Showing posts with label allotment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label allotment. Show all posts

Friday 11 November 2016

Six steps that will help you grow your own vegetable patch.

Six steps that will help you grow your own vegetable patch | Daily Mail Online
Anyone, anywhere can do it — no garden is too small.
A window box or pot is ideal for herbs that transform dishes and a patch of ground a metre square will provide salad leaves all year.
I have seen spritely 90-year-olds digging on allotments and three-year-olds helping to plant rows of beans.

- Follow the sun to pick your plot.
Vegetables all grow best in good soil that is free-draining with direct sun for at least half the day - preferably longer.

- Getting warm!
A greenhouse is best, but cold frames are very good and a porch or spare windowsill is perfectly workable.
When they have germinated and are reasonable sized seedlings, put them outside to harden off before planting them out at 22cm (9in) spacing when the soil is warm and they are big enough to withstand any kind of slug or snail attack.

- Mulch to do.
The best soil is rich in humus or organic matter that comes from the roots of plants and the addition of decaying plant material such as compost or manure.

If you can’t dig, a mulch on the surface will do the job and work into the soil, albeit more slowly.
Root crops such as carrots and parsnips grow best in soil that is very free draining and hasn’t had fresh organic material added in the past year. That’s because it can cause roots to fork and split and encourage lush foliage at the expense of the roots.
So it’s a common practice to heavily enrich one third of the plot for potatoes, legumes and salad crops, and to top up another third with a mulch of good compost, which is good for brassicas such as cabbage, cauliflower and broccoli plus alliums such as onions, leeks and garlic.
The third section is left unenriched and used for root crops, such as carrots. This last one becomes the first next year — so is heavily enriched; last year’s first gets a top-up; and the one that was second (brassicas and alliums) is left alone to grow carrots and roots. And so it goes on. In practice, there is usually much more mixing and matching than that and crops are squeezed in among each other. It doesn’t have to be slavishly obeyed, but it is a good guiding principal.

- Easy-reach beds.
Don’t make the beds too wide: 1m (3ft) to 1.5m (5ft) is the maximum workable width, and it is best to keep them to less than 4.5m (15ft) long so they remain quick and easy to walk around.
Mark the beds out with string and dig the ground deeply, adding as much manure or compost as you can obtain. This will raise the surface of the soil. Use bark chippings, paving or grass for the paths.

- Slugs and snails.
The healthiest plants are those that respond best to the situation that they grow in — whatever and wherever it might be. Encourage predators to get rid of pests for you. Thrushes, frogs, toads, beetles, centipedes, shrews and hedgehogs all love eating slugs and snails.
It means avoiding toxic chemicals — ie slug pellets — and a degree of tolerance for collateral damage.

- Sow little & often.
Succession is the key and gives a steady supply of fresh vegetables for as long as possible.
It means sowing two or three batches of your favourite vegetables across the season, so when one batch nears the end, another is ready to be harvested with perhaps a third being sown or grown on.
Start with some fast-growing salad leaves raised indoors in plugs that can be planted out as soon as the ground warms, and follow it with regular additions, raised in plugs and directly sown, until September.
Crops such as peas and beans, chard, carrots and beetroot grow more slowly but can be spread over months to provide two or three overlapping waves of harvest.
Finally there are long, slow crops such as most brassicas, chicory, garlic or celery that will tie up space for most of the growing year.
I always inter-plant these with a fast-growing catch-crop such as radishes or rocket that is ready to eat before it competes with the slow-grower.

Monday 15 September 2014

Усадьба в Блэндфорд St Mary. Дом садовника. Огород.

Dorset Garden - Manor House, Lower Blandford St Mary.
Дорсет. Усадьба в Блэндфорд St Mary. Coach House.
Продолжение.
Начало здесь.
Dorset Garden - Manor House, Lower Blandford St Mary.
Дорсет. Усадьба в Блэндфорд St Mary.
Продолжение.
Начало здесь.

Saturday 10 May 2014

How allotments lost the plot.

How allotments lost the plot | Julian Baggini | Comment is free | The Guardian:
The Allotments Act of 1832 was designed for the "welfare and happiness of the poor", with the land it provided used primarily as a source of turf and wood, cut for fuel. Over time food became a more important crop but, as living standards rose, people saw less need to toil away on hit-and-miss crops. More and more people abandoned their plots, which became largely the preserve of the ageing working class.

Allotments, now shorn of their association with poverty, provided a site where all these interests came together, providing a discrete, manageable contact with nature.

They are all about solidarity and co-operation: sharing surplus crops, water troughs, tools and piles of manure. It also turns food cultivation into a kind of social display, reflecting allotments' transformation from symbols of low status to status symbols.

Because allotments are hard work, those who are attracted to them for the wrong reasons don't last long. Growing vegetables provides not carefree communion with nature but a struggle with an unco-operative Gaia. Those who stick with it know the real rewards. The satisfaction of eating your own produce is not that it's better than other people's, just that you grew it. If you find cultivation speaks to you, you don't care about what it might say about you.

The story of allotments could be seen as the story of western society in microcosm. First, we did what we needed to survive. Second, we acquired for the sake of acquisition, mindlessly consuming. Third, we turned to non-material goods but still bought them like good customers. Finally, perhaps we will come to enjoy what is good for its own sake. That would be a victory worth digging for.


'via Blog this'

Sunday 4 May 2014

My Allotment-city Today!


Мой любимый Любисток - Lovage. Sorrel - Щавель кислый на заднем плане и Sage - шалфей.


Картошка и огурцы.


Chard -Мангольд и редиска.
Не рекомендуется сажать мангольд рядом с тыквенными, дынями, кукурузой или травами.


Comfrey - окопник.
Это удивительное растение. Накапливает кальций, фосфор и калий.
Рекомендуется сажать вблизи большинства фруктовых деревьев.
Традиционное лекарственное растение. Хорошая ловушка для слизней.
Отличный активатор компоста, листву использовать для приготовления опрыскивания растений.

Лук-чеснок.

Бобовые и горох.

Смородина. Крыжовник и малина. Черника.

Смородина. Инжир, или Фига - крошка еще. Клубника и земляника.

Wednesday 17 July 2013

Огород. Пик сезона.


1. На огороде появляемся ранним утром или на закате. Днем +30!

Thursday 27 June 2013

Во саду ли, в огороде.

- The most popular veggie that people grow in their gardens is tomatoes. Then cucumbers, then bell peppers.
- If you grow the veggie for its leaves (spinach, lettuce, kale) you need partial shade. Everything else can use full sun.
- Carrots hate to grow near strawberries. Beets like to grow near anything. And more.
- An easy way to practice crop rotation: for each area of your garden choose root, fruit, or leaf. Swap them each year. So the root section would grow onions, carrots, etc; fruit would grow broccoli, bell peppers, etc; and leaf would grow all greens.