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Sally Nex

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Sally Nex

Tag Archives: mice

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.

The September veg garden

01 Tuesday Sep 2020

Posted by sallynex in education, exotic edibles, greenhouse, kitchen garden, my garden, self sufficiency, this month in the garden

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

harvesting, mentoring, mice, perennial crops, pests, sowing, tomatoes

Harvesting this month: French beans, courgettes, patty pan summer squash, sweetcorn, potatoes (the last of the second earlies to eat, plus maincrops to store), apples and raspberries, plus cucumbers and tomatoes from the greenhouse, and baby-leaf salads from pots outside the back door.

Sowing this month: Autumn-sown (Japanese) onions and lots of salads, for outside (under cloches) and in pots to refill the greenhouse borders once the toms are out, including winter lettuce, mizuna, mibuna, American land cress, corn salad, chard, beetroot (for leaves), turnips (for leaves), spring onions, and round-rooted carrots.

This month I will be:

  • Clearing summer brassicas
  • Planting autumn-sown onion sets
  • Mulching empty beds
  • Saving seeds
  • Taking cuttings of herbs and borderline-tender plants like salvias and pelargoniums
  • Planting herbs and perennial vegetables
  • Cooking apples (and tomatoes) to freeze for winter

New perennial crops for this year

Perennial vegetables are so much more sustainable than annual as you don’t have to continually disturb the soil (so no carbon release) and they require much less input in the way of resources compared to raising seeds and using lots of water, warmth, feed and compost.

There aren’t many of them, though, and some are very unfamiliar. So one of my projects this season has been to start a perennial vegetable garden. No soil disturbance, a fraction of the inputs (feed, water, fertiliser, compost) of annual vegetables, and you lock up more carbon with permanent planting too. And a fraction of the effort of regular vegetable gardening. But the trick is to find perennial vegetables you actually want to eat: here’s what I’ve started with.

Daubenton’s (perennial) kale is growing well: it’s under a little tent of mesh to keep the butterflies off but I’ll remove that once they go away at the end of the season.

The skirret was a total failure: sowed direct in May as instructed, absolutely no seedlings. No idea if the slugs got them or if it was too dry or if they just didn’t fancy it this year. It may have been the seeds themselves so will order from a different supplier next year just in case. And I will be sowing them into pots where I can keep an eye on them.

Salsify were more successful: several good leafy rosettes now from direct sowing in May. I am leaving them to establish for a year or two before I try to pull a few roots.

American ground nut (Apios americana): I planted these odd little tubers (they are actually beans but are more like small, floury potatoes to eat) at the foot of canes by the low wall. Not all survived, but enough did for me to think this will be an interesting taste test next year!

Chinese artichokes: Easy as anything to grow – they’re related to deadnettle. I’ve got them in an old sink in the back garden: I will wait until they die back before harvesting some of the knobbly roots to try (probably next month: watch this space).

And a new addition: Turkish rocket (Bunias orientalis). It’s not the most spectacular plant, being a clump of fuzzy-felt leaves and not much else. But it is bone hardy and a useful spicy salad ingredient. And when I say spicy, I mean spicy: I had a little taste and like most things Turkish it’s ten times stronger than anything you’ve ever tasted before. I am not sure if I like it yet, but I will persevere.

New mentoring service

Well actually it’s not entirely new: I’ve been mentoring several students recently and have found it works so well I am offering it more widely.

The idea is that you have me “on tap” for advice and help about organic and sustainable methods of food growing, over email (no complicated technology to master!) and when you need it. Arrange an hour whenever it suits you and I can answer questions, give you loads of ideas and inspiration, guide you in starting up a new veg garden or help you develop an existing one. It’s entirely up to you what we talk about and it’s completely tailored to you and your garden. Book a one-off session, or a regular time each week. It’s up to you!

A lovely comment from one regular student recently: “I’m SO glad you’re there!”

For more details contact me at sally(dot)nex(at)btinternet(dot)com.

This year’s tomatoes: the verdict

I haven’t a lot of room in the garden to grow dozens of different types of tomatoes but I do like to try one or two new ones each year (there are about 7,500 varieties to choose from so there’s always one you haven’t grown before)

It has not been a vintage year. I’ve had lots of tomatoes: but only one of the three I grew came up to scratch.

Ailsa Craig Good old Ailsa. What would we do without her? There are relatively few straightforward medium-sized salad toms around nowadays – we all seem to be growing fancy cherries, black tomatoes and beefsteaks instead. But sometimes all you need is a straightforward slicing tom and this one is fantastic: reliable, prolific and great flavour too.

Coeur de Bue To be honest this is my own fault as I was being a cheapskate. I grew Coeur de Boeuf a year or two ago and loved it: all the flavour and size of a beefsteak without the difficulty (or low yields). This one came as a freebie and I thought, Bue? Boeuf? Not much in it… how wrong can you be. Insipid taste, pinkish red (so hard to tell when it’s ripe) and a sort of dry texture: a pale shadow of the original. Won’t be growing again.

Reisentomate Another freebie I should have turned down. It’s an interesting idea: a tomato that grows in segments, so you can pick off a segment at a time to eat rather than having the whole tomato. But beyond the novelty value, you’ve got to ask yourself….. why? Flavour insipid, texture dry, fruits small. Just no.

Mouse attack!

Mice got into the greenhouse and ate my low-hanging tomatoes…
… and then they nobbled my newly-emerged beetroot seedlings. The giveaway that this is not slug damage is that nipped-off leaf: a slug would have eaten them down to the ground.

I have been battling the mice. You may think this would be something of an unequal fight, being as I’m several gazillion times their size but they are obviously far cleverer than me.

It started with them taking munchies out of my low-hanging tomatoes: I have never had this happen before in all my 25+ years of growing veg but it was definitely mice as they climbed on top of one fruit and left a lot of poo as a calling card. Yum #not.

Now they’re after my beetroot seedlings. I sowed them direct and they came up within days. Yet along came my whiskery friends and… no more beetroot seedlings.

I do have a feral cat but she is getting old nowadays and spends most of her time on the boiler. I am also starting to think a cat brings too much in the way of collateral damage: don’t mind the baby rabbits so much, but the robins are heartbreaking. So Sooty is to be my last cat and I will have to think of other ways to keep the little blighters off my food in future.

I could trap them, but I always prefer a live and let live policy so for now I am trying an alternative approach. Come back next month for news of its success (or not).

This month in the greenhouse: April

21 Tuesday Apr 2015

Posted by sallynex in greenhouse

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

mice, pelargoniums, pests, Potimarron, scented leaved pelargoniums, sowing, squash, Uchiki Kuri

greenhouse1

Heeelp….!! I’m running out of room…

As always in April, there’s a traffic jam in my greenhouse. Outside, the cold frame is jam-packed with evicted seedlings but still they keep coming, as April is second only to March in terms of how much needs sowing yet you’ve still got the tender plants sheltering and taking up space, to say nothing of last month’s seedlings taking their time over growing big enough to go outside in their turn.

Still, so far, so good and there are lots of promising little things going on.

greenhouse2Uchiki Kuri squash seedlings, for instance. Aren’t these lovely fat little things? I do think they’re gorgeous. They’re getting in urgent need of potting on – amazing how quickly five fat squash seedlings can fill a 10cm pot.

It took me a long time to realise that Uchiki Kuri were the same thing as Potimarron – a French squash I’ve grown before and absolutely loved. They taste of chestnuts – a smoky, savoury flavour quite different from ordinary squash. I’m growing these just to make sure that they really are the same thing and not some Japanese upstart imitator (with apologies to the Japanese, who thought this was their heirloom squash and have no doubt been cross with the French ever since).
greenhouse3I have had great success overwintering my little collection of scented-leaved pelargoniums this year: this one is P. quercifolium, with pretty leaves the shape of oak leaves. I took quite a lot of cuttings this spring too as I was potting the parents on and trimming them back in their start-the-season haircut: and most of them have taken, so it’s going to be a bit of a scented-leaved pellies summer. These are going outside to harden off just as soon as there’s space in the cold frame…
greenhouse4And finally I thought it might give you a laugh to see the tip that passes for my potting bench, in one corner of the greenhouse taking up valuable room when actually it ought to be in the shed (but we didn’t get around to building it this winter).

In case you were wondering, the peanut butter is for trapping mice (I keep the last scrapings from our breakfast spread, which is why it’s three pots – only a little in each one).

Three casualties so far in the gardener-vs-whiskery ones skirmish which followed the clandestine savaging of a mangetout pea sowing one night, but it’s all gone quiet again: I even dared to put in the beans a week or so ago and nothing’s gone missing (yet). So I’m hopeful that they’ve learned their lesson and are staying clear.

I do hate trapping mice – it’s far less humane than our feral cat which is my usual control method. But they make it impossible to grow any legumes (or sweetcorn, come to think of it) if you don’t – so I grit my teeth and get on with it. Artemisia leaves laid on the floor of the greenhouse are supposed to keep them off, as is mint – they don’t like the smell, apparently. I’ll give that a try next time – but I’ll keep the traps handy, just in case.

Hasta la vista, ratties

24 Wednesday Sep 2008

Posted by sallynex in Uncategorized

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

allotment, cats, mice, pests and diseases, rats, sheds, sweetcorn

This is a cob on my sweetcorn the day before I got my two feral cats to keep down the rats and mice:

Sweetcorn is an irresistible favourite of all things verminous, and I’ve never yet managed to get any to maturity, even though I still plant it (more in hope than expectation). It always, always ends up like this – scoffed by either rats or mice, or both, before it even gets ripe.

Now this is how the rest of my sweetcorn looks, a couple of weeks after the cats were let out of the shed:


Oh, my… I am too excited for words. I think I may be about to harvest my first-ever home-grown sweetcorn cob after four years of growing the stuff.

I think it can be said that the cat as mousetrap experiment has worked. Outstandingly well.

(the cats are having a great time too… :D)

Meet my mousetraps

08 Monday Sep 2008

Posted by sallynex in Uncategorized

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

allotment, cats, mice, pests and diseases, rats, sheds

I don’t know why it is that none of those worthy tomes about growing things on allotments ever talk about mice and rats – but in my experience, these twin scourges are second only to slugs in terms of what damage they do to crops. This year their tally includes my entire early pea crop, eaten to the ground when just seedlings, and now the first of my sweetcorn cobs to ripen.

I’ve tried everything: humane traps (they laughed scornfully and nicked the peanut butter while holding the door open with their tails); home-made not-very-humane traps (sweet jars sunk in the ground – they find their way in and then can’t climb out. Trouble is, the rain gets in too and then they drown – I don’t hate them that much); and not-at-all-humane traps (the conventional kind: once again, scornful laughter, no peanut butter and no dead mousies).

So it’s time for the nuclear option. Meet my new mouse traps.

Mousetrap No. 1: aka Sweep. And…

Mousetrap No. 2: aka Sooty. This is about all I’ve seen of her so far – she hides under the soil sieve in the corner nearly all the time – and Sweep, though more courageous in that she’ll come out if you’ve got a tin of cat food in your hand, isn’t exactly trusting.

These are feral cats – I got them from the Cats Protection League after reading that they were very short of homes for these basically wild animals. They aren’t pets, which is of course what most people are looking for when they want to rescue a cat – so they need people with outhouses, barns, stables or in this case sheds on allotments who can look after them but don’t expect them to be very domesticated.

As far as I’m concerned, they’re working animals with a job to do. Doesn’t stop me being a bit soppy about them – they’re very cute as they’re only about 6 months old and have that kittenish look still – but I don’t try to stroke them. I let them out for the first time this weekend – until now I’ve been keeping them in the shed so they know where home is – and am now keeping my fingers crossed that a) they’ll come back and b) they’ll massacre the mousies. And I hope rats, and possibly even bunnies too. Oh, I may be an animal-lover, but where my veggies are concerned it’s war…..

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