The Veg Garden

Danielle rearrange/re-potted a few plants on Sunday. We had quite a few herbs all over the place so it was hard to find things. We now have, green basil, red basil and a basil plant we had bought from Asda’s ages ago all in one pot. As is our Sage and mint.

The most reliable way to repot we have found is as follows;

1. fill a bucket with water.
2. carefully lift your plant to be replanted. Be careful not to damage the roots of the plant, gently pull after forking the immediate area surrounding the plant. If there is resistance, continue to fork the surrounding area to work the plant free.
3. place the plant in the bucket of water to give it a good drink.
4. add some fertilizer to some compost and mix well.
5. create a hole in the soil
6. place the plant in the whole and firm the plant into position with your hands around the edge of the plant
7. water the plant well for the next week until the plant can reestablish.

We’ve still got more herbs to organise but this was a good start and all we could manage as our 1 year old son keeps us occupied .

Still a fairly successful Sunday in the garden, mowed the lawn, planted some Mizuna (similar to Rocket), cleared all our dead lettuce, consolidated a few herbs into less containers, cooked and ate some beetroot, preserved some beetroot and watered the gardened (this last one may not sound like a big feat but when haven’t connected an outside hose yet and have 70 containers and a bed to water with a watering can, it takes a while).

We baked some of our beetroot today. We harvested a bit more so in total we had 8 beetroot. The ends were topped and tailed to leave a little root and stem and the beetroot was then wrapped individually in silver foil. We preheated our oven to Gas Mark 2 and then baked the beetroot for an hour.

After taking the beetroot out, we allowed to cool for a short while and then the messy bit started. To be honest it wasn’t that bad, Danielle decided to where some gloves to avoid staining. The outer later simply peels away between thumb and forefinger.

Once the beetroot is cool enough, the ends can be cut off and the remainder can be sliced as thick as you like it. We cut ours quite thinly as that’s our preference but it’s really up to your own individual taste.

You then need a jar big enough to put the beetroot in for preserving if this is your preferred choice. We top the jar with malt vinegar and that’s it.

We Have Runner Beans

For those of you that have been following our Runner Bean saga, there is some good news. We have Runner Beans growing in a few of our containers now. This week the black fly that have been having been feasting on our runner bean plants have got a little worse.

Our last attempt at stopping the black fly was with non organic chemical bug spray. This helped for a little while but they keep coming back for more. We are now at the stage where we can’t really use the chemical spray so yesterday I thoroughly rinsed a trigger bottle, filled it with water and a about a teaspoon of washing up liquid.

This is a slightly different approach to our initial attempts to be rid of black fly. At the beginning we were trying washing up liquid in a watering can. This certainly slowed the black fly down a little but in the end we had to try chemicals to save our crop.

In hindsight I wish we had tried the trigger bottle washing up liquid and water method as it does seem to be a lot easier to get at the black fly. As well as being able to coat them in the mixture, the speed at which the water hits the black fly also disperses them from the plant and I would think that some are being killed by the initial water spray.

I intend on repeating the spraying every couple of days now to try and get a decent crop from the plants. Also it can be quite difficult to get at all of the black fly in one go, not to mention time consuming.

Here the latest runner bean plant photo, they’re getting quite big, it was getting a little dark when i took this photo.