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Sally Nex

~ Sustainable food growing

Sally Nex

Tag Archives: gardening without plastic

The October veg garden

02 Friday Oct 2020

Posted by sallynex in climate change, gardening without plastic, greenhouse, kitchen garden, my garden, seeds, self sufficiency, sustainability, this month in the garden, wildlife gardening

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

apple juice, apples, autumn, cloche, gardening without plastic, greenhouse, harvesting, juice, mice, newspaper pots, no dig, plant protection, sowing, tomatoes, windfall apples, winter salads

Life in the veg garden is taking on a definitely autumnal feel… it’s all fuzzy edges, like a woolly jumper


Harvesting this month:
French beans, carrots, the last of the courgettes and patty pan summer squash, Musquee de Provence winter squash, potatoes (maincrops to store), raspberries, curled-leaf and flat-leaf parsley, baby-leaf salads from pots outside the back door.

Sowing this month: Broad beans for overwintering, beetroot (for leaves), turnips (for leaves), spring onions, and round-rooted carrots.

This month I will be:

  • Clearing out the greenhouses
  • Pricking out greenhouse salad seedlings
  • Turning the compost
  • Mulching empty beds
  • Planting herbs and perennial vegetables
  • Juicing the last of the apples (mine and other people’s!)
  • Repairing fences

Mouse update

Remember my poor mouse-beheaded beetroot seedlings from last month?

The obvious solution was to trap the mice – and that’s certainly what I would have done before I became aware of the need for sustainability in the garden.

I don’t like killing things at the best of times: and with mice in particular they’re a really important food source for larger predators like owls, so every mouse that you trap is one removed from the wider ecosystem.

Also mouse traps are, usually, plastic, and I have vowed not to buy any new plastic for my garden (even if it’s not strictly for gardening).

The wildlife photographer Simon King once said to me that we humans are really, really clever animals: so if we can’t figure out a way to keep other animals away from our food without killing them, we’re not thinking hard enough.

Quite right: so I put my humanoid thinking cap on, and this is what I came up with.

I bought myself a big roll of 8mm gauge mesh from B&Q for about £20 and made myself a mesh cloche (the roll was big enough to make two or three, but one step at a time).

It took a while to get right: I had to staple the bottom edges to wooden battens, burying these in the ground to hold the whole thing stable and prevent mice from burrowing underneath, and the ends are squares of mesh tied in with wire, again buried a few inches beneath the ground.

But I resowed my beetroot seeds at the beginning of the month and they are already much bigger than they ever reached last month before the mice got them. It’s tricky to get in and weed, but I sow into mulch so the few weeds that have come up aren’t too troublesome. Once the seedlings have developed into sturdy young plants, of less interest to mice, I will remove the whole cloche and stash it to use elsewhere. It should last me several years of mouse-free sowing.

The big greenhouse clearout

That’s it: time to admit defeat. I had a good pick over of the last tomatoes to cook down and freeze, and now the plants are undeniably finished. They’ll go onto the compost heap (I had a spot of blight during the season where the rain got inside the greenhouse – but even blighted foliage can be composted as the disease doesn’t survive once the foliage breaks down).

Once the toms are out I’ll give the glass a good wash, then weed out the borders and refresh with a good thick (5cm/2″) mulch of garden compost before replanting with greenhouse salads (see below). My only dilemma is that I can’t bear to pull up those lovely French marigolds just yet; I sowed them back in February and they’ve been flowering their socks off all summer, no deadheading required. I guess the salads will just have to go in behind them till they’re done.

Pricking out salads

From this….
…to this: give them another few weeks and they’ll be the perfect size for planting into the greenhouse borders after the summer crops are cleared

All the salad plants I sowed last month are now big sturdy seedlings and ready to move on into their own individual newspaper pots (the above are Winter Density lettuce (left) and mizuna (right)).

I’m a big fan of newspaper pots: zero plastic and pretty much zero carbon (as you’re reusing waste newspaper to make them) and the seedlings do so much better as their roots grow through the sides and don’t circle as they would in plastic. I get much better results from them every year – well worth the extra 15 minutes it takes me to fill a seed tray with paper pots.

Juice!

The last of the windfalls: I have a lovely little Devonshire Quarrenden apple tree, very early eater with a lovely sweet, strawberry-like flavour. But my only slight problem is that it crops so early in the year – over by about mid-September most years – that I miss all the Apple Days and my windfalls are already long gone before I can juice them.

This year, what with the coronavirus an’ all, Apple Days aren’t really happening – or at least not the ones with the big community juicing events. Luckily, though, I’ve found a friend with access to a scratter, to chop up the windfalls into rough pieces, and a press, to make the juice.

I am taking along my own few remaining windfalls, and scavenging apples from everyone I can think of with a surplus. It’s one of the best ways I know of storing the abundance our apple trees provide: tip the juice into saved plastic litre bottles and freeze, then savour the rich, sweet flavour all through winter. Yum.

So… what’s new?

18 Wednesday Mar 2020

Posted by sallynex in news

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

biological controls, coir, gardening without plastic, innovations, nematodes, new products, peat-free compost, tomatoes

I’m trying the weird new ‘Reisentomate’ (Suttons.co.uk) this year – it grows like a bunch of grapes

Just from time to time, I put down the hand fork, brush the mud off my jeans, look up and take notice of what everyone else in the gardening world is up to. Here’s my look at this year’s new developments and innovations for veg gardeners everywhere: https://www.learningwithexperts.com/gardening/blog/so-what-s-new

Gardening without plastic: Seed trays #2

07 Wednesday Jun 2017

Posted by sallynex in gardening without plastic

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

gardening without plastic, plastic, seed trays, sowing, wooden seed trays

So: onward and upward with my efforts to replace my stack of green and black plastic seed trays with lovely organic and handsome wooden ones instead. Here are the options I’ve been trying out this spring:

1: Home made

I have discovered that while you can buy full-sized seed trays off the shelf, the half-sized trays I favour for many of my sowings are more difficult to come by. You can make your own from recycled pallets, or get in some Western red cedar which I’m told by my carpenter husband is slower to rot than most woods, but is imported so less environmentally-friendly. It takes more time to make a seed tray, but it is phenomenally cheap: I am experimenting with different methods and will report back.

2: Second-hand

Second-hand finds at reclamation yards and online auction sites have, frustratingly, almost always wine boxes or fruit crates which are NOT wooden seed trays – they’re too deep, for one thing, and much too large. The ideal size for a seed tray is (about) 38cm x 23cm x 5cm: anything larger than this is getting difficult to use.

Proper wooden seed trays, even in those garden brocante places that charge the earth for old gardening stuff, are as rare as hen’s teeth. I’ve just scoured every stall in the Chelsea Flower Show, where garden brocante is de rigueur, and found not a single seed tray. So I’ve given up.

3: New

There are, I discover, lots of places which sell proper wooden seed trays, and very handsome they are too. I am feeling a product review coming on. The ones I’ve decided to trial this year are:

Great Dixter seed trays: These look a little on the deep side compared to what I’m used to, at 6.5cm, and they are expensive – £8 for two (plus £5 shipping, so that’s £6.50 per tray to you, guv). But they use them on the nursery to this day: and what’s good enough for the late, great Christopher Lloyd is good enough for me.

Burgon & Ball Wooden Seed Tray Set: One of the very few – actually, the only one I could find – to offer a half-tray option. A little froufrou for my liking (why is it that people can’t resist printing things on the side of wooden seed trays?), and I think I’m going to find them deep as the height is 8cm on these. Price is £12.99 + £4.95 shipping, so £17.94, more expensive and definitely a pricey option.

D&P Marchant Seed Trays: And last but not least: the eBay option. This is a small business based in the Lleyn Peninsula in north Wales, hand-making wooden seed trays (and other things) from reclaimed timber. They aren’t cheap, at £9.75 (though that does include postage) – but the attraction here is that they get a lot cheaper if you order more. I spotted a stack of 10 for £47.99, which is a much more reasonable £4.79 a tray. And no postage costs. And they do half-trays, too.

I have collected all three to put through their paces and will report back later in the year!

 

 

 

 

Gardening without plastic: Seed trays #1

04 Sunday Jun 2017

Posted by sallynex in gardening without plastic

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

gardening without plastic, plastic, seed trays, sowing, wooden seed trays

From this…

The year marches on: and I thought it was about time I gave a little update on where I’m at in my attempts to clear the plastic out of my garden.

One of the things that’s become very obvious is that the main cause of the plastic mountain that greets me right inside my gate is the annual seed-sowing frenzy that envelops me and my garden each spring (and, fitfully, for the rest of the year too). It’s a side-effect of growing your own veg: you effectively raise an entire garden from seed every year, and to do that you need a lot of stuff.

From March to May, I’m reaching for a seed tray, module or pot every single day. So my seed-sowing paraphernalia builds up into teetering piles on display for all to see. And most of it is plastic.

I thought I would start at the bottom, so to speak, and look at my extensive collection of seed trays.

I use seed trays for absolutely everything to do with sowing. I sow straight into them from time to time, especially baby-leaf salads which I like to transplant straight from the seed tray in chunks – saves a lot of pricking out.

Seed trays hold my modules and smaller pots too. They make useful carry-alls for transporting seedlings out to the cold frame. And they’re just the right size to fit on the shelves in my greenhouse.

So I wouldn’t be without them. But every single one I own is made of plastic.

As with so much in this particular crusade of mine, I’ve been looking back to Victorian ways of doing things for a solution.

…to this

Wooden seed trays are far more beautiful than plastic; and of course they’re completely biodegradable. I like the look of them, very much. They’re a bit more expensive, granted: but being wooden, if you don’t want to shell out for the posh versions you can also make your own.

Disadvantages: they are heavier, and of course they do deteriorate and give way, although I would argue plastic ones too have a limited life in a busy garden. Mine regularly crack through heavy use, get trodden on or strimmed to uselessness and have to be thrown out. And of course broken plastic seed trays end up in landfill – whereas wooden ones biodegrade back into the environment.

In terms of using them, they’re much the same: fill with compost, and extract seedlings for transplanting with a kitchen fork, the tip of a trowel or just your fingers. Just like you would with a plastic tray.

They do dry out more quickly: I have found this is becoming a bit of a theme with non-plastic gardening, as you use a lot more absorbent materials (plastic, of course, tends to hold moisture in). But on the plus side, once it’s watered wood holds on to moisture against the seedlings, too (because it is damp itself), more effectively than plastic where the edges can, I find, evaporate to dryness more quickly than the centre.

I’ve been trying out a few different types this spring. I’ll outline which in the next post – with results later in the season, once I’ve put them through their paces. Watch this space!

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