Prepping the beds

A break in the monsoon rains gave me the opportunity to finally sort out my veg beds. I've managed to grow a nice crop of dandelions! After an hour or so of weeding the beds with a garden fork, I also whizzed round the rest of the garden which gave me a big blister on my right palm from using the hand trowel. I managed to fill two big bags of garden waste, luckily there is a collection scheduled next week (thankfully Hackney takes this stuff off your hands).



Since the sunshine continued I also cleared out my compost bin and the scrappy heap of all-sorts (a mixture of woody clippings, old bits of timber boards, a pallet, guinea pig litter, ...). Injury number two was a nail that protruded from a board I moved and which I managed to drive into my thumb (left hand this time).

The compost from the bin itself was not a great success: compostable bags obviously need much longer to disintegrate and I had to pull them out from the usable stuff. Messy business. In future I won't put them in anymore, not worth the bother. The scrap heap yielded quite a bit of compost at the bottom of it, thanks to the guinea pig litter. It now is a bit tidier too but it could do with removing completely, however I am not sure how I can dispose of it.

I had enough muck to spread onto the veg patches and dig it in. It's still a bit to horrible to plant anything out, even the lettuce, beetroot and carrots would find it a bit too chilly at the moment. Better to wait for a couple of weeks and hope the weather improves. Can't wait till the planting starts!

Digging out the compost bin

Not as in getting out of storage, no, I mean literally digging out.

Late last year something bad happened to my compost area. An influx of cage litter, old bits of stairs I had replaced, large dead shrubs, doors (don't ask...), it ended up all around the bin. It got to the point where I couldn't lift the top off anymore. So today, taking advantage of the nice weather, I did some investigation and a clean-up.

The doors have almost rotted down, except one which must be made of some hardwood (it is still solid and I think it has been out there for years). Restacked they can go on doing their thing. The large shrubs are now a screen against the back wall. Found lots of old decking off-cuts which I can use for marking beds. Also found a broken BBQ and lots of other rubbish. A broken birdhouse is sitting on the curb hoping someone can muster up the will to put it together again. The bits of stairs now form a wall around a mound of cage litter which still has another year of composting to do.

(It may not look like much but you shoudl have seen it before. And yes, I know there is a plastic goose...wanna make something of it?!? It's not rubbish, it's..decorative. )

Then I tackled the compost bin itself. Three-quarters full of lovely compost! I emptied that out on the nearest beds which have been mainly made up of cat poo and builders rubble so far.


I went a bit crazy after that because then I also forked in the guinea pig waste that I spread out on the other beds, and I cleaned up the deck, getting rid of an old table to make room for this little beauty:


I also hope someone will take about 50 small plastic plant pots off my hands...Oh, and I found some ancient grass seed in my cellar which I put on the bare patches in the grassy path. And I spread out some bags of ballast I had hanging around on the other, gravelly path.

Now I'm exhausted but it was lovely to sit on the deck with a nice cup of coffee and a hot cross bun afterwards.

Dead of winter

Lots of snow this year and cold too. At least next growing season there should be fewer snails and slugs (hopefully).

The garden is mostly shut down. I left some white beetroot leaves out there, not sure if they survive or will be any good. Raspberry canes have been cut down. Plenty of material from guinea pig cage cleaning is being dumped on the beds. The ornamentals look a bit bedraggled but that is to be expected in early January (especially as there are some where frost-hardiness is doubtful; at least I managed to bring my pelargoniums inside).

I still need to go through the seeds which I ordered and that have arrived (rhubarb will arrive for planting in March). There are some items in there which I may be able to start off early inside. I am also contemplating getting a cheap greenhouse, which means I can move things (like tomatoes) outside much earlier. This year I am going to try the individual growing medium, having not had much success with the toilet roll method and also the normal seed trays.

Still haven't had a chance to build myself a better compost bin - lack of light/time and surplus of snow has been against me. As soon as it warms up a little bit I shall try though.

Probably not much happening for the rest of January...

snow, cold and nothing doing

It has been cold and snowing on and off over the last two weeks so I haven't ventured out in the garden much. Once the weather clears a little bit I will start (hopefully). Today I collected some leaves from my bay tree; it's nice to be able to replenish the herb cupboard on a whim.

My compost bin is full now with guinea pig waste and vegetable peelings, so much so that I had to start another pile next to it. Must remember though to move the bag immediately to the assigned area - I left one just outside the backdoor overnight and it was ripped open by a fox. Must have been a bit of a surprise for the fox though: "ooh yummy, someone left a rubbish bag! Ugh, it's full of poo!"

Haven't done anything else, not even ordered any seeds. Must rectify soon. I've collected some seeds from a bought butternut squash though. Last year this method was quite successful with a Kabocha, more so than the expensive seeds I got through a catalogue. Task of re-organising the garden seems a bit daunting...

obsession with poo continues...

A great weight on any gardener's mind is compost and manure. Last year at the community gardens we were fortunate enough to have a great big pile of poo delivered. This year I am not so lucky.

London soil is dreadful. Clay-based, leached out, used as all the cats' outside litter box. Hundreds of years of builders' and tenants' rubble. Pollution from the air. Plain horrible. So it needs a bit of TLC.

I have always kept a compost bin in the back, recycling appropriate kitchen and garden waste. One year I supplemented that with pelleted chicken manure (good but expensive and stinky). What I really need is a big load of good quality top soil or manure but with the only access to the garden being through the whole house this is not going to happen in a hurry. So I am stuck with reasonable amounts of compost.

And then, cleaning out the critters' cage, it struck me that I was sitting on a gold mine - or, indeed, poo mine. Guinea pig manure to be precise. They are herbivores...they poo a lot...their litter is compostable. Hurrah!

But I wondered how good guinea pig manure would be and if I should invest in getting other organic fertilisers. There are, unfortunately, no charts about the nutritional composition of guinea pig poo, however, I found some information about rabbit manure (close enough, I reckon). Surprisingly, it seems to be really high in nitrogen, even higher than chicken manure. Also, good values of P and K. Obviously that will drop as it is mixed with litter.

So, in the compost bin it goes and I look forward to better soil. I <3 guinea pigs.

starting to clear up

The season's end is here. Everything should be cleared by 31 October. I started on that yesterday.

A trip to the garden yesterday revealed no more cucumbers but again a few zucchinis. Harvested all the remaining green tomatoes - excellent as salsa and I will try fried green tomatoes tonight. More carrots. I also removed the few little ears of corn that were straggling, for use as guinea pig food. Only the rainbow chard and collards remain for harvesting. I left a few tiny winter squashes to see if they do something over the next week or so.


I took down the beans and removed all the rest of the plants, which generated an additional compost heap. Unfortunately, I missed the garden clear-up in the morning during which Parks & Recreation got rid of unwanted material with their truck.


Even at mid-afternoon the light is dimmer and the shadows longer. I've really enjoyed having this garden and I will miss it over the winter months.


This morning I had some delicious scrambled eggs (traded with produce from the garden) with zucchini (from the garden), mushrooms, neuf-chatel and spring onions and a side of sauteed Rose Finn Apple potatoes (also from the garden). I haven't really had to buy any vegetables from the supermarket recently (except lettuce for the piggies) and it'll be strange to be doing that again.

A pile of dung!

My intention for this weekend was to level out the soil, mark out some beds, build a compost area out of chicken wire, and maybe, just maybe, sow some rocket (aka arugula).

Well, that whole plan turned into a pile of dung. Literally. After helping out at the Portsmouth Neighbourhood Clean-up event round the corner, I went round to the garden. I knew something was in the air when I arrived. A big heap of horse manure sat in the entrance to the community garden.
I phoned the garden manager to ask who it belonged to. She thought that probably the city had dropped it off. Very nice of them. Were they listening to me???

On closer inspection, it turned out that it was semi-composted. Too fresh to pile onto plants (it was still steaming a little bit and it definitely smelled of manure) but not that wet either. I decided that it probably would be good as a top dressing right now, to be forked in a little bit later.

I spread it on about 1/2 inch thick all over the plot, piling it on a bit more in the area where I want to grow winter squash and strawberries. Managed also to pull more weeds out as I went along.



Of course that meant that I couldn't do any beds or sow anything (in any case, I was getting tired and hungry). The last few days of snow, hail, rain and sunshine mean that April is round the corner and things should be picking up. Maybe I'll actually get some gardening done soon instead of just digging and dealing with shit...

An emerging obsession with poo

I admit I'm obsessed with poo. It started with envious thoughts of the much-mulched plot. Well-rotted horse poo apparently, by the truckload. I am unfortunately light of a truck and therefore also of poo.

Trying to be as organic as possible, I decided against inorganic fertilizer, although it does handily fit into the back of an average-sized car.

What of bagged compost? A quick cursory glance around the Internet shows that mushroom compost seems to be the most available in hardware stores. This is actually the straw after mushrooms have been grown on it. Opinions seem to vary as to its benefit, a nutritional breakdown I found suggests that it contains around 2-0.5-2 (that's the breakdown of the main plant nutrients: nitrogen for leaves, phosphate for roots and potash for seeds). Some gardeners do not recommend it since usually it does contain some pesticides and it may make your soil more alkaline .

Fresh farmyard manure is of course still an option but in smaller quantities. I used to use chicken manure in my previous garden and although it stinks to high heaven I was impressed with its fertilizing qualities and the fact that it came in a manageable tub.

The search for fertilizer led me to a recent local craigslist post:

"All the goat poo you can use, and then some. Come out this weekend and fill up anything you want with goat poo. There is plenty - we can clean out the stalls if we need to to fill your vehicle."

I was nearly hooked.

Rabbit manure was something that I had never really considered before. Now I am viewing my guinea pigs through new eyes, wondering if they could fulfill my need for their poo more quickly. It would certainly solve the problem of what to do with their spent litter. (Which brings me on to compost bins, as in, I need one).

Of course, there is always blood meal, bone meal, and fish meal. Three guesses what is in them... Yes, lots of nitrogen (in blood and fish meal) and phosphate (in bone meal). Unfortunately, not much potash and it requires mixing the right quantities together. Of course, seaweed and wood ash are main potash sources, so all I have to do is go to the beach and start a barbecue...

Anyway, part of this weekend will be spent sourcing fertilizer, so watch out much-mulched plot!