Kitchen Garden Forum

Hello all, what a difference a week makes with the weather! our first real taste of Winter arrived this week for many of us but at least it was calmer than last week, regards Steve.

http://www.myallotments.com

Good morning Steve, so glad i was wrong about the box having box blight, it's at times like this that you don't mind being wrong.
Daniel would have loved it here wednesday with the snow, he could have given you a good pelting with snowballs.
Glad to see you are making good progress, and hope you are enjoying your writing for the gardening magazines.

Planting time will be hear before we know it.

Hello Steve,

Box seems a very keen rooter...it soon puts out roots from any stems that get covered...so I suspect a build up of of leaves and soil on the path during the gardens neglected period has been rooted into by the box.

We capitalise on this habit to propagate new box bushes. Set one deep and it will root from the stem...the next year dig it up and tear it apart into many new bushes. Plant these deep and hey presto...this is based on our findings in an area that we use as a general nursery bed that has dark ashy gritty soil that was once home to a large pile of spent boiler ash from the old greenhouse boiler.

We always set any newly planted box hedging Deep..a trick passed on to us from an old hand....and it seems to work for us.

In 1997 we set out a new length of hedging having built up new stocks..but not quite enough...so again at planting several plants were torn down into 3 or 4

With apologies to JB

Clive.

Having had a further read about your Sweet Peas...we too have fun with the Mickeys....and aside from keeping mouse traps about, baited with apple or potato or whatever comes to hand at the time, we place the seed pots in a platic tray and suspend the tray by strings from some of our more sturdy roof brackets..this usually has the little critters beat...except we are running out of good sturdy roof beams ...but that is another story and hopefully will soon be addressed

Clive.

Hello Old Herbaceous, yes I think Daniel would have loved the snow that you had not sure about me though. I'm glad that you did not have any problems like you did last week in reading the update, thanks Steve.

Hello Clive and thankyou very much for the information on the Box hedging, I'm glad that it is not blight as it would have been a shame to not have the traditional form of hedging around the vegetable beds, regards Steve.