are even more lovely, like a bicoloured sweet pea in mauve and cerise.

I thought that was good: but then this year, not being organised enough to get hold of some more ‘Shiraz’, I grabbed a packet of the standard green mangetout.

Oh. My. Goodness. [read more…]

A housewarming present

26 Sunday Sep 2010

Posted by sallynex in container growing

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

hedychium, moving house

My poor container plants are all higgledy-piggledy. There are geraniums on the steps and a loquat tree teetering on the wall, the lawn is developing oval-shaped sickly yellow patches under tubs of mint dumped and still there two weeks after moving, and all my lovingly-sown salad leaves, still in their seed tray about to be transplanted into their large and roomy trough, were eaten by large snails on the first night we got here.

But though I could be gloomy and pessimistic I am not: for among it all appeared a single flower which has become my Good Omen and convinced me that despite all evidence to the contrary everything is going to be All Right.

I posted some time ago about an unfeasibly big Hedychium I was given which I promptly split in three. You won’t be at all surprised to find that the experimental portion I left in the ground perished forthwith during last year’s winter: but I have two left. The one in the house is alive, but small and not very enthusiastic: but the one I overwintered in the greenhouse is rude with health.

Since I knew I was moving I kept it in the pot: it only just survived the move, in fact, as while it was on its perilous trip from greenhouse to removal van there was a horrible creaking and ripping noise and one of the large branches listed drunkenly sideways. The removal van was rather sweet, if a little gung-ho, and grabbed a nearby leg of greenhouse staging to plunge it in the pot: he then used a webbing strap of the sort they have in removal lorries to lash the whole lot together. Heath Robinson it may be but it saved my ginger lily.

It has rewarded me – and, in absentia, the removal van man – by producing its first-ever flower spike. It is a little late in the season and since temperatures are dropping by the hour it may never quite make it to flowering stage: but even the fact that it’s trying is one of those little signs of hope which help you make it through the cardboard boxes and out the other side.

Pocket-sized vegetables

01 Sunday Aug 2010

Posted by sallynex in container growing

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

vertical walls

Now, if the seed companies and garden centres and all those people trying to sell you stuff are to be believed, this is the Next Big Thing.

Personally, I don’t know quite what to make of it.

On the one hand, I know people are running out of space: the good Lord knows I’ve come face to face with that particular trend while combing the south of England for a new house. Gardens are undeniably getting much, much smaller: in fact unless you’ve got a million or so to spend (or are willing to live in the lee of a motorway), large gardens don’t seem to exist anywhere within a 100-mile radius of London.

This is particularly true in cities, of course: my last city garden was in Chiswick W4 where I had what was considered even then (and I go back some way) a massive garden: it measured 40ft x 20ft including the patio.

At the same time, city folk – and not a few people who don’t live in the city – are mobilising en masse to grow their own grub. This is a fantastic and rather delightful phenomenon which I hope continues indefinitely as it’s altogether a Very Good Thing.

Only one problem. Growing grub – if you want to actually feed yourself in some form – takes room. And a lot of it. Allotments, as we all know, are more difficult to get hold of than a Lib Dem spokesman in a crisis: so you can forget that, then. That’s when those inventive folk at the commercial end of horticulture started wittering on about vertical gardening. The trouble is – it doesn’t work.


Well, that’s not quite true. I’m sure it does work if, as at Thompson & Morgan where this rather wonderful vegetable wall was photographed, you have a industrial-standard automatic irrigation system running along the top of the wall into which the exactly-measured amounts of fertiliser are being dripped.

And it probably also helps if, as here, you were only growing for a display to impress journalists rather than actually produce stuff to eat: this wall had lettuce growing alongside beans (so in real life, when it’s sunny, the lettuce bolts, and when it’s shady, the lettuce is fine but the beans sulk). And a melon, greedy plant that it is, growing in a pocket which would have allowed a rootball all of about 8″ across. No melon I know would grow at home kept constrained like that.

I don’t want to bash T&M as this was really quite a spectacularly beautiful wall and did show just what’s possible. It did however undeniably overlook the fact that the number of people growing at home who can put in the expense and effort required to give their veg growing in this way such ideal growing conditions is vanishingly small. Most people, let’s face it, just muddle along: and for these people, growing veg in pockets on the wall is surely setting yourself up for a crashing disappointment.

Growing veg in pots is fine – in fact it works, really well, and I do it all the time. But the First Law of Patio Veg Growing is that the bigger your pot, the better your veg: and in terms of volume, pockets are really, really small.

There are aspects of growing in pockets which definitely do work: shallow-rooted plants like lettuce (if kept in a shady spot and not grown alongside beans) do very well in them, as do drought-tolerant veg like kale, spring onions and chillies. Dwarf French beans don’t mind and tomatoes do sort-of OK, if you choose one of the tumbling container types, though they do look very sickly towards the end of the season and it’s hard to keep them adequately watered.

I liked the idea of dwarf peas as I haven’t tried them yet – they had ‘Twinkle’ on this wall which is a good type – but how many are you going to pick off that lot? A handful? Maybe two?

And that’s the other problem: if you’re going to grow your own at home you need to have a reward of some sort to show for it at the end of the day. A handful of peas is simply not worth the expensive compost, pockets, irrigation system and/or time, both in setting it up and looking after it.

And as for growing potatoes in compost sacks…. I went around chuntering for days after reading Sarah Raven’s article on growing potatoes in containers in last Saturday’s Telegraph Gardening. It all sounds quite sensible until you look more closely at the yields she got from each 60-litre sack.

Largest yield: 3lbs 12oz (‘Foremost’)
Smallest yield: 1lb 5oz (‘Anya’).

My Delia recipe tells me that a single shepherd’s pie, serving 4, requires 2lbs potatoes.

So, let’s see. For £4.99 (peat-free multipurpose compost) plus the cost of fertiliser – never mind water and time – we’ve barely grown enough for one meal’s worth of food. That’s about £1 per potato. Heck, even Waitrose’s best organic only costs £1.33 for 2lbs.

It’s this sort of thing that gives growing your own a bad name. Harrumph. Rant over.

Bargain hunting

25 Monday Jan 2010

Posted by sallynex in container growing

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

bargains, shopping, spring bulbs

Off down the garden centre on a hot tip this weekend to find spring bulbs slashed to just 50p a packet!

I bought the lot, or at least one packet of every variety – that was 11 packets of bulbs for £5.50. For the first time in my life I think I understand the feral look in the eyes of those ladies you see elbowing each other out of the way in the January sales.

Got home and had a happy hour divvying them up into likely combinations according to predicted size and blooming times to go into containers on my patio.

I’m in good company planting them this late in the season, and in fact it seems I’m a bit slow on the uptake – it seems everyone else is well clued up on this bit of late-winter bargain hunting. The general consensus seems to be that since they’re a month or two late in the planting they’ll also be a month or two late flowering – but they will flower eventually. So I made a note of the dates they were meant to flower too so I can do a little experiment and find out just how late it makes them to plant at this time of year.

Now I have the following to look forward to, whenever they decide to show up:

Chionodoxa luciliae followed by Oxalis adenophylla

Puschkinia scilloides libanotica and Narcissus lobularis

Chionodoxa again, mixed colours this time, followed by Anemone blanda

Crocus chrysanthus var. fuscotinctus followed by Scilla siberica with a final flourish from mixed Ixia

Anemone coronaria ‘St Brigid’ possibly but not probably overlapping with Tulipa ‘Rococo’

The relative timings are, of course, a lottery, and who knows what will come up when. But that’s half the fun of it. Come to think of it, a lot more fun than doing it when you’re supposed to.

Return of the Rumble Memorial Pot

17 Friday Jul 2009

Posted by sallynex in container growing

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

summer bedding, winter bedding

You know, I’m supposed to have a pretty container frothing with flowers just outside my front door to welcome visitors. The idea was that I filled it with colourful bedding, petunias or some such, in summer and replanted with a cheery mix of winter pansies and maybe some spring bulbs in about November.

Well: this is it.


Yes, those are – or rather, were – the bedding plants under the cat. The trouble is that the very thing that makes this a good spot for bedding – sunny, bright spot and all that – also makes it very covetable to pussycats.

My late and much-lamented black-and-white cat Rumble used to do exactly the same: in fact, I had christened this very container the Rumble Memorial Pot after he died, and it always made me a little sad to see bedding actually thriving in it instead of being squashed. So since Rumble’s junior partner in crime Pippa has taken to doing the same thing I’m rather perversely cheerful now that I’m having to look at a pot of dead foliage all summer once more.

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