Grow It Alone

How To Grow Runner Beans

Justin — Fri, 07 May 2010 13:40:15 +0000

Runner beans are one of the easiest crops to grow. They need very little in the way of care while they’re growing, all they need is a suitable cane tripod, trellis or fence to climb up, and if you pick the ripe beans often enough will keep on producing delicious beans right through the summer months.

Runner Beans - One of the easiest crops to grow!

The variety I’m growing this year are “Prize Winner Stringless” which I picked up in my local Wilkinsons store in March. You can sow them directly in the soil or in a large compost filled pot in late may when the frosts have past, or you can start them off in small pots to give them a bit of a head start, which is my preference.

Getting Ready To Sow!

All you need to get these going is a suitable plant pot or container. Something 3″ to 4″ diameter is about right. I’ve used old Baked Bean tins with holes punched in the bottom with a nail for drainage.

Put 2 Beans In Each Pot...

Fill your pot with about 2/3 seed compost. I’m using Wickes Multi-Purpose compost which cost about £4.50 for 70 litres. Place 2 beans in each pot. Runner Beans do have quite a high success rate when it comes to germination, so don’t plant the whole pack otherwise you’ll have more bean plants than you know what to do with.

Cover With More Compost & Water Well

Cover the beans with a further inch or so of compost. Water well, and leave in a warm place. I just left mine on the staging in the greenhouse to germinate. Germination should take around 7 to 10 days. I’ve sown about 12 seeds this year so it’ll be interesting to see how many plants we get.

Three Weeks Later

After just three weeks in a moderately warm place such as an unheated greenhouse or a windowsill, and we have this…

Runner Bean Plants After 3 Weeks

Another week or two depending on how warm it is and these will be ready to harden off and be planted in the veg plot.

Five Thrifty Gardening Tips

Justin — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 05:47:58 +0000

As well as trying to grow our own veg, we’re also determined not to spend a fortune either. If you get suckered into buying everything Garden Centres tell you you’re going need, then you can quickly negate one of the major benefits of growing your own… The Cost Saving! My late Grand Father, John Henry Hill was a superb gardener and a devoted follower of the self sufficient lifestyle. He rarely spent his money of fancy items for the garden, and would always consider every purchase carefully before parting with his cash. So now it’s our turn.

Recycle Fruit & Veg Packaging. Tomatoes, Strawberries and even ready meals from the supermarket come in plastic trays. This are just the right size for sowing a few lettuces in to get them started. You can’t put too many seeds in these so get one going every 2 weeks for a continuous crop throughout the summer and long into the winter. Proprietary seed trays can cost up to £15 for 5! These are free!
Ready Meal & Strawberry Trays Used To Grow Lettuce
Use Old Bean Tins For Your Runner Beans. We end up with loads of these. Whilst we normally recycle them anyway we thought we’d recycle them again and use them to get our runner beans going.
Using Old Bean Tins To Grow Runner Beans
Seed & Plant Swaps. Many local allotment groups hold regular seed and plant swaps. You can either contribute by giving away some of your plants, or make a monetary donation in exchange for a few expertly grown local specimens.
Make Your Own Plant Markers. Collect Lollipop sticks when your kids have an ice lolly, or make your own by cutting up old margarine tubs etc. Write on them with a fine tipped permanent market and they’re as good as any you buy. These take seconds to make and cost nothing at all.
Homemade Plant Markers
Compost Compost Compost. OK, you might not be able to produce your own top quality seed compost, but home composting is a great way to make use of kitchen scraps and gardening waste. Add the manure from your chickens if you have them, or grab a few handfuls of nettles and drop them in every so often, and you’ll have a very potent, good quality compost to use in your pots and as a soil improver in just a few months.

Planting Up The Green House

Justin — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 05:05:02 +0000

Tomatoes Ready For Planting Out

Now I feel really guilty this year… I bought my Tomato & Cucumber plants from B&Q! In the past I’ve always been loyal to our local garden centres, but this year a 2 for 1 offer or some such thing caught my eye and I grabbed half a dozen. Anyway, they’re quite stocky specimens so they should do ok. I’ve been hardening them off a bit by leaving them outside during the day for the last week, so now the green house is ready, In they go!

The Tomatoes

We’ve got three types of tomato going in this year, Moneymaker, Gardeners Delight and on other who’s name escapes me.

Moneymaker is an excellent tomato for the Home Gardener. High yielding and producing medium sized fruit. It will also grow equally well outdoors as in a green house. Providing it’s in a very sunny position that is, to get the fruit to ripen nicely.

Gardeners Delight is another high yielding variety, this time giving nice bite sized fruit with plenty of flavour. Again these can be grown indoors or out.

I’ll check the third variety when I let the chickens out in a bit!

Tomato Plants In Position

Hopefully with the tomato plants being in the greenhouse this year, we’ll get a better crop and better ripening than we did last year in our old garden.

Here You Can Just See Vertical String Tomato Supports... Hope they work!

To support the tomatoes, I’m trying the vertical string method. The description on the back of the label with the tomatoes is a bit vague, so I’ve just dangled strings down to the plants for now. I’m not sure if they grab hold of them as they grow, or if I need to wrap the string round the plants as they grow I’m not quite sure… a bit of Googling needed maybe!

The strings are supported by a horizontal wire at the minute, but I know the plants are going to get heavy as we progress into summer so a stronger support is most likely needed here. I’ll get my thinking cap on.

The Cucumber

We’ve gone for one, heavy cropping cucumber this year to see how we get on. I grew a cucumber plant outdoors a couple of years a go and it did ok, but I neglected it a bit, so this time I’m going to try and do it properly! I’ve followed Alys Fowler’s tip when planting it out which is to plant the cucumbers root ball so it’s slightly raised or mounded up. Cucumbers are prone to rotting off if they sit with water around their stems. Mounding them up apparently stops this, so thank you Alys for that tip! I’ve also started to make a basic cucumber support to keep the fruits off the ground once it gets going. I’ll post that shortly.

A Handful Of Radishes

You can’t been home grown radishes on a Salad, so I’ve left room in front of the tomatoes on both sides of the greenhouse to get a few radishes going. They’re a fast growing crop, from seed to plate in 4 to 6 weeks. They’re easy to sow and grow too, which is handy. Just make a 1.5cm deep trench or drill with the end of a trowel or hoe. Sprinkle the seeds in. I left about 3/4 of an inch between each seed to save me thinning them later. Cover them over and give them a good watering (with a bit of Miracle Grow for good measure). I only sowed half a row for now, I’ll sow some more in a fortnights time to give me a continuous crop for as long as possible. Fingers crossed by mid may I’ll have home grown radishes about ready to eat.

Preparing The Greenhouse For Planting

Justin — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 12:07:54 +0000

The Greenhouse Before!

It’s been a few years since I had a green house at my disposal and I’m really pleased the previous owners of our house left this one behind. An essential component in the Self Sufficient Gardeners arsenal, the Green House will be a very busy place indeed. At least that’s the plan.

Ours is 6′x8′ and is in pretty good condition although it still needs a little TLC in places. It’s perfectly good enough to grow a few Tomato & Cucumber plants this season though, and will probably keep our lettuce crops going until well into the winter with any luck.

The only big problem with this greenhouse though was that it was standing on a fully slabbed base, meaning Tina & I couldn’t plant anything directly in the ground, which is in my opinion, essential if you don’t want to be watering your Tomatoes every five minutes during hot summer months!

One Of The Dug Out Beds

Making The Beds

To solve this we grabbed a hammer and bolster chisel and started to hack away at the slabs until we could remove a few sections of the slabs each side to make a couple of beds about 6 feet by 1.5 feet. Now I honestly thought, as it’s a greenhouse, the slabs would either be laying directly on bare earth, or maybe a couple of inches of sharp sand, but no. This greenhouse base was built to survive a world war! Firstly there was 4 inches of quarry waste and chippings to get through! Followed by another 6 inches of rubble and hardcore!

IT’S A GREENHOUSE FOR GOODNESS SAKE!

So what I thought would be an afternoons work, tops, turned out to be a day and a half’s worth of shoveling and wheel-barrowing!

Tina Preparing The Beds In The Greenhouse

Filling Up The Beds

Once the beds were dug out it was time to fill them all back in again with top soil we’d saved from leveling the chickens run and a couple of bags of decent quality peat free compost. We chose peat free for the reduced environmental impact on our rapidly vanishing peat bogs! To add a bit of extra Zing to the beds we also mixed in some well rotted Chicken Manure (which we always have plenty of!). This should give our crops a bit of a boost with any luck.

Getting Rid Of The Bugs & Nasties

Once the beds were ready it was time to give the greenhouse a quick clean to rid any remaining bugs and nasties from the place. The best way to do this is with a liberal dose of Jeyes Fluid. It’s easy to use, cheap and very effective. You can get it at any diy store or buy it online if you wish. It’s a general disinfectant that will kill off most things but won’t harm your plants or your pets.

A couple of buckets of Jeyes fluid were mixed up and we gave the whole place a darn good scrub, rinse and left it to dry overnight…

I can’t wait to get the plants in now!…

Chickens – The Most Destructive Animals Ever!

Justin — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 05:27:20 +0000

Free Ranging Hens - Destructive Little Buggers!

The idea of Free Ranging chickens is great in an idea world. But in the real world, in a small to medium garden, it’s a recipe for a disaster coated in chicken poo and big holes.

Chickens love to scratch, forage and dig nice big holes to have dust baths. But they’re definitely not picky about where they do it! When we moved into our new house back in December, obviously nothing much was growing so we let the chickens roam about most of the time rather than being cooped up in their temporary home (The Aviary) all day long, which was driving them nuts.

This was great for a few weeks, but it didn’t take long for 99% of the garden to end up bathed in chicken poo and for large holes to start appearing in what were once flower beds and nice tidy borders. Their foraging and constant scratching, which is what a chicken is programmed to do has now resulted in widespread carnage throughout our garden, and now that Spring is here, there’s a constant battle between chicken & nature is the daffodils try to make it all the way to blooming before they’re decapitated by a ravenous Big Bird!

So after much thought, this has now resulted in us planning to build a much larger coop and run for them to inhabit for the majority of the time. As much as we like our chickens to be free ranging, it’s going to be impossible for them to be 100% free range AND grow fruit and veg at the same time. When we have a bigger plot (the small holding we’ve always dreamed of) maybe they can be totally free range. Until then… there’s a new home planned for our girls around Easter!

Welcome to Grow It Alone

Justin — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 04:25:54 +0000

Grow it alone is my online diary of my family’s journey toward self sufficiency. Hopefully it will be an eye opening, enjoyable, entertaining, and indeed educational one too.

Our goal?

To make the most of everything we’ve got! Our land, our money, our very precious time, and our resources. The ultimate goal being to provide our own food for as much of the year as possible, initially in terms of fruit and veg, but we might venture into the world of keeping animals for meat… who knows!

Why?

The first incentive to start on my road to self sufficiency is the increasing lack of quality in supermarket food. Stuff used to taste better when I was a kid. Everything is grown for speed and convenience now… there’s non of the flavours, the textures anymore. Tomatoes have no flavour, strawberries have no flavour. It’s time for me to get those basic, very enjoyable things back in my life.

The second is increasing prices. We were in Tesco the other day getting a few salad items and I couldn’t believe the prices. Nearly £1 for a lettuce and not far off that for a cucumber too. It can’t be that hard to grow a lettuce, and they’re not that big, so you don’t need a huge allotment to fill your plate with salad.

Thirdly, both sets of Grandparents did it to varying degrees. My Mums father more so. 75% of his garden was dedicated to providing food for his family, and he managed it on a very tight budget indeed. I spent many hours with him in the garden when I was growing up and I think I picked up a few hints and tips along the way. My other Grandfather was less of a gardener, but he still grew potatoes, tomatoes, gooseberries, pears, apples and a lot more, with very little knowledge. My Father to grows a large proportion of his fruit and veg for him and my Mother and gets some exceptional results.

So now it’s time for me to have a go. We’ve got a reasonable sized garden at our disposal, and it’s time to put it to use.