God I love growing our own

[enrico]

I'm sure it must still be possible to get diamond glass cutters, but I don't think I've ever seen one. Even memories from my childhood of watching my dad cut glass was with a carbide wheel cutter. All this practice has meant that I am getting so much better at cutting thin strips off sheets by scoring and then "chasing" a crack down the line of the score by tapping the glass on the opposite side with the other end of the cutter.

I mostly got the kitchen pipework repaired yesterday morning and installed an isolation valve just for the kitchen at the same time. This morning I had to cheat and use some sealant on a compression joint I'd taken apart to make working easier which then wouldn't go back together without weeping. I should really have replaced the olive, but it didn't want to budge and there wasn't really room to fight with it. I even managed to get the dishwasher to work again -- it was throwing fits because its anti-flood mechanism had been triggered by the water that was splashing about from the failed pipe.

As a result and thanks to the persisting rain preventing me from addressing the issues with the chicken runs I've had time to carry on doing more of the glazing. Everything is now done other than one gable (very little glazing required because most of that end is one side of a pair of compost bins) and one run for the roof. I've had to fiddle with the spacing of the glazing bars on the gable so I can use up glass of the sizes I now have left over, but I can't finish the roof because I've run out of rubber sealant strip. I was only using up some I found in the workshop that happened to be the correct design, but it's irritating to have to order more now when I'm only about 4m short Thanks to some "creative" cutting I might possibly even manage to get the entire job done in glass. It's meant I've used more glazing clips and so on, but they're no use sitting around on the workshop shelves like they have been for the last ten or possibly even fifteen years.

James

I have some sealing strip. but coming over for it will probably cost more than ordering some

 

[JamezF]

I have some sealing strip. but coming over for it will probably cost more than ordering some

Indeed. I have ordered some that should be here by the weekend.

James

 

[JamezF]

James....you are a one man industry. Do you find time to sleep?

I cannot deny that I sometimes resent the necessity for sleep

As I've posted before, I'm not really working at the moment, but I feel I must use the extra time that gives me to do things that are productive. The worrying thing is that I really will need to get a job at some point and I've now reached the stage where I don't actually have time to do one

James

 

[E&MBees]

One of the young people that I work with has developed a real interest in growing vegetables. It has made a huge difference to their engagement in education etc. Together we have grown potatoes, peas, broad beans, French beans, sugar snap peas, tomatoes and cucumber. They have taken seeds home and are growing more peas there. They love cooking too. Come September and the start of the new school term, I would like to be able to grow some winter vegetables. Although I have the poly tunnel, it’s not heated and will be mostly full of stock for next year. I can reserve a small area in one of the raised beds for the young person.
Has anyone got any interesting suggestions? They must be achievable as the garden is the young person’s safe space.
Thanks,
Emily

 

[JamezF]

Has anyone got any interesting suggestions? They must be achievable as the garden is the young person’s safe space.

Our polytunnel is given over to salad crops over the winter, quite a few lettuces and mustards, but also chervil, coriander, dill, land cress, corn salad and so on. Obviously you'd not cook with many of them, but having fresh salad crops available in the middle of winter is a real pleasure. We pick individual leaves from most plants rather than harvesting whole which gives them time to grow a little more before the next crop and that way enough plants can last until the Spring. Sowing time is a bit tricky given how variable our weather is at the time of year, but I usually do successional sowings in modules through very late August and September so I have some ready to transplant into the polytunnel at a reasonable stage once the weather starts cooling off. Anything that doesn't get planted out can be cut and eaten as "baby leaves". A range of different plants gives all sorts of colours, tastes and leaf shapes and textures. I can let you know the varieties I usually grow if you're interested, but generally I'd avoid hearting lettuces as my experience is that they mostly tend to rot inside. I suspect they might trap too much moisture between the leaves and it can't evaporate away.

Radish also do ok sometimes, but others they'll sulk through the winter and then fatten up during early Spring.

I'm also intending to experiment (outdoors) with chicory this winter. I've never grown it before so don't really know what to expect, but it's better than leaving the ground bare.

James

 

[E&MBees]

Our polytunnel is given over to salad crops over the winter, quite a few lettuces and mustards, but also chervil, coriander, dill, land cress, corn salad and so on. Obviously you'd not cook with many of them, but having fresh salad crops available in the middle of winter is a real pleasure. We pick individual leaves from most plants rather than harvesting whole which gives them time to grow a little more before the next crop and that way enough plants can last until the Spring. Sowing time is a bit tricky given how variable our weather is at the time of year, but I usually do successional sowings in modules through very late August and September so I have some ready to transplant into the polytunnel at a reasonable stage once the weather starts cooling off. Anything that doesn't get planted out can be cut and eaten as "baby leaves". A range of different plants gives all sorts of colours, tastes and leaf shapes and textures. I can let you know the varieties I usually grow if you're interested, but generally I'd avoid hearting lettuces as my experience is that they mostly tend to rot inside. I suspect they might trap too much moisture between the leaves and it can't evaporate away.

Radish also do ok sometimes, but others they'll sulk through the winter and then fatten up during early Spring.

I'm also intending to experiment (outdoors) with chicory this winter. I've never grown it before so don't really know what to expect, but it's better than leaving the ground bare.

James

I would be interested in the varieties, please James. The food tech teacher is keen to support the young person too, so anything we can grow will be used at school. Thanks

 

[JamezF]

I would be interested in the varieties, please James. The food tech teacher is keen to support the young person too, so anything we can grow will be used at school. Thanks

Ok, the lettuces I grow that seem to do reasonably well over winter are:

Lollo Rossa
Multigreen 3
Reine des Glaces
Rouge Grenobloise (also sold as Red Grenoble or Grenoble Red)

Red and green Little Gems are just about ok. I had some "oak leaf" type lettuces that did quite well but they were in a left-over pack of mixed "cut and come again" salad leaves and I never knew what
variety they actually were.

Mustards etc:

Pizzo
Red Frills
Golden Streaks
Salad Rocket
Leaf Radish

Allegedly you can grow both salad rocket and wild rocket and the latter will become ready to harvest as the former heads to seed, but I've not tried. Pizzo is quite strongly peppery, the others less so.

Other stuff:

Chervil
Coriander
Lambs Lettuce/Corn Salad
Land Cress
Dill
Red Chard (pick the leaves fairly small for salads, obviously)

With all of those we just pick enough of the outer leaves of the plants to make a salad, even Multigreen 3 which is specifically intended to be cut as a single head.

Before I had myself properly organised I grew quite a few of the plants in mushroom trays lined with newspaper or cardboard and filled with compost, generally six plants to a tray. That actually worked pretty well on the staging in my greenhouse. The harvest was fairly skimpy in January, but otherwise we got a decent amount of salad leaves through the winter period.

Another thing you could try early-ish in the new year is to sow any old left-over pea seeds in module trays, three or four to a cell. Once they're an inch or so tall, transplant them into the polytunnel at about 4" spacing and just let the plants sprawl across the soil. Once they get going you can pick the tips of the shoots to add to salads. We usually find we get a good contribution from those when sown early in February before everything gets cleared out of the tunnel for summer crops.

On a small scale I've found that sowing into module trays (several seeds and then thinning to one with lettuces and mustards) works really well because you can pick the best plants when it's time to transplant and fully use the space you have. The negative side is needing the space for the module trays in the first place. I punch a large hole in the bottom of each cell so I can push the plug out without damaging the tray and then re-use them until they fall apart to assuage my guilt over the plastic.

James

 

[JamezF]

Some of my daughter's handiwork today. Have to put her to work now she's left school...



Not sure how many bulbs there are there. Perhaps about seventy? Should last us until the next harvest, at least. I've kept back some nice fat bulbs for sowing again later this year.

James

 

[Goran]

In our greenhouse ( nylon, not glass) over the winter we have lettuce, onion, garlic, spinach, mangold, asparagus ( non heated) for our needs. Early in the spring asparagus and mangold stays all the time..
We don't treat with any pesticides these, maybe few lettuces got disease ( less than 10%) and that doesn't justify spraying. Onions and garlic from greenhouse mostly we use as scallions ( a lot)..
We eat a lot of vegetables and sow a lot..

 

[JamezF]

Well, it's taken quite a while to get this far, but Frankenstein's Greenhouse is basically finished now, bar a few small odds and ends that need finishing off:

Why Frankenstein's Greenhouse? Well, to start off with, it's all something of an experiment.

I've been wanting to build a greenhouse with some sort of solar heat storage to extend the growing season for plants such as peppers and tomatoes for a while. One way that's sometimes done is to bury perforated pipes up to a metre deep in the soil beneath the greenhouse and use solar power to blow warm air from the top of the greenhouse into the pipes. The ground then becomes a large "heat battery", storing heat that can is used to warm the same air at times when the greenhouse gets cooler. Unfortunately my situation really doesn't lend itself to such an arrangement because the soil isn't very deep and the rock beneath is very porous, meaning any buried pipes would probably just fill up with water.

So I took a slightly different approach. The right hand wall in the photos is stacked with twenty litre containers that used to contain dairy hypochlorite. They're now filled with water, and being black will absorb heat as the temperature in the greenhouse rises. The far wall is actually the back wall of two compost bins that I hope I can maintain at over 40°C once they get going, with some of the heat rising off the heaps coming through the gap in the wall into the greenhouse itself. These two heaps will be used for all of the food waste that used to get put out for the council recycling collection (cooked food, basically) and, as soon as I finish it, the "contents" of my compost toilet. Later in the year I intend to line all the glass with horticultural bubble wrap to increase the insulation.

There's another thing it has in common with Dr. Frankenstein's creation however: as I've posted before I have little meaningful income at the moment, so as far as possible this entire project has been stitched together from all sorts of bits other people didn't want or that I found lying about unused. The greenhouse frame itself is actually made from parts of two completely different greenhouses -- different shapes and heights and produced by different companies. Possibly they're antiques One even had sloping sides whilst the other's were vertical. They both came to me via Freecycle. I've put them together to make a single greenhouse about six metres long and two and a half metres wide. The base is made from a disused telegraph pole abandoned by BT almost twenty years ago, a disused electricity transformer pole that I got the contractors to leave behind when they replaced it, and three railway sleepers left over from another project. Some of the glazing came with the greenhouses; most of the rest from at least two others (some via Freecycle again). Two sheets are actually sliding doors from a glass-fronted cabinet. The compost bins are made using a mixture of broken up pallets, recycled decking, sides from a raised bed that was removed and bits of the old chickens' bird flu winter quarters that I took down last year. I did use some new featheredge boards (which also cover the wall behind the water containers) for the lids and fronts. The fronts are retained using pieces from an offcut of electrical conduit and offcuts from an oven shelf that I needed to make smaller to fit in my smoker. The main things I had to buy were the featheredge boarding and the timber for that wall and the racks holding the water containers. I did also need a few more glazing clips and bolts to assemble the greenhouse frame and hold the glazing in place. Oh, and some nails.

I had some left-over tomatoes and peppers in pots that I'd saved so that's what's planted in the beds at the moment. I'm also going to plant some pineapples that I have in pots. I've no idea if they'll fruit, but it will be fun finding out. I only actually put the door on after lunch today (easier to shovel in the compost and woodchip without it), but even so the water containers felt warm to the touch by about 8pm this evening.

Now I just need to get the compost toilet finished... Oh, and get rid of a wheelbarrow load of waste glass.

James

 

[beeboybee]

Excellent work James.. greenhouse envy.
shout when your doing tours.

 

[Erichalfbee]

Well, it's taken quite a while to get this far, but Frankenstein's Greenhouse is basically finished now, bar a few small odds and ends that need finishing off .........................
.............so as far as possible this entire project has been stitched together from all sorts of bits other people didn't want or that I found lying about unused.

James

Im speechless....and that's rare

 

[Erichalfbee]

Tipped one Sagitta bucket out today. Two plants. Pretty pleased with these.
Thanks @enrico

 

[JamezF]

Either that's quite a large potato, or someone has Trumpesque hands

(And I'm fairly sure I recognise the table and chairs, come to think of it. Only ours are now dark blue, having been attacked with a rotary wire brush when the paint started to peel off.)

James

 

[Erichalfbee]

Either that's quite a large potato, or someone has Trumpesque hands



James

Size 7.5

 

[Erichalfbee]

(And I'm fairly sure I recognise the table and chairs, come to think of it. Only ours are now dark blue, having been attacked with a rotary wire brush when the paint started to peel off.)

James

Yes I must do something about it.

 

[enrico]

Tipped one Sagitta bucket out today. Two plants. Pretty pleased with these.
Thanks @enrico

View attachment 36998View attachment 36999

That biggun is perfect for chips and I guarantee they are good chips. Had roasties, chips and mash so far and all perfect.

 

[JamezF]

This afternoon I got a bit experimental (again) and made carrot juice from some of our carrots. My wife and daughter aren't keen. It seems like a lot of work I have to admit, but I can't actually see anything wrong with it. It just tastes quite sweet and carroty.

James

 

[enrico]

This afternoon I got a bit experimental (again) and made carrot juice from some of our carrots. My wife and daughter aren't keen. It seems like a lot of work I have to admit, but I can't actually see anything wrong with it. It just tastes quite sweet and carroty.

James

We experimented with white beetroot, sort of blows the mind, looks like turnips and then if you taste it without knowing what it is you know the taste but your mind plays tricks. Takes a while to realise what it is. Lovely and sweet and quite a novelty but I don't think we will bother again the good thing is it doesn't turn your pee red

 

[pargyle]

Busy day in the rain ... dug up the broad beans which are over, planted out my Brussel sprouts in their place (might be a bit late but hopefully will get a few for Christmas), lifted my Garlic - about 30 reasonable sized bulbs (not bad from a raised bed that's 1.2m x 0.8m). There were about half a dozen where the bulbs were very small so replanted those (more in hope than any thoughts of success), weeded, weeded, weeded some more, pinched out my tomato plants.. I have far too many - just got carried away, lots of tomatoes on them ... all still green. Fed everything with my home made magic fertiliser. Tied up tomatos plants ... tied up the squash plants which are now 6 feet high and still going ... I was worried about my sweetcorn - 6 feet tall and flowering but no cobs forming ...that was 2 weeks ago - gave them a couple of doses of my magic formula fertiliser and there are two or three cobs forming on each stem (I suspect a lack of calcium). Potted on and pinched out about 20 Basil plants... The rain today will be good to get some real moisture into soil - despite me regularly watering I was surprised at how dry the ground was lower down in the raised beds. Picking french beans, runners, beetroot - I was going to tip out one of the bags of Sargita and see what I have got but the rain got heavier and common sense prevailed - going to be a bit drier tomorrow !