Earthing up spuds in the glasshouse

let there be spuds

Just a quick post to let you know that I have earthed up my spuds in pots. I'm experimenting with "Rocket" and "Swift" that are renowned for giving a fast crop (in two months!) under cover. Mine were sown in February (in pots of cow manure and put in the glasshouse under fleece) and despite my standing over them they showed no sign of life up to two weeks ago when shoots suddenly appeared. These have amazed me since at their speed of growth, I know they are called Rocket and Swift but I'm still amazed!! Will I be eating them by the end of April though? Watch this space....God I'm getting hungry now just thinking about it..

Overwintered sweet peas V spring sown ones

Ah sweet peas and roses...summer bottled

For a long time I have been reading how Autumn sown overwintered sweet peas in a cold frame are THE WAY to grow sweet peas, bringing you stronger multi-branched plants that bloom earlier and produce huge crops of flowers......The only problem is that by October I'm not inclined to sow anything. I am long retired from sowing as far as I'm concerned. I finish sowing around June and concentrate all my efforts on EATING from there on out. It's the whole point surely of growing all that veg in the first place?! And as much as I love sweet peas I could never summon up the motivation to want to look after them through the winter. So for years it never happened. Until finally last year I read Monty Don giving advise on sweet peas and happened to see the man in the UK with the national sweet pea collection on the A to Z of TV gardening and there were both espousing the merits of an Autumn sown plant. I gave up the fight, dragged myself out one fine day in October and grumbling to myself begrudgingly set one root trainers worth of seeds.

February transplanting; un-eaten on the right, eaten on the left

After that not much happened. I was disappointed to see that germination was quite erratic and more disappointed when I missed a slug getting in who managed to graze several seedlings to the ground.That's the problem with winter weather. A lot can happen outside while you are inside wrapped up on the couch watching The Tunnel, eating for Ireland and piling the fire high. The survivors apparently shocked into hibernation by the death of their brothers looked a bit forlorn and miserable while I stared into the cold frame pulling my eyebrows together and fretted about them. By Christmas I gave up fretting, forgot all about sweet peas and concentrated on seed catalogues and new types of tomatoes. They were still alive but not looking like they would amount to much.I was ready to write them off as a failed experiment and send a tweet to Monty to ask him what I was missing.

Sweet peas looking good this April

Around February much to my surprise I realised they were starting to grow, with roots beginning to poke out the bottom of the root trainers. I re-potted them all and once I opened the root trainers I was surprised again to find that almost all of them had in fact germinated and those I thought had failed or had been grazed by slugs were sending up second growth, so I ended up transplanting far more than I had expected to. Over the last two months they have steadily grown taller and bushed out, while in the last few weeks they have been fully hardened off outside. It was really only last week when I put the spring sown sweet pea seedlings beside them that I could see the value of the overwintering plants. They are three times the size, climbing well and looking extremely promising.

Spring sown sweet peas

The final test will be the flower crop outdoors this summer of course. Tomorrow we have a willow weaving workshop planned in Kilmallock for the FETAC 5's where we will all make and bring home willow garden obelisks for climbing plants like our sweet peas. Now all that's left to do is to prepare the ground with horse manure, compost and chicken pellets!

The secret life of slugs

Slug Cartography; A slug maps out Spain and Portugal in the veg garden..is he looking to fly Ryanair?

I was going to title this "the sex life of slugs" but as ever, the thought of my mother somehow one day learning to use the Internet and actually reading my blog(longest odds in the world by a country mile) managed to discourage me. Last week I held the funniest class I have ever had as I tried to explain to my Science laden FETAC 5's, (without getting embarrassed myself which is harder than you might think!), how slugs mate. As you might imagine as we got into it (forgive the pun)chronic giggling broke out, followed by accidental (and not so accidental) innuendo, uproar followed, (it really went to shit at this point, even I was having trouble keeping a straight face)and cold showers were threatened until finally I got some type of order on the chaos, finished the lesson and survived the day. O Lord. I have a new found respect for teachers explaining the "facts of life" as we once quaintly called them to 11 year old's.These were adults! And worst of all it was all about the un-sexiest creature on the planet-the slug! Thank God I'm not explaining human reproduction to them.

For those of you who may not know it every slug (and snail)carry the bits for both male and female inside them, making them hermaphrodites. When they meet they push out their bits and swap sperm leading to both parties laying their own clutch of eggs after parting ways.This might begin to explain to you why slugs seem to be everywhere, as literally hundreds of eggs are produced by each slug each year. I'm not going near explaining Apophallation, thank God I didn't get into it in class , I'd have to be stretchered out! Needless to say if you are curious click on this link here to take you to the Wikipedia page that explains it all (its under the Reproduction heading). If you are male you might be better off not reading it at all-you have been warned!

Gosh that was really easy; there is a lot to be said for delivering this kind of information over the Internet from the comfort of the couch, no danger of blushing or getting embarrassed and no smart ass innuendo either!

Great Craic with Helen Dillon

Helen Dillon

My jaws are yet aching today after a great night with a unique stand up comedian.Hats off to The Limerick Garden Plants group who had Helen Dillon down from the big smoke to talk to the Gardeners of Limerick last night at the South Court Hotel. Helen is really funny -a bit of a deadly wit actually! She does a great line in telling it like it is so while many of her slides showed beautiful photos of her garden in proficient bloom there was also a gallery of failures. She explained the Irish expression of "it died on me" really translates into "I killed it" and honestly described how she has evolved from posh muted colour coordinated borders to "box of smarties" with loads of different colours in the borders.

She is fiercely direct and honest and feisty as hell! She has great tales of Christopher Lloyd and other famous gardeners she hob-nobbed with and is brilliantly self-depreciating in her re-telling of how people would come up to her after her Irish television career had finished to check it was really her because, as she puts it "everyone thought I was dead"!

A great Lady of Irish Gardening (even if we had to originally steal her from Scotland).Even I , a person prone to growing plants with a view to eating them can appreciate, and be inspired by such a passionate and energetic ornamental gardener (though to her credit she grows some veg in carefully tucked away raised beds hidden behind a sunny border in her garden). If you want the Dillon experience read any of her books, she also writes for Which Magazine and writes in the monthly Catholic "Messenger" (which got her a lot of new fans in the nuns!) and you can visit her beautiful garden in Dublin. Highly, highly recommended!

The Dillon Garden in Dublin

Slow, slower, slowest......

Sorry everyone, since the storm last month the internet service has been reliably awful. I can't post anything successfully, but, finally! the man over the phone opened a small window for me today with a temporary fix (that is coming and going all morning )and better yet a man with a tool box is coming out next Thursday, so hopefully I will be back blogging with a vengeance on Friday! In the meantime keep sowing and growing, and mind yer ankles!

Sowing onions from seed

There can never be enough onions , I wish I had a field!

The sun is shining (between pelting showers) but regardless of the weather today is the day for sowing onions from seed.I finally got my module trays(7cellx12cell) from Garden World at 9am sharp this morning.This year I am trying out module trays on the advise of Klaus Laitenberger who swears by sowing three onion seeds per module and transplanting all three to the next stage before separating them out in the outside bed.Usually I use an open tray and broadcast the seeds, but these Letrim Germans might be on to something, and I'll never know unless I try.

I'm experimenting with compost this year too. I'm trying out a new worm castings compost called Celtic Gold which I got in Raheen Co-op last week.Supposedly the addition of 10% worm castings boosts plant growth by 100%, on the downside the remaining 90% is peat based. Great stuff peat, but not sustainable unfortunately. And while I'm not exactly wearing hemp clothes and living off grid  you can't escape the pressures on our resources.

Seamus has resurrected the heavy duty propagator and it's all set up in the Utility, with only a few cat paw prints so far-Ginger has yet to break in properly to sleep on it as he did last year, knocking pots, flattening seedlings, (well hes a bit large and clumsy)and causing general chaos. This year the plan is to put a cloche over it to make it harder for him to find a way in. But you know cats, they would sit on your head to get a bit of heat, so I'll be dubiously optimistic until I see otherwise. Expect me to post photos of him caught rotten, trying to pretend he is invisible!

Hurricane season

Will I ever get home?

Well lads, what a bloody day.

The centre in Kilmallock was evacuated at 1.30pm when the storm had knocked out the power and heating and people were starting to panic about getting home.Birdie was stranded ( "my fella" as she calls her long suffering husband, was stuck in traffic in Mallow)so I offered to take her home.
Easier said than done!

from Old Pallas to Pallasgreen

We set off at the height of the hurricane, luckily for me Birdie talked non stop distracting me from the wild rocking of the van and absolute howling of the wind outside.The centre of town was closed, a man in a high vis jacket was busy directing cars elsewhere, (afterwards I found out slates and bricks had been flying across the road) so we took an alternate route round the back of the town.It all looked good until the truck ahead of us suddenly pulled in and I flew past him only to find a huge tree blocking the whole road.Birdie did the swearing for me, even berating the council for lack of signs! But a few roads later it became obvious the council couldn't keep up with the rate of falling trees. Every road out of town was blocked and all I could do was drop off Birdie and take myself in resignation to the Deerbert Hotel for a cup of coffee and commiseration with the other people similarly stranded in the foyer of the hotel.

It was like the start of a bad horror film. Strangers stranded in a hotel, the power out, the staff trying to look after everyone as best they could, all eyes on the door for fresh arrivals and updates on yet more roads closed and yet more trees down. I looked out at one stage, watching the trees across the road (luckily there are no trees near the hotel) buckle and flail in the wind, and thought, I'm stuck here for the night!! But two coffees and one old lady later the news arrived; the town had reopened, the winds had dropped, and there might be a way home after all. Woo hoo!

Two hours later I finally got home!

Kilmallock to Bruff Road

It should have taken me 25 minutes, but between trees down, council crews with chainsaws, diversions, power lines flailing like ribbons, floods and deadly back-roads it was the longest commute of my life. I have to take my hat off to everyone on the council crews and the local farmers with machinery and chainsaws who worked flat out to clear the roads. The nicest man I met was near home, a cheerful farmer in a tractor clearing debris off a back road " don't go down there" he told me, "there are five trees down in the next mile alone!". I thanked him profusely and told him to mind himself as we talked casually underneath a huge tree leaning dramatically at a 45 degree angle across the road. He had just picked up his chainsaw to start cutting it down. "Tis a pity about this tree" he said, "I thought it would escape, it stood strong all morning, and that other bloody tree( he tilted his head to the other side of the road) I hoped would fall is still standing!"

The beautiful weeping willow in my neighbors garden that has been the backdrop to so many springs and summers here was the last tree I met across the road as I finally saw home. I cant tell you how sad it made me to see it lying prostrate on the road, it was so beautiful, and I had loved seeing it fill with new leaves each Spring. Not any more. No doubt in the middle of all this chaos, aside from the practicality of clearing roads, people are saddened to lose some much loved trees.

This tree on the Dromkeen back-road took the ditch with it!

I got home, parked up and congratulated myself on still being in one piece. Then I walked around the corner. to..absolute carnage; portable greenhouse shredded, BBQ stripped, roof ripped from the dog house, outdoor furniture stripped, plastic sun lounger half way down the garden in several nonredeemable pieces, cowl from the roof deposited in the hedge but worst of all part of a metal fence(where the hell did that come from?) resting casually against the glasshouse having obliterated half the glass and beheaded several plants on its journey over the hedge. I spent the next two hours with Seamus picking up glass and moving precious plants indoors getting colder and hungrier as hail beat down on us.But good news! the electricity is still on, there is a blazing fire in the stove and I am typing this with Ginger lying across me on one side and Seamus on the other, one purring the other snoring! so for now at least the worst is over.

I hope all of you are OK tonight and in one piece after a unforgettable crazy day . Eliza I hope your beautiful old trees are all still standing.

The end of the lovely weeping willow