No dig diary, 24th March 2021

Posted on March 24, 2021 by james

My wife wanted our strawberry plants to be in a raised bed (which does make them easier to pick), but I’ve struggled to come up with any ideas that weren’t going to cost an arm and a leg to set up. In the short term therefore I have scavenged the wood previously used for the sides of the beds in the polytunnel before I converted it to no dig beds and combined with a few other bits and pieces I have built a no dig raised strawberry bed.

In old money (because that’s how the timber was sized) the bed is nine feet long by two foot six wide by two foot high (about 2.75m x 75cm x 60cm in this new-fangled metric stuff). I lined the sides with some old plastic animal feed bags to try to help prevent the moisture from the soil inside rotting the timber away too fast, and then filled about three quarters or perhaps a shade more of the depth of the bed with soil.

On top of that I put a layer of cardboard. I don’t think the soil actually has too many weeds in, but it has been sitting outdoors in a heap for a fair while and adding the cardboard surely can’t do any harm.

And finally I spread a layer of green waste compost over the top to fill up the bed (and started sorting out the plants we grew from runners last year).

It’s possible we could have more than thirty plants altogether, which is more than I can reasonably fit into that bed. I hate throwing away perfectly good plants though, so I might have to try to find some other space for growing the remainder. Is there such a thing as too many strawberries?

This bed is actually intended as a bit of a temporary thing, which is one of the reasons for trying to recycle the materials rather than buy anything new. I don’t really have a nice solution for raised strawberry beds that isn’t quite expensive. I’ve seen one or two quite attractive solutions, but from a maintenance point of view they appear to be a complete nightmare and anything using a container where the growing medium isn’t in contact with soil on the ground looks like a pain from a watering/drainage standpoint and probably doesn’t provide much fertility in the longer term.

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Not mushroom in the polytunnel?

Posted on March 22, 2021 by james

Then I’ll need to get rid of these little chaps.

No idea what they are, but they’re growing all over the place. I’ve not had mushrooms growing in the polytunnel before, so I have to assume they’re from spores that came in with the green waste compost. Which raises an interesting question as to how they survived the composting process. Even when it arrived the compost was too hot to keep my hand in with any comfort.

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More winter salads bite the dust

Posted on March 22, 2021 by james

When I disposed of some of my greenhouse winter salads a short while ago, I cut the flower stalk off the salad rocket to see if the plants would produce any more leaves worth eating. Not only did they not do that, they also started growing more flower stalks from the existing leaf axils.

They have therefore taken a final trip to the compost bin, accompanied by the Pizzo mustards, which were also having a good try at flowering.

That leaves me with a few lettuces and the Green Streaks and Red Frills mustards. I’m thinking I might do one last pick of all of those when we next have salad and then move on to leaves from elsewhere in the plot. I’m getting to the point where I need more space in the greenhouse again, so I don’t think they’ll be a huge loss.

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What do you get if you cross shoes with wellies?

Posted on March 22, 2021 by james

It is my habit whilst out in the veggie plot doing jobs that present no risk to my feet to wear a pair of “rubber” garden clogs (like Crocs I guess, but not, and without the holes). In part this is due to laziness. Most of the time, as my daughter puts it, I wear “invisible socks” (like the emperor’s new clothes, if you get my drift), but I don’t like to wear boots without socks, so a pair of clogs I can just stick my feet into to go outside is an easy solution. Much of the time this is great, but if the ground is a bit (or even a lot) slippery as it has been for most of the last three months the relatively smooth soles of the clogs make them lethal. Had I more gymnastic ability I could probably represent the country at mud-skating by now.

There are clogs that look like they might do a better job, but they all seem to be about £60 a pair and I’m not that lazy! This week however I found a possible alternative: welly shoes! I had no idea they even existed, but they’re just like standard wellies that have been cut down to the shape of a slip-on shoe, so they have nice deep treads on the sole. They weren’t expensive so I ordered a pair to try out. And if Sod’s Law should mean that my purpose ensures there is almost no rain to speak of for the next six months, I certainly won’t be shedding any tears over that.

Once they arrived I found them comfortable to wear though a little more chilly than my clogs, perhaps because due to being solid “rubber” rather than some sort of aerated material. I might try an insole with them to see if that helps. They also require a hand or shoehorn to get them on, though that might just be until they’ve worn in a bit. First impressions are pleasing though, and I look forward to not going base over apex on trips out to the compost bins or to collect eggs from the chickens any more.

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No dig diary, 21st March 2021

Posted on March 22, 2021 by james

Planted out my first sowing of radishes today, sown on 20th February and re-sown two days later after birds raided them (four seeds per cell multisowings):

And then covered them with fleece to keep the worst of the cold off for the next few weeks.

These are actually planted where I plan my last rows of carrots to go, but that won’t happen until the end of May and I fully expect enough of the radishes to be gone by then to leave space. I wasn’t sure of spacing, so I’ve guessed that a 8″/20cm grid should be ok.

I’m also coming to the conclusion that the size of cell in the module trays I’m using is too large. I think perhaps 3.5cm square cells would work better than the 4.5cm cells I’m currently using, so in future I’ll switch to those. Of course either still have the problem that it’s awkward to get the plants out without damaging the plastic in the first place. That’s a problem I still have to solve.

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No dig diary, 20th March 2021

Posted on March 22, 2021 by james

Quite a busy outdoors day today, some of which was just getting on with tidying stuff up after the winter, but at long last I did manage to get my broad beans (twenty-eight in total from two sowings on 5th and 19th Feburary) planted out. They’ve grown far too much really because I delayed planting them out due to the weather, so I’ve put the mesh cloches that I used last year to keep the partridges off the peas over the top, and used them to support some fleece just to keep the wind off them until they’ve settled in. Ideally I’d say they really only want a month from germinating before going into the ground.

I also sowed my first batch of carrots in rows across the bed, so about just over a metre long allowing for a bit of space either side next to the path I guess. I’m really not sure how well they will do. It might be a bit early yet so is something of a gamble. Weeds are starting to germinate so perhaps the carrot seeds will too, but the weather is still quite unpredictable and the forecasts can be far from accurate, particularly with overnight temperatures. My plan is to sow a row each of Amsterdam Forcing, Maestro and a “rainbow” multi-coloured selection every three weeks or thereabouts until the end of May. To try to help things along a little I’ve also covered them with fleece.

(The nearer bed in the photo has the potatoes I planted yesterday.)

Once the carrots germinate (assuming they do) my intention is to replace the fleece with fine mesh to keep out carrot root fly, and they’ll stay under that until I lift them or it’s too late in the year for the fly larvae to be a problem.

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No dig diary, 19th March 2021

Posted on March 19, 2021 by james

I removed some of the leaf radish plants from the polytunnel yesterday as they were running to seed. I’m now using that space for my peas for shoots, sown on 5th and 19th February. I’ve set the plugs from the cells out on a 6″/15cm grid. Possibly they could have gone closer as I don’t think I had any cells where all three peas that were planted germinated. Most managed two plants, but in some cases there was only one that germinated, or even none at all in a couple of cases.

It’s my intention that these plants will stay where they are until it’s time to plant out my peppers when I’ll clear them and use the space once again, though I’m not sure that will be until the start of May.

Despite the cold north-easterly wind I hoed off a small section of one of the outdoor beds and took the opportunity to plant my “first early” International Kidney potatoes. They’ve gone into the compost at roughly a trowel’s depth and on a 40cm (16″) grid which gives me three plants across the 1.2m (4ft) bed. Hopefully by late June or early July at the latest we should have our first new potatoes.

And finally I did a second thinning of the lettuces and other salad leaves that I have in modules (sown on 21st February) to reduce them to one plant per cell. Once they’ve developed a little further they’ll be joining the peas in the polytunnel.

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“Automatic” watering for the polytunnel

Posted on March 19, 2021 by james

Generally we pump water from our well into five IBCs to water the polytunnel, but the new beds will be watered using “leaky pipe”. I’ve now stretched these out along the beds and pinned them down at each end to get rid of the kinks. Next I think I need to make a manifold to split the incoming water pipe into eight so that it feeds each of the leaky pipes. I’m not entirely sure how I’m going to do that yet, but temporarily I can just switch the incoming water between each of the pipes on a regular basis.

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Ancient greenhouse vent opener fixed

Posted on March 19, 2021 by james

I posted earlier that the new no dig greenhouse came with non-functioning vent openers for which I was unable to obtain spare parts.

I ordered a couple of the cylinders for modern openers with a view to bodging something so they’d work. If that failed it wouldn’t be a big deal as I’m sure I’ll end up needing to replace the ones in my existing greenhouse openers at some point.

When they arrived it was clear that they were about 50mm too short when compared to the originals, and needed something to fix the end without the pushrod in position. By chance I found that the cylinder fitted very neatly into a piece of scrap electrical conduit, so I cut a 120mm length, drilled a hole for the pivot at one end and another hole 50mm further up the tube to take a bolt that the end of the new cylinder would rest against and it looks like it will do the job.

I also had to remove the fitting on the end of the original pushrod and drill it out to 6mm to fit over the new one. Given the amount of blackening visible in this photo I was amazed when I started drilling it to find out that it is made of brass.

A few odd bolts to fit it together and it’s now back up on the roof. I’ve not been able to adjust it yet though, as it was too cold today for the cylinder to operate.

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No dig diary, 18th March 2021

Posted on March 18, 2021 by james

Back to the compost heap today, and into the second bin with a view to getting as much of the remaining area covered by compost as possible. The compost from this bin was noticeably darker than that from the first. I’d guess that perhaps I got a better mix of “green” and “brown” material, enabling it to reach a higher temperature and keep the raised temperature for longer. It was also packed with worms, which I take to be a good sign. There were worms in the first bin, but nowhere near the same kind of numbers.

After quite a few wheelbarrow loads, I now have all but one half-bed of plot done. The remaining area is where the purple sprouting broccoli is growing. I know I could attempt to spread compost around the base of the plants, but it’s very lumpy thanks to being so wet and as a result not easy to “place” where I want it. I’ll just wait until the PSB is finished and do it then. I can leave that part of the bed to use last so the compost has time to settle.

I also did a bit of weeding in the existing beds. There are a lot of sycamore seedlings sprouting where the seeds fell on the compost in the late autumn/early winter and it looks as though a few grass and groundsel seeds have also blown in.

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