Upcycling in the garden

I've been busy upcycling in the garden.

1. Upcycled branch cuttings into broad bean supports (with built-in pigeon protection)

2. Upcycled plastic bottles into slug collars

Just to be clear, the slug collars aren't collars for slugs, they're collars for plants to protect them from slugs and snails. You make them by cutting a section of a plastic bottle about 12 cm (5 inches) long, making downward cuts around one end to create little flaps of about 1-2 cm (1/2 inch) all round the top and bending these over outwards so they stick out. When you're done, just push the slug collar into the soil around your plant. Slugs and snails now have to crawl over the slug collars to get to your plant. OK, it won't stop a determined slug or snail, but it makes their journey a bit harder and makes me feel like I'm doing something to protect my plants. I find Sainsbury's extra-strength squash bottles ideal because they're nice and thick, which makes them easier to push into the ground; they're quite wide in diameter, which gives your plant more room; they're the perfect height to make two collars; and, perhaps most importantly, they're the plastic bottle we get through most of in this house.

3. Upcycled diddy plastic bottles into cane-toppers to make a butterfly cage

I used Actimel bottles, but any bottle around that size will do – which as far as I can tell means the probiotic drink bottle of your choice. We actually bought the drinks specifically so I could use the bottles. They make the perfect top for a bamboo cane. Not only does this protect you from any danger of poking your eyes out with the cane, it also means you can put netting over the top of them. This is good for protecting your plants against either birds or butterflies (or both). Technically the netting I bought is supposed to have holes too big to stop butterflies getting though, but in practice it worked last year (I watched plenty of cabbage whites trying and failing to get through to my delicious brassicas). I've rigged it up over my cabbages. I'll probably also need to protect my kale, but I think my turnips can manage on their own, as I don't eat the same part as the caterpillars. I'll keep an eye on the cauliflowers and see what happens.

4. Upcycled shredded paper into compost (subject to Mother Nature doing the composting part)

This should nicely balance out the grass clippings that otherwise make up the majority of my compost and will hopefully compost down more easily than if I hadn't shredded it first. See this post for an explanation of how to balance the ingredients in your compost heap.

Giving plants room to grow longer roots with toilet rolls is only half a good idea

I wanted to give my courgettes a chance to grow good long roots, so I put them in compost-filled toilet rolls on top of pots, the idea being that the courgette would grow roots all the way down the toilet roll and pot, and I'd plant the toilet roll along with the plant, because wet cardboard disintegrates pretty quickly in the soil.

That part worked well. The courgette grew its roots all the way down to the bottom of the pot. Unfortunately it turns out that courgettes aren't keen on growing stems strong enough to support their leaves without the help of the ground. So what they did was lean on the rim of the toilet roll, leading most of them to snap their stems part way across. This was particularly problematic when I added the extra stress of moving them in and out of the shed to harden them off.

 The strange thing is, they snapped several days ago and the leaves aren't dying. I'm wondering if this is something they can survive or not. I only have a couple that haven't snapped at all. I haven't put any of those straight in the earth yet, as this is a bit of an experiment to see how well they do in April - there could still be frosts that ruin everything. I'm not sure whether to brave putting more out on Sunday 26 (4 days before May) or whether to wait till Friday 1 May.

We've also cleared a bit more of the garden, as I wanted more space to grow cucurbits after Kitchen Garden magazine sent me some exciting-looking winter squash seeds that I wanted to be able to grow (Sweet Dumpling). Well, I say we, I didn't fancy challenging my back and hip pain by that level of clearance work, so luckily my other half volunteered to do it:

Hardening off

An unusually warm April day (22 degrees, I'd swear I've been through whole months of British summer when it never reached those heady heights) prompted me to think I should start hardening off my seedlings from the shed. Well, actually it prompted me to think that my seedlings might die in the scorching temperatures the shed reaches in sunshine, making me think I should probably take them out of it so they survive, and then I remembered I was supposed to be hardening them off too, so I thought I'd kill two birds with one stone.

It turns out that today might not have been an ideal day for that. It might have been a bit too hot and sunny, as some websites I read recommended starting them off on a cloudy day in a sheltered position in the garden and only for a few hours at a time. So where did I put them?

Why on the path in direct sunshine with a fair wind blowing, of course, although I did get nervous and take them back into the shed after a couple of hours in the end.

My courgette seedlings seem not to have been too pleased with me and started looking rather droopy, especially the one whose stem I accidentally bashed when its toilet-roll pot extension fell over. Most of them seem much better now they've had time to recover in the shed though. I won't be trying my toilet toll trick again next year if I can find the pots for long roots that I saw Monty Don with on the telly (I can't work out how to Google them, mind, so it may be toilet rolls for my seedlings again).

Anyhow, to try and avoid my seedlings expiring of heat exhaustion, I left the shed door open after I'd put them back in and propped cardboard up over part of the windows to protect them a bit. This seemed to be OK for them and I haven't had any definite seedling deaths yet (although one of my peas looks none too happy). Still, there's always tomorrow, when I get to try again and have to decide whether I'm prepared to carry them all to a properly protected part of the garden or whether laziness will prevail and they'll be sitting on the path again. I am torn. Laziness is a strong pull, but then, I really don't want my seedlings to die after all that work I've put into them - especially as it's already taken them a month to get as big as they have, so if I they die I'm back to square one at a much later time of the year.

Lots more seeds planted

I've had a big planting day today. I put in all the seeds that needed to be started in April (and also accidentally some fennel seeds that weren't supposed to go in until May, as I planted first and read the packet properly second). I even noticed I'd very cleverly written on my broad bean packet that I was supposed to be doing another planting on 14 April and another on 14 May, so I figured today was close enough and stuck some more in. Excitingly, the broad bean seeds I planted almost a month ago have finally sprouted, and they look huge and gorgeous (I find vegetable seedlings that don't look like standard seedlings incredibly exciting, especially if they're huge).

Broad bean seedling

Broad bean seedling

The copper coloured thing is a slug ring to try and protect them from slugs and snails, but actually I didn't place them very well and there hasn't  been any slug damage yet anyhow. Mind you, I have been on the rampage and quite aside from my misadventures with slug pellets, have been manually killing every snail I've seen in the garden this year (by drowning or by crushing to death with shoe or stone). Still, early days yet, so I've positioned the slug rings more carefully to try and avoid the death by slug my runner beans suffered last year.

In other news, look how well  my onions have come along since January:

Onions now (April)

Onions in January

Badly designed slug pellet container

Some of my brassica seedlings are already being decimated by slugs and snails. I'm not sure if my purple sprouting broccoli is more delicious than my other seedlings or whether it's just nearer where my slugs and snails live, but either way it's looking very nibbled and in danger of not surviving. So I decided to sprinkle a few slug pellets.

 Unfortunately the container had other ideas. The insert in the top was so loose, it flew out when I shook the holder and I ended up with a scatter pattern like a toddler let loose with the hundreds and thousands.

To name and shame in the hope they do something to fix it, the faulty product was Verve slug and snail killer.

I scooped up as many as I could from the garden, hopefully without disturbing too many of the seeds I've planted. It's still way too thickly pelleted though. I feel doubly bad about this, as my neighbour shortly afterwards told me that blindness is becoming an increasing problem among hedgehogs, and it's not a massive leap to imagine the problem could be caused by the hedgehogs eating poisoned slugs (correlation is not causation, and I don't even know for certain that there's correlation, but this is definitely a case of humans chemically manipulating their environment, and that sort of thing is likely to have unintended consequences).

I've made an attempt to fix the slug pellet container as well.

I've put a couple of strips of gaffer tape around the inside of the rim of the container to try and make the space the insert fits into smaller, then rammed the insert back in. It might not be quite enough to hold it in next time. I couldn't just tape it on over the top though, as the thread for the screw top is just round the edge of the rim.

I have also bought some horse manure of the same brand, but that seems fine so far. It smells plenty like farmyards, making me think that it's probably not been hot composted (this is a guess based on things I've read on the Internet, so I may be talking a load of baloney here), but it looks quite broken down and like something that my plants would welcome, even if my neighbours might not be quite so keen on the pungent pong of eau de merde floating over my fence.

What different types of seedling look like

I planted a load of seeds on 20 March, just before we went on holiday. Then I brought them in to the dining room table, turned the heating off while we were away and left them. Despite me turning the heating off, quite a lot of them have now come up and they look surprisingly different to each other and not like my husband was expecting at all (he was expecting them to look like mini versions of the big plant, not to have their special seed leaves (cotyledons)). Here are the seedlings that have come up so far:

Mangetout seedlings (Carouby de Maussane)

Slightly older mangetout seedlings (6 April 2015)

Tall peas - mangetout - Carouby de Maussane

Pea seedlings (Ne plus ultra)

and the really not significantly different tall peas 'Ne plus ultra',

Runner bean seedling

but the delightfully different and dragon-like runner bean.

Kale seedlings (Russo-Siberian "Red Russian")

These kale seedlings - Russo-Siberian "Red Russian" look far more like I expect seedlings to look.

Tomato seedlings (Moneymaker)

And these tomato seedlings (Moneymaker) are exactly what I'd think of if you just told be to think of a seedling.

Tomato seedlings in a propagator

I actually grew these in a little (unheated) propagator that I picked up cheap on sale at B&Q last year. I'm not sure it made a blind bit of difference. The other three types of seeds I planted in the propagator still hadn't come up by 3 April, whereas plenty of the ones I planted with no extra protection have.

Courgette seedling (Tondo di Piacenza)

Courgette seedlings (Tondo di Piacenza) - including one that was pulled out showing its roots

Courgette seedlings potted on into toilet rolls on top of 4 inch pots to try and make sure there's as much room as possible for them to grow long roots.

The most exciting seedlings are my courgettes (Tondo di Piacenza). It doesn't show up well in the photo, but when the light shines on them they are positively luminous and also they shot up that huge head with leaves about as long as a two pence piece in less than 48 hours.

Sweet corn seedling (Golden Bantam)

Sweet corn seedling with leaf (Golden Bantam) (6 April 2015)

My initially least exciting seedling was my sweet corn (Golden Bantam), until it got a few days older and popped out its first leaf.

Celery seedlings (Green Sleeves) (6 April 2015)

My celery seedlings are still tiny and took 15 days to come up at all and then stayed much smaller than my other seedlings.

Cayenne pepper seedlings (6 April 2015)

My cayenne pepper seedling appeared looking just as tiny a few hours after the celery seedlings, but soon outstripped them in size, so as of 6 April I'm only waiting for my bell peppers to appear in my propagators, and I can see signs that some of those are about to break through.

Carrot seedlings

And now we move on to my outdoor seedlings. Here are my carrots, which are going to need thinning, which always makes me feel immensely guilty (which is weird, as I have no guilt feelings about pulling weeds up - it must be the waste of potential, each one I thin could have been a carrot!).

Radish seedlings (Scarlet Globe)

My radish seedlings have been in the ground for some time and are growing under horticultural fleece. They've only suffered minor slug damage and some of the ones in the picture have grown their first true leaves as well as their seed leaves.

Kohl rabi seedlings

My kohl rabi seedlings look pretty similar, but they're tinged with purple and have been attacked by slugs already. I've now scattered slug pellets (see next post).

Turnip seedlings (Purple Top Milan)

My turnip seedlings also look pretty much identical.

Kale seedlings (Dwarf Green Curled)

As do my kale seedlings. It must be a brassicas thing.

My lettuce seedlings look a bit different though:

Lollo rosso seedlings