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Planting stuff
Ordered some strawberry plants from Ken Muir as he was recommended by my mother-in-law. Ordered Elvira, an early strawberry, as I'd tasted it early this year in the shops and had a 'wow' reaction to the flavour. Also bought a late variety, Chelsea Pensioner, which is one Ken Muir have developed themselves and think will promise well.
Richard dug in loads more manure from the local stables and I weeded round the beetroot seedlings. The strawberry plants all look to be good healthy ones and the Chelsea Pensioner had had a free upgrade to pot grown rather than bare-rooted, so I'm feeling very complimentary about Ken Muir (who also include a detailed guide on growing strawberries with the order) and may well order more soft fruit from them in future.
Beetroot looks like being one of the plants that we can grow successfully. Unlike cabbages (members of the same brassica family), it doesn't suffer from clubroot - which most of our cabbages have - and we've found that it grows a lot better when fed with a mulch of grass clippings. It also has a much higher rate of seedlings succeeding where we've dug in compost - and the slugs don't seem to go for the seedlings as much as they have with other plants (or maybe they just germinated when the slugs were having an off day...).
The spinach has been resown as the slugs got nearly all of the seedlings. We saw them come up and then vanish... Slugs traps are in place with the new seeds.
The courgettes taste better than anything I've ever had from a supermarket and so do the cucumbers. I'm still amazed how easy the cucumbers were to grow - for some reason I'd expected them to be difficult (maybe because I mentally associate them with greenhouses) although we did give them a head start in a baby poly-tunnel.
The tomatoes, by contrast, were dire.
The spuds have been a mixed batch. Nicola tastes great. Edsell Blue have a really poor flavour.
Richard dug in loads more manure from the local stables and I weeded round the beetroot seedlings. The strawberry plants all look to be good healthy ones and the Chelsea Pensioner had had a free upgrade to pot grown rather than bare-rooted, so I'm feeling very complimentary about Ken Muir (who also include a detailed guide on growing strawberries with the order) and may well order more soft fruit from them in future.
Beetroot looks like being one of the plants that we can grow successfully. Unlike cabbages (members of the same brassica family), it doesn't suffer from clubroot - which most of our cabbages have - and we've found that it grows a lot better when fed with a mulch of grass clippings. It also has a much higher rate of seedlings succeeding where we've dug in compost - and the slugs don't seem to go for the seedlings as much as they have with other plants (or maybe they just germinated when the slugs were having an off day...).
The spinach has been resown as the slugs got nearly all of the seedlings. We saw them come up and then vanish... Slugs traps are in place with the new seeds.
The courgettes taste better than anything I've ever had from a supermarket and so do the cucumbers. I'm still amazed how easy the cucumbers were to grow - for some reason I'd expected them to be difficult (maybe because I mentally associate them with greenhouses) although we did give them a head start in a baby poly-tunnel.
The tomatoes, by contrast, were dire.
The spuds have been a mixed batch. Nicola tastes great. Edsell Blue have a really poor flavour.
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I ordered dwarf apple, plum and cherry trees from him and they arrived with full pruning instructions. A couple of weeks later he telephoned me personally to check that my trees were doing ok.
Sadly I had to pass the trees on to a friend when I moved to Germany, but I am very impressed with Mr. Muir and his plants.
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Btw: an envelope of assorted seeds I mailed you back around spring got returned by the Post Office the other day...
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Next year, I'm going to sow beans and oxheart cabbage, since those were the only things that grew well last time and tasted good.
My favourite potatoes are lady christl, but they didn't come out too well, even though the brochure and my book claimed they were very impervious to diseases.
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