Under The Cloche

..in the UTC gardening toolkit is definitely the Opinel No. 8 knife that G got me as present a few years ago. With its beech handle and carbon steel locking blade, it’s a french design classic from 1897 that still manages to be function over form.

It started life as a general handy knife, but has become a garden specialist. Razor sharp and just the right size for lots of tasks, cutting twine, opening boxes and packs, nicking out growths that you don’t want. Just a shame I’ve manged to break the tip.

My pocket-sized friend

Keep an eye out for the main couronnée and you can’t go wrong.

OK the title may be an over statement, but it’s time for a sunflower competition update. So here are the latest from me, SiL and FiL.

Let’s start with the previously unseen competitors belonging to FiL, which are also the only competitors planted directly in the ground.

The Tyneside Competitors

As you can see they are obviously in a nice sunny spot, with lots of leaves and what look like fairly sturdy stems. I reckon he’s been keeping these quiet in order for them to be the dark horses of the bunch.

Next up are SiL’s efforts.

The Yorkshire Contingent

In need of a bit of watering by the looks of the lower leaves, but I suspect this is because no-one can get near them as they appear to be protected by a garden Dalek.

Finally are my entrants. Still the runts of the litter, but I think they are catching up with SiL’s (or is that wishful thinking?).

Team Cloche

In conclusion, FiL is definitely in the lead at this stage, a triumph of experience over (not so) youthful exuberance, but it is still not yet full summer, so it’s all to play for.

As I haven’t taken delivery of my veggie seedlings yet, I gave into temptation whilst in the garden centre on Saturday and bought a tray of meteor peas.

Do you like peas...

Now not only did I have some greenery for the garden, but also the excuse for some minor engineering. A couple of canes hoops and a rather dodgy bit of lashing later, and I had my home-made wigwam, if something this rounded counts as a wigwam.

Pea Heaven

My old scout leader would sob

So my need for instant gratification was sated, but now I am starting to wonder it they will climb canes or if I need to wind some wire between them.

Legume Symmetry

Making the most of the glorious weather this weekend, it was time to do stuff around the back yard. First off was to take a good 18 inches off the top of our hedge, which is excessively tall for the size of our garden. A simple task you would think but it seemed to involve varying amount of pain, immediately from scratching my arms to pieces as I cut it, then sore muscles the next day from a combination of balancing on the top of some ladders (which I am sure the safety guys at work would have something to say about) and trying to cut through the branches with a pair of blunt loppers which feels like it gave my shoulders a good work out, fortunately I had a physio appointment the next day!

Anyhoo, once that was done, G and I decided to re-arrange the garden, and in the process I took the opportunity to move the sunflowers on up to their final pots and give them a growhouse of their own. The reason for this is that they were looking a bit limp and under-watered, so I took a guess that they were not getting enough moisture in their small pots.

Bedraggled Sunflowers

As part of this I thought I would start my first gardening experiment and grow the two sunflowers in different composts to see if they have any effect on their growth.  Therefore the red stemmed sunflower got potted in John Innes pots and planters compost, while the green stemmed plant was given John Innes No. 3.

The Compost Competitors

What this picture also shows is the need for me to get a more manly trowel, instead of using G’s flowery number.

Now, as I am a fully fledge hard sums geek I would like to point out that I know enough about experimental design to realise that this little test certainly wouldn’t get approval from the FDA, as I only have one sunflower in each type of compost and no idea if the sunflowers are even of the same variety, especially as they have different coloured stems at the bottom. But as this is for fun, and not peer review, I can live with it.

Although I may be urban gardening in the backyard of a small terrace, my sunflowers are now in the pot equivalent of a 4 bedroom detached house in the ‘burbs, old pots in picture for scale.

Green Stem

Red Stem

All I have to do now is wait and see which one sprouts up the most.

Nothing of major excitement going on in my growhouse at the moment, things are getting bigger but no interesting events to comment on, and I am still waiting on my seedling delivery. As this is the case I am going to use the break to write about the tomatoes I am growing from seed.

Garden Peach

The toms I am growing are called Garden Peach, and I believe they are an heirloom variety, which means it is an old cultivar and not a modern variety suitable for mass growing. From what I can find out garden peaches are south american in origin and produce a fruit that is yellow with a pinkish tinge (unsurprisingly much like a peach). On the plus side they are meant to be very sweet and juicy, but on the down side they  have a fuzzy suede like skin, which, I don’t know about you, doesn’t sound the most appetising to me!

I fear I am being clobbered so far in the sunflower competition stakes. I have received a picture of SiL’s efforts and mine look rather puny in comparison. In my defence she has a couple of weeks head start- or at least that is what I am telling myself.

My titchy sunflowers

SiL's monsters (plus herbs)

And just to rub it in she has better pots too- bah!

Being rather unobservant, I had missed the fact that my plants had started to push their roots out of the side of their paper pots (no photos as it was starting to rain) so I decided it was time to move them up the property ladder.

The handy part of having a gravel back yard is that I am never short of stones to put in the bottom of my pots before adding the soil. I have officially called time on the chillies.

Getting bigger

The missing tomato plant is on the shelf above.

One thing that puzzles me is how do you get new soil to take on water easily. It always seems that the first few times you water freshly potted plants the water just sits on the top of the compost instead of sinking in. I may try poking holes in to see if that helps.

After a bit of a dry spell, we’ve had some rain round our way in the last week or so, and the effect it’s had on the greenery in the garden is quite impressive. Mind you, in the northwest 2 hours without rain is considered a drought.

I can claim no credit for these as they are all G’s plants.

The climbing hydrangea as turned from a couple of twigs into something more recognisably alive.

Climbing Hydrangea

While the hostas have sprouted up from nowhere.

(Currently slug free) Hostas

It won’t be long before the back yard is it’s usual hydrangea forest, not that G is obsessed by them or anything.

I got an e-mail the other day saying my seedlings will be on their way soon so I made a visit to the local garden centre to spend a load of money getting ready for the delivery and also to allow me to move my own stuff outside. On the plus side, I avoided having to go to the gym due to lugging a load of compost into the back of the car and then into the garden.

Back breaking mud

Though this may not be enough, as I will have quite a few pots to fill for the veggies, and  a couple of whisky barrel ends that I got from someone who works in a distillery for growing the salad in.

It's gonna take a lot of compost to fill these things

Unfortunately I don’t have a lot of room for a greenhouse and thought it may be best to go budget until I find out how much I enjoy this lark, so I bought a couple of plastic grow-houses to keep things nice and toasty until it warms up a bit. In order to keep the garden looking as nice a possible I’ve only put one up for the moment.

The flat pack

Spot the bricks in the top of the picture to keep it from blowing over until it is a bit fuller.

The finished article

Not as tasteful as some of the nice wooden ones you can get but it seems to warmer on the inside when I open it up. So my plants are transferred outdoors and I am now waiting for the postman to come bearing gifts.

My plants developed a habit of pointing towards the window, which required regular turning to keep them straight. As I convinced myself this waving to and fro couldn’t be good for them, I decided it was time for a bit of garden shed inventor action (minus the garden shed). One piece of foil, a bit of cereal box and 10 minutes later I had a handy light reflector. What’s more it actually seems to have worked and my seedlings have pointed straight up ever since.

Budget basement reflector

Apart from the chillies that is, which have decided not to grow. Harrumph!