My Tiny Plot

One of my favourite Lettuces to grow is Tom Thumb. It’s a butterhead type with nice tight, bright green leaves and it tastes lovely with a good mustardy dressing. One of the reasons I like it so much, apart from the taste, is that it looks so neat in the garden!

Some of the Lettuces I grow are, to be honest, a bit floppy like Marvel of the Four Seasons, and a new one I tried this year, Drunken Woman (I don’t know why it’s called that either). And then your common or garden varieties like Oakleaf can get very big very quickly and take over the garden.

With Tom Thumb, they stay quite small (so you need to grow a lot of them) but they also stay where you planted them, in a neat row. I like that. At this time of year it’s my little piece of sanity in a garden gone mad.

I’ve been harvesting my New Potatoes for a few weeks now - later than last year I’m sure. But they still taste amazing! I didn’t get to grow my saved seed Potatoes that were given to me last year. Why? Because mice ate them! Can you believe it?

It makes me laugh that I wrote this post “How to Save Seed Potatoes” last September and then failed to actually save any. I saved the Potatoes over the winter in a sealed tin box, like a good little girl. Then in February I took them out to chit them in the potting shed. Little did I know that the mice were lying in wait thinking, ‘ooh she’s putting out some juicy snacks for us, let’s wait till she’s gone and eat the lot!’.

By the next day there was not a Potato in sight, nor a mouse. So much for purple Potatoes huh? Next year the cat lives in the potting shed while I chit my Potatoes. He doesn’t know it yet but I’m sure he’ll like it.

I took this photo today of a corner of my garden that I’m particularly proud of. Every single patch of earth is used up (which doesn’t happen very often as you harvest and replace) - the layering effect really works, I think.

In the foreground on the left are my Oakleaf Lettuce, then a row of outdoor Tomatoes, then the beautiful over-wintering Sweet Williams, followed by a thick layer of Peas held up with peasticks. And in the background you can see my Borlotti Bean just winding their way up the beanpoles.

As the Sweet Williams go over and the Lettuces are harvested that will give the Tomatoes more room as they get bigger. It’s almost like I planned it :)

After a wonky start due to some cheeky little mice my Peas are doing very well. I have virtually a whole row of them that are about an inch and half tall. That’s means only one thing, it’s time to deploy the Peasticks that I half-inched borrowed from a local estate.

My Peasticks lead a solitary life. Housed for most of the year in my potting shed, they are suddenly called up for duty in mid Spring and dispatched accordingly.

I don’t just use them for Peas you know - oh no. They have a plethora of uses, from holding up floppy Cornflowers, to doubling as Mangetout holders, and they have even been known to come to the rescue of a Sunflower or two. Yes, they’re very useful and in my opinion you can never have too many of them.

There will always be casualties. Like today for instance. I thrust one of them into the soil only to find I’d hit a stone and the whole thing broke in half - unfixable, it was.

This is not the only way to support Peas but I do love the rustic look that they give. And they’re pretty darn good at their job too.

What have you got planned for supporting your Peas? Any novel ideas?

Here is my Masterplan for 2010. I didn’t do one in 2009 so I thought I’d better do one this year.

There are a few things to note. Firstly, my tiny plot is roughly 13.5 metres long by 8 metres wide. Just to give you an idea of scale. I don’t really do crop rotation in the ‘correct’ sense. I try to keep the Brassicas in the same group each year and I also try to put the Carrots, Parsnips, Onions and Shallots together. But other than that I can’t really ‘do’ rotation because not all of my four beds have the luxury of full sun.

If My Tiny Plot was in the openess of a lovely allotment then I probably could but we’re positively hemmed in here. I have an 8-foot wall on the left side and a hedge of a similar height on the other. All of this produces a predictably sunny side and a depressingly shaded area.

Of course I ‘could’ try to rotate everything but when the Tomatoes and Sweetcorn ended up on the shady side then we wouldn’t be eatin’ no Sweetcorn that year, if you catch my drift. So with the delicate sun lovers (Toms, Sweetcorn, Melon, Squash etc) I rotate them between the two beds on the left.

My south-facing wall on the left is A-M-A-Z-I-N-G. It’s the only reason I’m able to grow Peaches and Grapes. My coldframe is a new addition this year (it was finished as the end of the season last year) so I’m really only getting to make full use of it now. I’ll be using it to bring up seedlings until my Melon plant gets too big and out grows everything else.

I absolutely love Lettuce and I always grow too much. I like to make huge salads full of great mixtures of interesting leaves and I also like to give it away to my friends. So the two measly patches of Lettuce that I’ve indicated on the plan are clearly a lie. What will actually happen is that I will grow more than that but I will shove it in wherever there is space. I’ll have Lettuce seedlings growing in the coldframe and when I harvest one from the main plot, or create space somewhere else I will plant a new Lettuce plant.

The other thing to point out is that all the flowers in the garden are for cutting. They don’t hang around very long and so I like to go for varieties that will self renew, like Cornflower and Calendula and Sweetpeas (they will be in with the Runner Beans). But I also have Tulips and Echinacea that will come up every year too.

As you’ll notice I’ve put far too much effort into what really only needs to be a scribbled plan. What can I say - I’m in love with my garden, and when you love someone…

Click here for a super-duper, okay slightly bigger, version.

I’ve cleared out my seed box, cleaned it out and put everything back sorted into which month they need to be sown in. It feels good to be this organised at the beginning of the seed sowing season.

It’s pretty difficult to put seeds into the months they are sown in because most seeds have a period of a few months where they ‘can’ be sown. If you sow them at the beginning of that period then you’ll get an early crop, if you sow them at the end then you’ll get a late crop. What I decided to do is to put the seeds in the month that they can be sown in first. Then if I want to sow them successionally I will move them to the month after once I have sown them.

This works fine for most things except seeds that need to be sown more often than every month - example Lettuce, Radish and other quick maturing crops. These I put into a separate compartment for seeds that are sown virtually all summer at fortnightly intervals. And I just dip in and out of that one.

It would be brilliant if growing vegetables were more simple than this, but unfortunately it’s not. What to sow when was the one thing that I struggled with for probably the first two or three years of growing. And still the only way I can feel truly in control is to constantly check sowing times and reorganise my seeds yet again!

It’s time to start thinking about buying some seed. I spend weeks researching which vegetables and which varieties I will grow. Most of my decisions are made based on what I’m into eating at the moment. But I always leave room to try out new vegetables that I’ve never grown before.

Because my tiny plot is, well, so tiny. There are tons of fruit and vegetables that I’ve never grown before. Some because I just don’t like to eat them - Celery, Celeriac, Chicory - not really sure why they all begin with C…hmmm.

And some because I’ve not had the right equipment or the space. So with that in mind I’m homing in on some new veg that I’d like to have a go at.

• Seakale (Angers) - ever since I saw it featured on The Victorian Kitchen I’ve always been fascinated by what it would actually taste like.
• Melon (Sivan) - because now I have a huge coldframe I finally have the space to grow one!
• Borlotti Bean (Supremo) - I’ve never grown beans for drying and the red pods will look so good in my garden.
• Tayberry (Buckingham Thornless) - When I saw a Tayberry trained into a fan at Heligan a couple of years ago I’ve always wanted one. Now I just need to find a bit of wall to train it on.

That’s it for now. I’m sure I will think of more before the seed order goes in. I always do.

So I’m all like…

In my opinion there’s nothing better than snuggling up with a seed catalogue when it’s snowing outside! Okay there is one thing better, snuggling up with a seed catalogue and a glass of wine. But it’s only 2pm after all! What’s your favourite thing to do when the ground is too frozen to dig? And… what’s your favourite seed catalogue? Mine is Marshalls - they do do a nice layout.

Yep it’s that time of year again - time to get your Garlic in. Personally, I love the fact that Garlic goes in the ground this early. It’s a great way to get you focusing on next year’s season even while this one hasn’t quite finished.

Sowing Garlic now means that you have to really think about what vegetables are going to go where in next year’s garden. You have to make room and be confident that that little patch of land can stay undisturbed until late Spring next year (when you harvest your Garlic) - it’s a big commitment! Of course if you’re undecided and need the extra thinking time you could always sow it in pots.

This year I’ve decided to try my hand at Elephant Garlic. I’ve seen the cloves on sale many times but never bought any. So when I saw some at the Malvern Show last week I took the plunge. They really are big! Hence you have to give them more room than normal Garlic. Plant them 4 inches deep and 6 inches apart (2 inches deep and 4 inches apart for normal Garlic).

Elephant Garlic is technically a wild Leek which may account for its milder flavour. As with all Garlic its best planted in Autumn as it prefers a stretch of cold weather. And ideally the ph of your soil will be around the 6 mark. Garlic doesn’t like acidic soils. But for me the best thing about Garlic is that the slugs won’t touch it! Of course there is a possibility that the evil white rot might appear again but I’m taking my chances.

I took this photo today. The Cabbages on the left are coming up for ready for harvest. The ones on the right were planted a little later.

This photo I took when the Cabbage seedlings were being planted back at the beginning of April. You can just about see the Peas pushing through the soil on the left hand side too. What a difference.