If, Like me, you are not happy about using sprays and chemical fertilisers in your garden why not try companion planting.
There are many things you can do to keep away pests and diseases. Of course, if you can get your plants to grow quickly because they are well fed with healthy food ,such as our Muckas Mulch, then many of the diseases will be avoided anyway. But planting onions in amongst your brassicae plants will keep off the dreaded cabbage butterfly and those smelly caterpillars!
And you won't need to keep checking for those orangey eggs laid on the leaves because they will not be there! I just plant one onion set and one cabbage , sprout or broccoliplant every other across the garden and that works wonders.
You will see the cabbage butterflies hovering around but they soon buzz off because they do not like the onion smell! Most gardeners suffer from slugs and there are lots of anti slug ideas .
Personally I like crushed egg shells scattered amongst the plants and they don't like the feel of these I can tell you!. Jam jars sunk into the ground with some beer dregs in the bottom are also effective but the advantage of eggshells is they supply nutrients as well as a deterrent to slugs.
I have tried the new organic slug pellets but I am not impressed with them and a ring of lime around each plant is better in my opinion and a lot cheaper too!
Carrot fly has been a real pest to me in the past but this year I planted nasturtiums next to the carrot rows and my carrots are really clean so the fly doesn't like nasturtiums by the seem of it.
October 2011
What an unusual year we have had this year. After the very cold weather of the winter in which many plants were lost due to the very hard frosts it was time to start all over again.
For the past many years I have been able to keep rabbits off my garden by hanging sweaty old clothes on sticks at each corner. The rabbits don't like the smell of humans and this was extremely effective for quite a number of years. This year however the rabbits have played havoc, eating off all my young runner beans and brassicae as well as my carrot tops! So it meant renewing the old clothes for a start and then checking my chicken wire fence all around. I tried one tip I had of using soft string soaked in creosote to keep them off but that was no good! I ended up using an air gun shooting them from my bedroom windows at 7.30 a.m and managed to get quite a few although the clever blighters would dash off as soon as they heard the click of the window opening.Anyway I shot about ten all told ( and missed about another TWENTY). No good for meat any of them because of the new spate of Myxomatosis.
I guess a Twelve Bore shotgun would be the better alternative as you can hardly miss with one of those! However they eventually left the veg plot alone and the brassicae all recovered. I had to resow the beans though so we are still harvesting them now deep into October.
I lost all my saved Gladioli with the frost so had to buy a new supply and they are only now coming into bloom. I may try leaving them in the ground this winter with a good covering of Muckers Mulch. Surprisingly my Chrysanths survived outside although I did transfer some inside before the frosts and they were all ok as well .
Tomatoes took a long time to ripen this year but we have a tremendous crop and the two Coxes Orange Apple Trees have been laden with a TREMENDOUS CROP. There is no tastier apple in my opinion and having peeled and cored many of them we put them in the microwave and then freeze them in small amounts so we can have apple for pies and tarts and sauce for pork all winter long. We have some Bramleys as well but the Coxes cook quite well, in the microwave so do try it. I don't have much luck with my Conference pears though. They either rot inside before
we can eat them or else they dry up from picking them too soon. If you have crab apple tree as we do, try making crab apple jelly. I can assure you it is delicious and has so many uses. Besides which the tree itself is a glorious picture both in blossom and in fruit.
Keep a lookout on this page for more tips and ideas in the future meanwhile HAPPY GARDENING. Colin
November 2011.
What a month this has been . ! They say it's been the warmest November since records began and I can well believe it because on November 29th I still have gladioli in bloom and also roses. As I am a farmer, I have had to deal with the harvesting of hay and also horse beans and we have had a very good yield of beans almost seven tons from just 4.5 acres and the normal yield is just 1 ton per acre! Of course I used our farmyard manure before planting but no artificial fertilisers, just natural manure, well rotted of course and this had produced excellent yields. The biggest problem with manure is of course WEEDS and, even when it has been standing in a large heap and is well rotted, it can still hold many weed seeds which soon become a problem once the heap is disturbed. This is why we have our MUCKAS MULCH which is manufactured here on our farm and we get the heat in the piles up to as high as 140 degrees Fahrenheit which sorts out the weed seeds admirably, cooking them to death!
However, I learned just lately that there is one seed that seems to survive even that temperature! I delivered a load of MUCKAS MULCH to a regular customer recently and he told me that in his last delivery he'd had a multiple supply of
TOMATO PLANTS growing out of it. I thought this was a complaint but he was actually delighted as not only did he get a wonderful crop of tomatoes but was able to give away many plants to friends and neighbours!. So, if you buy MUCKAS MULCH, I don't guarantee you'll get the same as that gentleman, but you will not get any other "weeds" growing out of the mulch. That I do guarantee!
WE do supply tomato plants , however, both cherry types and the standard sizes like Moneymaker and Alicante, at the correct time in the spring of course.
I read that many people around the country are now getting their own pig and some chickens and I love to hear about their experiences as I am very fond of farm animals and we have just bought in some Oxford Sandy and Black Pigs which I am hoping to breed from and then we will have pork and bacon and sausages to sell, as well as enjoying the meat ourselves. My neighbour, who is a great friend, recently gave us some pork they had over from their son's wedding feast, which my wife and I attended also and I can honestly say that there is no better taste than home produced meat whether it be lamb, mutton, pork ,beef or chicken or turkey.
Also when the vegetables are straight from your garden you will enjoy a meal that can match any Cordon Bleu chef's product! I have had problems in the past growing cauliflowers and sprouts but I can give you a tip here
These plants need very hard ground to grow in and if the soil is loose they fail and sprouts will not produce those hard buttons we all enjoy, at Christmas especially, but they will open out into little florets which are not the same at all.
So make sure your ground is hard for these plants and don't be worried about walking all over the ground ,after planting even, to keep it hard. I have now done this and my cauliflowers this year .... oh so delectable and when they are cut and cooked straight away .... oh, that taste is totally unbelievable, they just dissolve in the mouth and the taste... well you just try it and you'll know what I mean. Of course now we have some pigs even the waste parts of the plants are used up and they enjoy them as much as we do eating the best bits.
Here's a laugh for you though. I had a chap called at the farm some time back with a "European Directive". He said to me that I must not feed vegetables from my garden to the pigs!
He qualified that after a bit ,saying that it was ok if the veggies went straight from the garden to the pigs, but if I took them into the kitchen first then they must not be fed to the pigs after"! I have heard of some daft ideas coming from Brussels but that one as they say "takes the biscuit"
His reason was that I might cut the veg with a knife which had been used for cutting meat and that would "CAUSE, Foot and Mouth Disease" . He was obviously ignorant that the 2001 outbreak of Foot and Mouth allegedly started AFTER timber merchants had received orders for timber for the pyres to burn the dead stock!. Now we all know how clever our MPs THINK they are, but I doubt if even they could forecast an outbreak of Foot and Mouth months before it happened! I will leave you to draw your own conclusions as to how that started!
Anyway I thoght I would let you know about the "European Directive". It kind of matches the one about straight bananas I thought. My visitor left hastily after I gave him my views I can tell you.!
Well, hopefully we will have some dry weather in December
so we can get those plants out before any serious frost damage. I'll be back with more thoughts and tips in the New Year, God Willing,Till then, Happy Christmas Everybody! Colin
