My planting scheme

The problem with seeds is that they don't last forever. Actually, some types pretty much do, but a lot of them need planting soon after being created, so a kind Christmas gift means I've ended up with more seeds than I have garden for. The 20 packets of seeds that came free with the Kitchen Garden subscription my other half got me arrived in the post today and I now have well over 30 types of seeds, but unfortunately not all of different types, for instance I now have four packets of kale. I'm clearly going to have to start swapping my seeds or giving them away. But before I do that, I'm going to have to work out which ones I'm going to keep and where to plant them and when.
I've taken the first step and divided them into plant families (so I can plant the same type together and start my first year of crop rotation). Here's what I've ended up with:

The Potato Family

Potato family:

Plant	Sow outdoors	Sow by
Pepper (sweet) - California Wonder	March/April for outdoor crops	2017
Pepper (hot) - Cayenne	March/April for outdoor crops	2017
Tomato - Moneymaker	March/April for outdoor crops	2017
Tomato - Gardeners Delight	March/April	2016

The Root Family

Plant	Sow outdoors	Sow by
Celery - Green Sleeves	March - May	2017
Celery - Apium graveolens	March/April	2016
Parsley - Petroselinum crispum	indoor planting kit, sow anytime	2016
Parsley - Plain Leaved 2	sow outdoors March - July	2017
White carrot	got it free from the allotment from carrots they'd left to go to seed, I'm guessing it's similar to:
Carrot - Ideal	February - July	June 2016
Coriander - Cilantro (for leaf)	March - July	2017

The Brassica Family

I ended up with a lot of brassicas. There generally seem to be a lot of brassicas, I'm not sure how to deal with that in my crop rotation, but I'm going to have to add a lot of compost and fertiliser as they won't be following legumes (which enrich the soil) in my first year of kitchen gardening and brassicas are greedy feeders that won't grow properly without enough nutrients.

Plant	Sow outdoors	Sow by
Turnip - Purple Top Milan	March - July	2017
Radish (last year's mixed pack of French Breakfast, Scarlet Globe, Sparkler, White Turnip and Pink Beauty)	March - September	June 2016
Radish - Scarlet Globe	February - September	2016
Rocket - Annual	I seem to have mislaid the seeds and only still have the packet
Rocket - Wild Trizia (All Year Round)	March - September	2017
Kale - Black Tuscan Cavolo Nero - Black Palm Kale	in spring as soon as ground can be worked + late July - September	end 2016
Kale - Russo - Siberian 'Red Russian'	sow indoors before transplanting out in mid-spring or outdoors in midsummer	end 2016
Broccoli - Purple Sprouting	April - July	end 2016
Kale - Dwarf Green Curled (x 2 packets)	March - May	2017
Watercress Aqua - probably one for swapping, I'm allergic to watercress	March - August	2017
Cabbage - Greyhound	March - May	2017

The Cucurbit Family

Plant	Sow outdoors	Sow by
Squash Butternut - Burpee's Butterbush	sow in greenhouse from March or after soil has warmed	end 2016
Courgette - Tondo di Piacenza	April - May	2016
Cucumber - Chinese Slangen	May/June	2017

The Legume Family

Plant	Sow outdoors	Sow by
Pea, Tall - Mangetout - Carouby Maussane	March/April and again in early summer	end 2015
Pea, Tall - Ne Plus Ultra	March/April and again in early summer	mid-2016
Bean, Broad - Bunyards Exhibition	monthly March until end of May + autumn	end 2015
Runner Bean - Butler	indoors April - June, plant out June	June 2015

The Lettuce Family

Plant	Sow outdoors	Sow by
Mixed Lettuce Leaves (Catalogna, Cocarde, Curled Red American, Grand Rapids, Red salad bowl, Rossa di Trento)	March - August every 2 - 3 weeks	2017
Lettuce - Salad Bowl	March - August every 2 - 3 weeks	2017

The Allium Family

Plant	Sow outdoors	Sow by
Leek - Elefant	March - April	2017
Leek - Atal	April - July	June 2016

The Beet Family

Plant	Sow outdoors	Sow by
Chard, Swiss - Bright lights - Rainbow Chard	from mid-April until September, autumn plant for spring crop	end 2016
Chard - White Silver 2	April - July	September 2015
Beetroot - Boltardy	March - July every 3 weeks	2016
Beetroot - Action	April - July	June 2016

Other

Plant	Sow outdoors	Sow by
Sweetcorn - Golden Bantam Dolce	early spring under cloches in pots or mid-spring outdoors	end 2016

Other herbs

Plant	Sow outdoors	Sow by
Basil - Sweet	May - June	2017

So my next task is to work out where in the garden I have room for all these plants.

Christmas presents for gardeners

My other half gave me an unexpected Christmas present yesterday: a 12 month subscription to Kitchen Garden, a magazine about growing your own fruit and veg. He also bought me the January issue, as the subscription doesn't start till February.

It turns out that this is an excellent gift on a couple of fronts. Firstly, it's full of handy advice on how to grow different kinds of veg - things like when to plant and harvest various types of veg and how to look after your soil or make a propagator, along with articles that seem to be written by people with the same concerns as me (practical tips on how to grow veg and which varieties are most resistant to pests and disease and how and why people set up a community garden or started allotment gardening, rather than people reciting the scientific names* of various type of flower as if they should mean something to me). Secondly, the January issue came with a free packet of kale seeds (I love kale) and I'll be getting 20 more packets of seeds when the subscription starts as part of the offer.

This is an excellent present, although I'm not sure I'll have room for all of them in my garden.
A far less excellent magazine is The Garden:

I would be pretty annoyed if I'd paid the price listed on the cover (£4.25) for a copy of it, as it doesn't seem professionally written to me and also seems to assume that I have such a strong knowledge of gardening that practical tips are no use to me and what I'm mainly interested in is lists of the long names of plants. It often doesn't even have photographs of the most important thing an article's talked about (for instance having a photo of the columnist instead of their garden in winter or whatever the topic of their column was - the excellent photo on January's cover is not representative of the standard or choice of photos in the rest of the magazine).

I actually have the magazine because I joined the Royal Horticultural Society, as that's the cheapest way to visit RHS Wisley several times a year and you get the magazine delivered for free as part of that package. My guess is that the principal purposes of The Garden are actually to promote the RHS's gardens and partner gardens plus to sell garden-related holidays and greenhouses. Certainly, my main thoughts after reading it each month are generally: I must visit Wisley again, those garden holidays look lovely, shame about the price, and I wish I had room for a greenhouse, I'd love a Victorian one. I certainly don't recommend a subscription to The Garden for any gardener you've not actually heard list several scientific names of plants in a single sentence**. On the other hand, membership of the RHS is a great present for any gardener who lives near one of the RHS gardens (particularly RHS Wisley), as these are amazing gardens to visit - or at any rate, I can vouch for the fact that Wisley is. The membership just happens to comes with a subscription to The Garden thrown in, but that part they'll just have to grin and bear (at least it should remind them to make use of their membership and actually go for a visit).

* I used to call these the Latin names of plants until my friend who's a professional gardener pointed out that not all of theses names were actually Latin, so we were supposed to call them "scientific names".
** Quite a lot of people seem to think I'm the type to call plants by their scientific names. Life's too short. I mainly don't need to know the scientific names of what's growing in my garden, so I mainly don't bother.

Someone's stolen our washing line hole

It occurred to me that as I'm turning 40 in the summer and want to have a party to celebrate, it might pay not to turn the entire garden into a giant vegetable patch yet. Looking out the window I saw this:

and it struck me that it already looked like someone had started a bed along our right-hand fence. So, new plan: instead of putting raised beds all over the garden in 2015, I'll save that for 2016 and just turn the strip down the right-hand fence into a bed for next year. It'll also be a darn sight more manageable, given the fact that my back currently only permits me to dig for two minutes at a time. Also, the fact that I was planning to replace our grass lawn with a non-grass lawn (made of chamomile etc.) means that I don't even have to be careful to preserve areas that I ultimately want to be lawn. When I thought about it a bit longer though, I realised that my original plan of having lawn under the washing line was still valid, as dropping the washing on lawn is less likely to result in needing to put it back through the wash than dropping it on soil is. That made me think that leaving the lawn all the way back to the fence at the level of the washing line was a good idea.

It was at about that time that I spotted the cover to the hole for the washing line lolling near the fence. The washing line itself spends most of its time in the shed for both practical and aesthetic reasons (practical reason: it stays much cleaner in there and doesn't gain grime that transfers to the washing). So I went to look for the hole it goes in. That was when I discovered that the hole was missing. The other half, who dug the hole for the holder in the first place, says it was a b**** to get in, so if anyone's had the gumption* to steal it, he's impressed. In the next breath he said not to worry, he'll find it again, that thing was a b**** to put in.

* Not his actual words. The other half doesn't use words that sound like they come from a 1950s children's novel.

Frozen dandelions

I've been putting my dandelions and dandelion roots in water to drown them like they told me to do on the gardening course, so that they can go on the compost heap without risk of them being able to grow again.

We've just had the first frost of the year and I found them completely frozen over this morning.

I can't make up my mind whether this means they're now thoroughly dead or whether it's maybe even delayed the process of their destruction. Given what a healthy green that leaf looks and given that dandelions have no problem surviving England's usual frosts, I think I'm going to err on the side of caution and assume the freezing is if anything prolonging their survival.

I'm not actually sure I was supposed to drown the leaves as well, but I didn't want to take any chances. Dandelions are hardy and persistent weeds with the ability to grow again from just the tiniest bit of root.

Removing a large hypericum

I took down another bush last week. This time it was the hypericum's turn.

Like every other bush in the garden, it was also harbouring a ball.

This one had a bird's nest too, but luckily it's a time of year when removing it won't be disrupting breeding.

I didn't actually cut it all the way down. I'm a bit wary of doing too much sawing with my back problems. I just took the branches off with secateurs and am now hoping my husband will saw the rest off.

He's already taken the lopped off branches out to the skip at the front that we've got for the new kitchen.

Extra, extra, this just in: He's just promised me that he'll saw off the rest of the branches in mid-March (early March if I'm lucky).

Gardening with my subconscious

I was putting some daffodil bulbs in the front garden when a light bulb went off in my brain. My onion sets are bulbs, I should probably be planting them at this time of year, not in the spring like my other veg.

So I looked on the packet I bought from Wilkinson's a few weeks back, and sure enough it said the last month for planting them was December. Good thinking, brain!
My brain also had plans for where they should go. I thought about how much trouble my back's been lately and how much work major changes to the layout to the garden were going to be, and came to the conclusion that getting rid of the existing shrubs was quite enough work for this year, so I needed to work with what was already there. My first thought was I'd put them where I'd just taken the small bush out:

In fact, my brain went so far as to refuse to consider any other options for them. It didn't even occur to me that there were other ready-to-plant areas in the garden until my other half came out after lunch to see what I was up to and mentioned he was glad I wasn't planting in the vegetable patch at the back of the garden, as that was going to get all trampled up when the cupboards for the new kitchen were brought in through the new garden gate next week.
Possibly that was just forgetfulness, possibly it was my subconscious doing the thinking for me so my conscious brain doesn't have to. I'm going to choose to go with the latter.
Anyhow, I decided that my subconscious could also decide how I was going to plant the mixed assortment of onions (red, white and yellow). I thought up a couple of possibilities and then asked myself if I'd feel disappointed with my choice if I took that option. In the end I decided to plant them in diagonals of red, white and yellow (from left to right) when that scheme made me positively glow with contentment.

I'm hoping they're going to look like ornamental alliums planted in drifts.
After I'd planted them I remembered that I was supposed to be adding organic matter, I also remembered that my veg growing class told us that compost will work its way into soil if just dumped on the top of it and I also remembered I really want to avoid digging because it messes my back up, so I just shovelled some on top.

Well, I say shovelled, transporting compost from one end of the garden forkful by forkful is a bit of a pain, so I emptied out a large flowerpot to use to bring it and discovered another huge colony of snails.

I didn't think a single garden could support so many snails. I disposed of them the organic way (water and washing-up liquid).

About half an hour of gardening

I decided my back problems were well enough to take this bush out (I think it's probably a hebe). Today's back problems all feel mouse-related, so I figured doing this gardening would actually positively do me good, and so far I seem to have been right, cutting branches off bushes with secateurs doesn't cause me the same problems as digging.

But I decided to learn from my experiences on the weekend, so I only cut and sawed the branches off in large sections and left the job of cutting them up small for the compost heap for another day.

I also left quite a bit of the core of the bush where it was. Another job for another day.

Garden finds

These are all the balls I've found in the garden so far. Four of them were in the bush I just took out.

I don't know what the plant in the photo is, but it's pleasant looking during the summer and has gorgeous autumn colours, so it's earned its reprieve and gets to stay until I find something I positively want to replace it with (although I might try pruning it back a bit, as it's bigger than I'd like).

Give it some wellie!

I got some new wellies from the Internet.

My feet are size 9 (that's 11 in US sizes or 42 in Europe), so my choices were limited because most places in the UK only go up to size 7 or 8 for women's shoes. But I found these pretty ones with daisies all over them, and I'm pretty happy with them - although I did have to roll my trousers up, as I couldn't get all of my calves, my leg warmers and my trouser legs in the legs.

How much gardening is too much for chronic pain?

I did two things in the garden today. The first one was that I clipped one of the box trees in the front garden. That's the clippings you can see in my upside-down compost bin. The compost bin is currently upside down because it got moved out of the way like that when our fence was replaced. In an ideal world, I wouldn't have just tossed them on the top of the bin and left them there, I'd have mixed them in with the rest of the bin's contents. Unfortunately, between clipping the hedge and clearing up the clippings, I did one other thing in the garden:

I re-dug the vegetable patch because it had been flattened when the fence was put up. I didn't even do a particularly good job of it. I left most of the chunks of earth large and unbroken and it only took me about 5 to 10 minutes - or at least, that was my perception (time does fly when I'm gardening). But by about three quarters of the way through, my lower back was using twinges to tell me it wasn't happy. I should probably have stopped the moment it started to hurt, but I really wanted to finish what I'd started - also, I have no guarantee that the damage wasn't already done at that point and that I'd have any fewer twinges bending down afterwards or would heal quicker if I stopped the moment the trouble started. Also, I really didn't want to leave clippings all over the front garden for yet another day, so I carried on and cleared those up.
My desire not to leave things unfinished so I don't have to do them later is clearly higher than my desire to look after my chronic pain.
It's tricky though. Mindfulness meditation suggests that I should be kind to myself. But what is kind to myself? Is it kind to myself to stop doing something the moment it starts hurting? If so, I wouldn't work at all (mind you, I'd have no issue with that if I had the money not to work). Or is it kind to myself (my usual approach) to make sure future Laura has an easier life because present Laura has thoughtfully planned and done things for her? I often find myself pleasantly surprised to discover that past Laura had done things for future Laura, that present Laura had forgotten all about and is now benefiting from, and it comes as a pleasant surprise to discover how organised and thoughtful I was (that particularly applies to filing things properly when I get them).
Of course, the downside of this is it means I have a tendency to battle on through pain - for instance I continue to work and save for my pension and my future despite the fact that, as a rough rule of thumb, every minute I spend working adds to my pain (it doesn't necessarily increase it up and up, but it does cause me repeated pain which I wouldn't necessarily be in otherwise and which stays with me and causes me problems after I've finished). It also means that I look like I cope brilliantly - or possibly that there's very little for me to cope with in the first place, which often means I end up doing more and more, including things I probably really shouldn't be, like the washing up (that causes me a lot of problems).
Anyhow, the key point is that I gardened until about quarter or an hour beyond the point at which it started hurting, and that's very definitely me done gardening at least for the day and quite possibly for the weekend, or even the week. There's another bush I'd have liked to take down:

It's not happening today though.
So, how much gardening is too much? I've been thinking about it while I was writing this, and I've come to the conclusion that for me it's like this:

Know your chronic pain. Observe what happens to your body when you do things. Then make choices about what trade-offs are worth it to you. Also, if you can split a job up so you do a bit of one physical activity for a while followed by a bit of a different one, that helps. For instance, if you need to spend an hour weeding, an hour mowing the lawn and an hour clipping bushes, it can help to do 30 minutes of weeding, followed by 30 minutes of mowing, followed by 30 minutes of clipping, then start the cycle again (or 15 minutes or 10 or even 5 if that's how your back works and you can bear to switch tasks every five minutes). I've now discovered that even 5 - 10 minutes is too much digging for me at the moment (although I have joined the gym, so if I'm lucky, that may change as my body gets stronger). In retrospect, I should have started with a couple of minutes of digging and interspersed my digging with clipping (which I can do for quite a long time without pain). But it didn't occur to me that I wanted to dig until I'd pretty much finished clipping. Also, I had no idea that 5 - 10 minutes was too much. Then, on top of that, I like starting gardening without thoroughly planning everything I'm going to do. I also like concentrating on a single task for longish periods, so constantly switching is quite irritating for me. On the other hand, perhaps switching about would have kept me going longer, which would have been good for my goal of doing more gardening than I got through today, but might also have upped my irritation levels (having to switch about instead of doing it in my preferred style). 

Update from the following day (Sunday): I should have stopped earlier. I should have done no more than 2 minutes of digging. I'm still in a lot of pain (in different places from where I had the problems yesterday), and digging the veg patch wasn't worth it. I will try and remember to limit myself to two minutes a day when I get better again (possibly with an alarm, so I don't just keep going). How I feel today was not worth 10 minutes of digging.

New fences all finished

Fences down, trees gone

We had the fence people in today to give us new fences and rip out our trees. Turns out trees are quite bulky. They took away this much:

Afterwards, the garden looked like this:

Back of the envelope design for the garden

I've been thinking about how the garden needs to work for me and started sketching things out on scraps of paper. I need to do more work on a couple of fronts (firstly, precise lengths and secondly making sure I've thought of all the plants and infrastructure I'm going to want, particularly plants). What I've taken into account so far is that I need somewhere to hang the washing out on the washing line (which lives in the shed for aesethetic reasons and to stop it getting dirty when not in use). I've thought long and hard about it, and I also think I need grass or grass-like plants under the washing line so that when I drop washing on the ground it doesn't automatically need to go through the wash again. Secondly, I want raised beds for my crop rotation. What I haven't yet worked out is where I should have my perennials, shrubs and trees (fruit bushes and trees, asparagus etc.) and whether they can go at the ends of my crop rotation beds or if I need something separate for them. So, here's the preliminary plan:

The two big squares at the front of the plan represent the shed plus the space next to it. The round space in the middle is where I'm going to have the washing line with camomile and other grass-replacement plants under it. The bits around it are my raised beds and then the strip right at the top is my existing concrete strip right by the house. This doesn't take full account of the existing infrastructure, which includes a concrete path I'd like taken out. It also assumes it's always going to be OK to walk on my lawn to get to the shed or the back of the garden, whereas I might instead need some sort of path or stepping stones.
Here's the garden as it currently is (also back of the envelope stuff):

The next stage is to draw the existing garden in Sketchup and then use that to draw more designs.

Mindful meditation and snails

I decided to take down another bush today. Actually, that's not true, I decided to measure the garden and its existing hard-landscaping features, but this bush got in the way:

So I decided to cut it back from over the path so I could measure where the path was more easily. Well, I still haven't done that, as I ended up cutting pretty much the whole thing back.

And then I got sent some work, so I stopped to do it.
While I was cutting back the bush, I discovered two things:
1. the honeysuckle does come from our side of the fence (which is good, as I have a past history of allergy to honeysuckle, and if it comes back that means it's my choice whether this one lives or dies) and
2. that bush was hiding an absolute ton of snails.

As a gardener I needed those snails gone. I've already lost enough plants to snails and slugs that I need to get rid of any snails I find. The thing is that I've been doing mindfulness meditation for my pain, and mindfulness meditation is strongly derived from Buddhist meditation. This causes me a bit of a problem, as Buddhism says you shouldn't harm your fellow creatures (including snails). Now, I find a lot of what Buddhism says very useful advice - or at least, I find a lot of what they told us at the Buddhist centre where I used to go to try and learn meditation very useful advice. And that makes me feel very guilty about killing snails.
As seems standard for human psychology, I have more worries about killing them by a method where I'm an active agent in their death - i.e. by stamping on them or drowning them by popping them into water, than where I play a less active role - for instance through slug pellets or a beer trap, despite the fact the snails end up just as dead and I'm not convinced that any of those deaths is pleasanter or quicker than the others - except maybe the beer death. For instance, I filled a small ice cream tub with water and a bit of washing up liquid and popped all of those snails in it. In fact, I pretty much filled the ice cream tub with snails. But I feel bad saying so on this blog (even though I strongly suspect that the two pictures above are actually at least partially snail graveyards, as some of those snails were very firmly stuck and the snails inside did not seem very well hydrated, so may well already have been dead).
Nevertheless, I put all of them into a tub of water with the intention that none would survive – although I did save as many of the woodlice who fell in by accident as I could. The snails that were curled up in their shells seemed not to survive my slightly washing-up liquidy water at all, but some of the others made several attempts to climb out, which made me feel even worse (because I didn't let them). I might need more washing-up liquid next time. It's surprising how much washing up liquid vegetable gardening involves. I don't know what farmers did before they invented it.

Year one: lessons learned

I think I harvested more in lessons learned for next year than I did in vegetables from my patch this year. I have now pulled up the rest of my vegetables (except for some leeks which are still growing, but may well not survive the replacement of our fences). So, here are my lessons:
Lesson 1: Space

Many vegetables need a lot more space than I gave them credit for. Because of their outer leaves, they get a lot bigger than the vegetable you see in the shops. If it weren't for slugs and snails eating holes in the cabbage leaf in the picture above, the cauliflower beneath it would barely be able to see daylight. If the seed packet says space them 30 cm apart, treat that as a minimum, not a maximum requirement. Also, my failure to give them enough space meant that it was easy for slugs and snails to crawl from one plant to the next across all the touching leaves, thwarting my barrier attempts to protect some of my plants with copper slug rings. Which brings me on to:
Lesson 2: Slugs, snails and insect pests

Although I largely successfully protected my cabbages from caterpillars I only got to eat about two leaves of them because they got ravaged by slugs and snails and other insect pests. I think I may have to become less organic about my approach to slug and snail control next year and I'm also planning to use either agricultural fleece or insect netting over my cabbages (if I grow them), as they don;t need pollinating, but do need protecting from pretty much everything. I'd like to be organic about my growing, so I may have another go with copper if I manage to get raised beds in. The plan is to run copper tape around all of the outside of the planks around the raised bed. However, I'm still not confident that will work. I killed dozens and dozens of slugs and snails this year (I'd guess more than 100), but it was never enough. They still decimated my crops. So, there will be non-organic slug pellets around my brassicas and legumes next year to try and reduce the garden's population of molluscs, and then the next year I'll see if I can go organic again.
Lesson 3: Fertilise, fertilise, fertilise

A lot of my plants simply did not have enough nutrients available to them to grow properly. I threw a bit of organic fertiliser about once, but I should have thrown a lot more around repeatedly and ideally I should have added more compost to the soil than I did too. I wouldn't even have needed to dig it in. If I'd spread compost over the top of the soil it would have worked its own way down, as that's what compost does.
Lesson 4: Late June is a bit late to be sowing seeds or planting out seedlings in England

Despite the fact I only planted plants whose seed packets said June was still OK for sowing, my rocket bolted really quickly (it probably wouldn't have been so desperate to flower so quickly if planted earlier in the year).

Although the two beans that grew at all were looking pretty healthy at this point, this was way too small for late September and I don't think I'd have ended up with any beans even if the plants hadn't all been eaten in the past couple of weeks.

Also, some of my veg failed to get to a decent size despite me leaving them in for months (in fairness, I'm not 100% certain if this was a late sowing or a fertlise, fertilise, fertilise problem).
The radishes worked out pretty OK (alright, I had all sorts of difficulties with them, but June being too late to plant them wasn't one of them as far as I can tell), and the leeks may still work out, as they still have some growing time left until their latest harvesting date of January.
Lesson 5: Use proper bamboo sticks as support sticks instead of found wood

I have strong suspicions that those holes in the sticks I was using could be woodworm and I have my fingers crossed that it either hasn't infected anything else or has only infected the fence - which is about to be replaced. In case, like me, you don't live within walking distance of a garden centre and can't fit sticks as long as you need in your car, you can always order sticks online. These sticks have now gone in a green waste bag and will be going off to the council for composting and sterilisation.

On the plus side, all the veg that I ripped up has pretty much filled my compost heap and added a load of greens (nitrogen-rich organic matter), which is good because I have a load of browns (carbon-rich organic matter) that I'm about to add when I cut down a load of bushes around the garden, and that should balance it nicely.

The vegetable patch is now down to just a few remaining leeks and a solitary carrot.