Febury in the Garden

I had not expected to have been able to do much work in the garden this month as I have a VERY busy schedule at uni at the moment. We are doing what are classed as "short fat" courses because of the way they apear on our timetables as a 3 week long block of lectures lasting all day every day. Or it is possible for them to be that lecture intensive... Luckily mine have not been 9-6 every day and have given time for us to do their assignments fairly easily. 

Anyways enough about lectures. I have managed to get out in the garden a little this month as my photos of spring appearing proved, but this time I actually managed to do some garden work. 

In the second week I planted some seeds and used the space under our stairs to germinate them as it is usually nice and warm in there. 
I planted some tomato seeds bought from Thompson & Morgan and placed them where it was nice and warm, on top of the radiator covered in a plastic bag (as it said to on the packet) and I only got two rather sickly seedlings pop their heads up. 
On the other hand my butter nut squash seeds which were taken from inside a squash I cooked for dinner last year have come up brilliantly. There was possibly one seed which didn't produce a seedling and two are a little weaker than the rest but all in all I am very happy with these seeds :D
In addition to this I planted some mixed salad seeds in a planter to be able to have some fresh home grown produce soon.

A week on and the Butter nut seedlings needed potting on so my collection of sauce pots and bottoms of milk cartons finally had a chance to shine and became a selection of small containers (after having poked holes in the base of them). 
I also found a plastic 'greenhouse' in town for a fiver so decided I would have to try this out and see if it worked or not. It is a similar size and shape to a traditional cold frame with a zip opening at the top to be able to put the plants in and then close up again. I have decided to put this on the roof area that I use to pot up plants because it has a much higher chance of getting enough sunlight to heat up during the day here. After being up for one day I ventured outside this evening after uni and found that it had blown over, unsurprisingly since I did not fix it down at all. It now has two bricks to hold it in place and we will see how this works shortly I expect. 

I have placed the salad container and most of the butter nut seedlings under the protection of this device, but have kept a few in the kitchen incase it doesn't work. 

Today I actually did some physical work in the garden by de-weeding and de-creepering  the bed I plan to try and use for veg. 

Here is a basic drawing of the bed in question. I will point out that it says newly FORKED bed and not anything else which it may be read as... 
This bed has been left from when I moved in to see what would come up over the year and not much did, there was the odd plant in the front of the bed, otherwise this section was bare. 
The back of the bed contains a Jasmin and a few other unknown (at least to me) plants and a very strange rock feature (pile). The very left of the front section of the bed has quite substantial ivy covering with a well established tree so I have limited the edge of the soon to be veg plot to where the tree is situated. 
Today I dug this over and removed all the ivy and Jasmine creepers along with a large number of stones! I was very heartened to see a large number of worms in this bed considering how little has been growing there. I also mixed two bags of soil, which have come from my nans garden, into the bed to raise the soil level. 

Now all I have to do is to wait and see if I have the same level of success with the second set of squash seeds and see if the plants survive the 'greenhouse' experiment... 

Spring Continued

So today when I was supposed to be getting ready to go to uni I might possibly have got distracted by the thought of what would be out in my garden at the moment. Since my sister got back from her weekend in London and so has returned my camera I thought I would take it out and see what I could find.

The first signs of spring in my bulb pot :D

With an additional burst of spring colour being added by some of the plants...

 

Although the slugs are trying to make a good go at reducing the display of this one...

Also the plants which got pruned rather aggressively are beginning to show new spring growth which is good as they were already established in the garden when I got it so it seems a shame to remove them now.

Although I do have to say the most exciting discovery that I have made today was this evening when I looked closely at my chilli plant that I have been 'overwintering' on the landing 'shelf' (there is no other way to describe it, technically it is a window sill but the window is much higher than the sill and stained glass so it doesn't get a huge amount of natural light). 

I have never over wintered a Chilli before and did not cut the foliage down on this one as it still seemed to be giving a good display and it seemed a shame to waste that as they are nice looking plants in themselves. 

But here it is the first sign of new growth for this year :D Ta Da...

Spring...

Well today was the first (semi) proactive step towards getting the garden developed this year and it unfortunately resulted in me spending money on plants and seeds for the garden. This might sound a little silly considering that I don't actually have anywhere in the garden that is ready to take them. But I am hoping that knowing that I have spent money on stuff to go in the garden will mean that I actually work at getting it ready for them to go in.

Most of what I bought was in seed form so this will give me some time to sort the garden before they are ready to be put in the ground. Currently the 'Herb Garden' section is the closest to being ready. It just needs to have some additional good compost mixed in with the existing soil and divided down the centre by a 'footpath' of some kind. This footpath is not going to lead anywhere but will be there to enable me to reach the back of the bed to extract herbs for cooking :D

This is one of the parts of the garden I am looking forward to the most. I do have a large selection at the moment but am looking to expand it this year.

I am still waiting for my daffodil bulbs to do more than just peak above the surface of their pot but have a few flowers to keep me going in the house. I picked up this lovely lilly from an impromptu IKEA trip the other day to help by boyfriend to get furniture for his new house and decided that the colour looked lovely and I would see if it could brighten up the dreary weather that we are currently experiencing.

Currently I am sat attempting to do work for my dissertation and the paleoclimate module I have currently but its all I can do to stop my mind wandering to planning the garden. Which is annoying since I am trying to limit the amount of planning I am doing till I actually get out into the garden and start on the bed to have a place to put all my plans into action!

So on that note I will leave and hopefully return after having hit my garden properly for the first time this year!

Sunny Days

Today is the first sunny day in a little while and has made such a difference to the garden and to every one's attitudes, Although it did have a bad effect this morning of making me sit in the arm chair by the window with my morning coffee and stare out into the garden for far too long.

Currently we are in the middle of our uni exam period and I have my last exam ever tomorrow so really should have spent that time getting ready to go to uni to revise but it was so nice this morning that that didn't happen. One thing I did find out was that we have a pair of Blue Tits using the nest box on the wall outside the kitchen so that was nice, and the other day the bulbs in the pots at the back of the house showed their tips above the soil so that is going nicely :D

Its days like today that I find myself constantly day dreaming about the garden and what the next step is and planning what I would like to do to it. Thinking it through over winter I have decided that I would like to try and grow as much veg as possible in the garden this year. See what is possible with the tiny garden that we have and with this in mind I have been thinking of what veg I would like to have and where it would all go.

I am also trying to fit in sorting the beds, (raising the bed at the back and digging compost into the one outside the kitchen window) and sowing some seeds between finishing exams (Weds Lunchtime) and leaving Southampton to go snowboarding for a week (Thurs evening) !

Realising how much uni work I am going to have next semester, with 6 weeks of 8 hours of lectures a day and a dissertation to write the garden is going to have to be as low maintenance as possible.

Here goes planning, and hoping that the sun stays till the end of the week to help motivate me to actually do work in the garden and not just dream about it...

Chilli Glut

This year for the second year in a row I have grown a Chilli Plant and it has produced a nice crop of small hot red chillies, unfortunatly this years plant only came labeled as a chilli plant and I do not know the variety.
But this good harvest has lead me to have to work out what to do with my sudden glut of chillies since I have got out of the habit of cooking with them recently I found that the first few harvested had ended up shrivelling up in my fridge and this would not do to have the whole harvest go this way.

After a bit of deliberation I decided to have an attempt at making chilli jam (or more precisely jelly since it is strained) as I also had a glut of cooking apples brought down from my parents garden in Essex.
The first attempt at making this jam didn't set properly as I had not put enough sugar into the mix. (the perils of not actually owning a set of kitchen scales) but after adding more sugar it set very solidly.
I have found my new favourite condiment to have with cheese and crackers :D

After this I had a few chillies left to ripen on the plant and needed to find something else to do with these. BBC good food then gave me an idea, Chilli vodka, but I have adapted the recipe to make more of a liquor by adding sugar and leaving it to absorb the chilli kick for longer as the sweetness will now combat the flavour.
Additionally I have added red food colouring so it is not drunk by mistake.

Now I only have the job of deciding how to over winter my chilli plant. The plant has such nice foliage on it that I am reluctant to cut it right down as one of the sites I looked at said to do. I may just leave it out with all the damaged foliage cut off and see how long it will stay green for and once the rest of the leaves start dying back then cut it down so that it can focus on keeping its roots alive.
Then I should have a good crop of chillies for next year. *fingers crossed* I am also looking for another chilli plant to grown next year and have been trying to find out what a chilli I saw on a gardening/food show is. It is a small purple chilli which is not too hot but has a lot of flavour to it. It just seemed so exotic and wonderful that I might have to try and find it. But if not then I will be looking for a cooler chilli to the one I currently have so that it is more likely to be used in cooking...

Potting up/out

On Wednesday the uni managed to break every network connection it has, and to be able to do any of my work I needed at least one of the connections if not more so this morning was a write off as far as uni work was concerned so I donned a pair of trousers that dont mind getting dirty and my boots and headed out into the garden.

Today I decided to plant the daffodil bulbs that my nan gave me recently and also the cyclamen that my mum bought on her last trip down here.
So I cut away the shrubbery from the two pots in the front garden which are bare at the moment and planted the daffodils in one of them and four of the cyclamen plants in the other. The soil was surprisingly nice, considering that nothing was growing in them (one or two tiny weeds but nothing else). Once I had done this it seemed silly to leave the last two cyclamen in their tray so I decided that they should be used up and I also had a few bulbs left over and so started a mass potting session on the lean to roof. (I have taken to working here as it is in the back garden and is about work top height so is nice for using to rest pots on etc, although the roofing felt has a habit of capturing dropped bits of compost!)

In the mass potting that followed I potted the extra cyclamen in their own pots, planted the remainder of the daffodil bulbs along with some other bulbs I bought recently. I have separated pots that came from my mother house and have either gained other plants during that time or she thought had given up the ghost and trained my mint plant into to grow another plant from (she is the only person in the world i know who can kill mint).
All of this potting has produced a large number of pots which have now all been moved together with any existing pots to the corner by my dining room/ utility room so that they can keep together and use some of the heat from the house to protect from the worst of any future frosts. Also so that I can use the herbs I have with out having to move too far into the garden when its cold and they can be admired from the comfy chairs in the dining room :D

New Arrivals

New arrivals to the garden lately have been yet another mint plant.
This mint was ressurected from a 15p reduced mint plant from asda and is still going strong. It was re potted into a larger pot and has been going since then.

Posher plants to have made their way into my garden is a Japanese Acer, a small Olive tree and a Geranium.
the acer arrived shamefully not from a garden centre but from B&Q... My mother decided that she couldnt pass by it with out buying it, the same with the other two plants. My olive tree is about a foot tall and I am unsure how it is going to survive and grow in my mini, english weather garden but only time will tell.

In addition to these plants a number of additional herbs have congregated 'in' my garden. They are living on the front drive at the moment waiting for me to plant them in the main garden but the bed is not ready yet. Although one of the lemon thymes has been planted in the gaps at the edges of the steps where I have pulled back the 'weeds' that was there originally and I am waiting to find out if it will take before I add the other pots I have.