Kitchen Garden Forum

A couple of hours pottering in the garden;a homemade Chicken Tikka Masalafor tea and a beer or two to wash it down.A good day.What' s not to like!!

Ooh home made curry, and a beer, just perfick!!

Well I used magazines - a single sheet folded in half vertically is the perfect size. If it was say the telegraph it would work too but I think you would get several pots out of one page. On the subject of fish and chips, I paid £8.50 the other night which included a small bottle of pop. Showing your age if you know what pop is!!

Is Corona still a brand? Sales might have gone down.

Does anyone remember Cresta pop? It had a polar bear in sunglasses for the adverts, as I recall.

I love my paper pot maker; it's nearly time to get going with them again. I may use them for my salad seedlings as they break down in the soil so well. I gave up using peat pots as they never broke down and plant roots couldn't penetrate them.

Primrose and Geoff, re your daphne cuttings: there is a mention of the difficulty of taking daphne cuttings in the current RHS magazine and somebody writes that growing the vigorous spurge laurel Daphne laureola and then grafting other daphne pruning onto to is successful. Perhaps you could try that?

Many thanks for this Monika. I don,t get the magazine but know a couple of people who do so will ask one of them to save the article for me. I,ve never tried grafting before. It had never occurred to me that might be an answer and I,m curious about what the properties are in this species which make it so difficult to reproduce when.with some other shrubs you can almost just cut off a twig, stick it in the soil and have a good chance it could develop roots.

I,ve tried this with Daphne in various compositions of compost, as well as directly into the soil with very little success.

Primrose, there is an actual article about daphne in the Magazine, but the idea about grafting is in a letter in the same issue.

I’ve an indoor small three tray proper gator on the go ,a week ago I planted 50 mange tout in them ,before I had this episode of falling they had just started showing most were around 25mm high or an inch in old money last night when I got home from hospital they were roughly 80 mm today they have grown over an inch I won’t be able to plant them out as it’s far to early so I’m thinking of putting them round the perimeter of the poly tunnel were I usually throw a few cobra seeds

First frog spawn in the pond, narcissus Tete-a-tete and Ice Baby flowering, song thrush and blackbird singing - could almost be spring!
I took the large black plastic sheet off the vegetable beds, hoed the lovely crumbly soil and marked out the beds. Looking forward to the planting and sowing now.

Little gem seedlings have just poked their heads through (in pots in the GH)

Gosh it's all starting to happen. No frogspawn here yet. Think the early morning heron got most of our frogs last spring!
Did get first cut of the lawn though.

I had the old Hayter Harrier 41 out today, mowed the roadside frontage in front of the daffodils and first cut of the front lawn, nicely striped now and the gateway grass edges ritted back. Just thought, I think of the 41 cm Harrier to be relatively new, except it must be 30+

Pulled big Wolf 3 tine cultivator through a strip of dug ground and pushed in a double row of Bunyards exhibition, the ground went down lovely after the recent frosts.

Washing dried well on the line today.

...and tonight a huge bright moon was coming up as I came back from my Co-op shopping expedition.

C.

Such gorgeous weather! I weeded my raised beds and have started clearing a couple of them. There's still loads of radicchio in them and the last of my leeks, as well as garlic and shallots that are coming on well. Salads are bursting forth in the greenhouse and my mange tout that I sowed a couple of pots of earlier in the week are already germinating in the greenhouse.
As usual, I have far too many tomato and pepper plants, but better that way in case I get any failures or disasters. I've also done my second sowing of sweet peas (1st ones in late autumn) to give me a longer season of their lovely flowers.
Hubby has been working really hard with clearing some ground for our fruit trees to go in. We've harboured them in pots for a few years (we knew we would be moving and didn't want to plant them for someone else!) and I picked up a few sturdy new ones in Aldi a week or so ago. I can't wait to get the fruit trees in, the thought of my own little fruit orchard is so exciting! I just love spring!

Saturday is my do nothing day - well except tend to the over wintering stuff in the greenhouse, weed the back garden, tackle the algae & moss, cut back the ivy etc. etc. And some guy came into the close with a big purple Porsche visiting the lads over the road which distracted the under gardener big time! Don't read into this we live posh, half the close were out looking at the beast but I'm not keen on purple for 1 & 2 it was noise pollution big time - maybe add 3 as it scared the life out of the critters & the barking & cats running around in a frenzy was not appreciated!