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Limping out the other side

March 4, 2010 by crocuskitchengarden

Broad beans always look ropey after a long winter

In celebratory mood this week as the sun is out at last! The ice-covered puddles have melted and are drying up, the soil is becoming workable, and I can smell spring in the air.

First for the post-winter casualty-assessment inspection were my four rows of broad beans, which have been sheltering under their polythene cloches all winter. Poor things – they’ve soldiered bravely through but it’s been a hard campaign. There have been losses, and more than a few are walking wounded: broad beans always look a bit ropey when you uncover them again for the first time in spring, but this is a particularly hard-hit troop.

Actually I never expect a perfect turnout after winter, even under cover: polythene cloches can only do so much, after all. Though they’ll keep off the winds and the worst of the rain, and raise temperatures inside two or three degrees, in minus-10 that still means it’s minus 7 under there. To say nothing of the weight of the snow pressing them down almost flat to the ground at times, despite my regular efforts at scooping it all off again.

But these are the hardiest broad beans of the lot: ‘Aquadulce Claudia’, the tough-as-nails Foreign Legion commandoes of the broad bean world. They may have been beaten to the ground by the worst winter we’ve had in 30 years – as we will no doubt still be telling our bored grandchildren for decades to come – but it takes more than that to keep a good bean down.

Even the most battered broad bean leaps back to life once spring arrives

The great thing about broad beans is that they re-sprout from the base: so even when you’ve got a plant whose leaves are chewed, whose stem has blackened with rot, and which is lying prone and pathetic on the ground, don’t root it up as long as it has some green on it somewhere. Chances are it will start producing new leaves, just like many of mine have done, and they’ll grow up to make fine healthy broad bean plants as if all this had never happened.

And as for those we’ve lost along the way: well, there really isn’t any hope when all that remains of your broad bean plant is a string of gooey brown slime, so I spent this morning clearing the casualties away so I could see where the gaps in the line were. 

Then I just brought in some reinforcements: new seeds plug the gaps nicely, and since they’ll be flowering and fruiting a month or so later than their overwintered neighbours they’ll keep the crop coming nicely for longer than it otherwise would have done. Straight in the ground, six inches apart, and in a months’ time you won’t be able to tell the difference.

Posted in Allotments, sowing | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Tales of an impatient gardener

February 28, 2010 by crocuskitchengarden

It’s no good: I can’t resist.

This happens every year in February. There’s something about the turn of the month that makes your gardening brain go into “spring” mode. Whatever the weather outside – and let’s face it, we’ve had some pretty horrific weather this year – I just want to get growing.

If I were a sensible gardener, I would stand by my cast-iron resolution made last year when I sowed my seed too early (again). I would restrain my twitching fingers until at least mid-March, because I know that seed sown later will always catch up with the struggling weaklings you produce sowing when it’s too cold, too grey, too damp, and just too unspringlike for them to thrive.

Unfortunately I am not sensible: I am impulsive, impatient and imprudent. So the middle of this month found me in my greenhouse sowing an inordinate amount of seed, trying to kid myself that I was trying to get a head start on the season but actually knowing in my heart of hearts it was just to make myself feel better.

I’ve sown an early crop of most of the hardiest veg such as ‘Early Nantes’ carrots and my ‘Countess’ parsnips, as well as some ‘Tom Thumb’ lettuce, mixed salad leaves and celeriac, all of which you can rely on to germinate at low temperatures. More risky are the greenhouse crops, which I’ve started now as they need to hit the summer running as big, beefy plants in order to produce a good yield. The trouble is they also need high germination temperatures and are generally inclined to feel the cold.

At the moment, I’m peering anxiously at the pepper and chilli pots which are stubbornly refusing to show signs of germination despite nearly three weeks in my increasingly compost-sprinkled but relatively warm office. No sign of the aubergines either. I think I may have to re-sow if they don’t pop up some time soon. Next year if I succumb to temptation again I’ll give them a bit more heat.

The tomatoes aren’t doing too badly: after the first tentative hump of seedling stem showed last week they’ve been popping up every couple of days. And of course the hardy stalwarts that keep a gardener going at this time of year are romping away: that’s the first tray of salad mix you can see in the picture, and the Tom Thumbs are up and growing too. No sign of the carrots yet (they’re sown in loo roll inners) or the parsnips (ditto) but then they always take a few weeks and generally don’t cause any trouble.

For all that success has been more patchy than it ought to have been, it does your soul good to see seedlings poking their way into the world at this time of year. And that, to be honest, is what it’s all about.

Posted in Greenhouse growing, Propagation, sowing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Forcing the issue #2

February 24, 2010 by crocuskitchengarden

What a stop-start spring this has been.

A week of watery sunshine got me all Tigger-like and bouncy in anticipation that finally, at last, the winter was over. Weeds were weeded, beds were forked over, edges were trimmed.

Now it’s minus-goodness-knows-what at night again, blistering cold wind and sleeting rain all day. The allotment is under water, as is most of my garden, and I’m forced to retreat back into the greenhouse. My Tiggerish enthusiasm has flopped like a frost-stricken seedling and I’m now tending markedly towards an Eeyore frame of mind.

But it takes more than a little setback like that to keep a good gardener down. Before the weather closed in again, I managed to dig up half a dozen rooted runners of my super-reliable mid-season strawberries, ‘Cambridge Favourite’, for forcing.

Strictly speaking, this isn’t quite the right variety for producing the very earliest crops: if you’re serious about your strawberry forcing you should choose an early variety like ‘Honeoye’. I do also grow this variety on my plot but I’ve found it hasn’t settled in too well – it’s possible that the soil is a little too heavy for it, and I confess I did let them get a bit weed-suffocated last year so they weren’t exactly given the best chance. So ‘Cambridge Favourite’ it is.

Strawberries need a good spell of chilly weather to get them to initiate flowering and fruiting, so there’s no point in getting them in for forcing too early. I don’t think there’s much doubt that there’s been plenty of chilling this winter: so I’m pretty hopeful that these plants should be at just the right stage for potting up. They’re just runners which I deliberately didn’t cut off at the end of the season, instead allowing them to fall onto the ground and root where they fell: after that it’s simply a matter of digging them up carefully, snipping off the connecting runner and replanting them indoors.

I have a couple of these old tin baths kicking about – I bought them on a holiday in the Isle of Wight a few years ago after spotting them in a corner of an architectural salvage yard (my long-suffering family are quite used to me dragging back bits of old junk from holidays: it’s one of the few times I get the chance to mung about in salvage yards, which is a shame as it’s one of my all-time favourite leisure activities and a fantastic source of useful things for the garden).

The strawbs won’t be in there more than a few months so I’ve just used peat-free multi-purpose compost: I’ll start backing it up with a liquid feed as soon as they’re flowering. I reckon I’ll be eating my first fruits in around early May – a month sooner than from my crops outside. Now that’s something to look forward to.

Posted in Container veg growing, Fruit, Greenhouse growing, Propagation | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Safeguarding the future

February 20, 2010 by crocuskitchengarden

I’ve fulfilled a long-held ambition this year and put my name down for the Heritage Seed Library.

This remarkable band of mainly volunteers have taken it upon themselves, very nearly single-handedly, to save all the vegetable varieties they can.

The majority of the veg we grow are registered under the 1973 Seed (National List of Varieties) Act. It seemed like a good idea at the time, as it guaranteed that all seed were uniform, stable and distinct: so you can be sure that what you buy is what you get.

The trouble is that unknown thousands of varieties never made it on to the database, and at a stroke became illegal. You cannot sell or buy such seed: the only way you can get hold of it is if someone gives you some.

The 1973 Act might have ensured growers knew what they were getting, but it also ensured the vegetable gene pool was dramatically limited to those few dozen varieties of each type of vegetable which made it through. Not good news when you’re trying to breed new varieties for, say, pest and disease resistance, or to withstand the effects of climate change.

That’s why the HSL is so very important. They’ve scoured the country collecting seed from that funny-looking bean Auntie Doris has grown in her back yard for years, or the carrots Joe down the allotments has honed to perfection over decades. Once they’ve got the seed, they grow it on, either at the Garden Organic gardens at Ryton or through a growing network of Seed Guardians – doughty volunteers who grow these often very rare heirlooms on their allotments or in their gardens, save the seed and send it back so it can be redistributed to Garden Organic members across the land.

And that’s how such seed become more widely available. There are several success stories: the Victorian runner bean ‘Painted Lady’ was once endangered but is now mainstream; and the crimson-flowered broad bean was saved by the Seed Library and is now much in demand for its spectacular good looks (I’m growing some this year myself).

The HSL redistributes its seed through its catalogue: and that’s what dropped on my mat the other day. So yet again I find myself indulging in more seeds than, strictly speaking, I should be committing myself to, as I get to choose 6 varieties as part of my Garden Organic membership and it’s full of tempting stuff like acocha (described as “ideal for an amateur production of Day of the Triffids”) and African Horned Cucumber (perplexingly prickly but intriguing).

I passed on both – maybe another day when I’m feeling braver – but here are my heritage choices for 2010:

Carrot ‘London Market’

Climbing French bean ‘Blue Queen’

Asparagus kale

Melon ‘Green Nutmeg’

Pea ‘Clarke’s Beltony Blue’

Squash ‘Virginia Rooster’

All have great stories behind them and date back at least 80-100 years plus: I’ll let you know how I get on with them!

Posted in Other stuff, Unusual veg | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Pick of the month: February

February 16, 2010 by crocuskitchengarden

Parsnip “White Gem”

All right, all right. You can stop laughing now.

Newly washed and presented to my family for inspection, my 9-year-old’s reaction to this was, “Ooooh, Mummy, you’ve grown an Ood!”(1)

I have terrible soil for growing parsnips. Despite ladling on barrowloads of compost and well-rotted stable manure, despite lovingly constructing raised beds to create better drainage, it remains stubbornly full of stones, claggy and clayey: to grow long, straight, beautiful parsnips you need deep, sandy soil that’s light as a feather with not so much as a pea-sized pebble anywhere to be seen.

The reason I persist in producing candidates for wierdly-shaped vegetable contests is that I love the taste of home-grown parsnips. It’s one of the many veg that you never buy from the shops again once you’ve tasted your own. From the shops, they’re bland, uninteresting, rather mushy vegetables; those you grow yourself are crunchy, full of texture, and richly, even fragrantly full of flavour. In fact home-grown parsnips taste so damn… well… parsnipy that I find they sometimes need diluting: a family favourite is to mash them with carrots, or you can add them to your mashed potatoes too (plus salt, pepper and lashings of melted butter – food for the gods).

This is the crop I sowed last year (in loo roll inners for the first time which is why they’ve all developed quite well until they hit the actual soil). It’s a bit the worse for wear having spent a very harsh winter in the ground, but once peeled, perfectly fine on the plate.

The variety, though, is one I don’t think I’m going to try again: ‘White Gem’ is billed as growing in any soil (the reason I chose it), resistant to canker and fine flavoured. Well: it failed the first one, but I don’t really blame it for that as I don’t think the parsnip has been invented that could grow well in my soil. And the other two it passed with flying colours.

What they don’t mention, though, is that it has a socking great core to it which is chewy as old leather and twice as bitter: so while you think you’ve grown a huge parsnip you actually get about a quarter of that in edible parsnip flesh after you’ve cut out most of the middle of each root.

Of course I could just harvest them earlier, as woody cores develop with age: but the whole point of parsnips, to me, is that they sit there all winter waiting for you to dig them up. So while the search continues for a variety with a very small core, I’m trying ‘Countess’ this year – much praised for flavour and whiteness of flesh. I’ve just sown them, so when they come up I plan to follow the Medwyn Williams school: core out a borehole with a long pipe or crowbar, fill it with compost and topsoil, and sow (or plant) into that. Here’s to perfect parsnips, for the first time ever, this time next year.

(1): In the highly unlikely event that there are any of you out there who are not conversant with the ins and outs of the latest series of Doctor Who: there is a rather fetching picture of an Ood here. I think you’ll agree it bears more than a passing resemblance.

Posted in Pick of the month | Tagged , | 4 Comments »

Of sun and wind

February 12, 2010 by crocuskitchengarden

This is the other coveted prize I carried home from the wonderful Potato Day I went to in Hampshire the other week. It may not look very promising: it’s just a knobbly sort of lumpy thing a couple of inches across. But within that unglamorous exterior is the promise of wonderful things to come.

It is, of course, a Jerusalem artichoke, and I popped it into the ground just as it was a short time after I took this pic. You can plant them pretty much any time in early spring as they’re very nearly indestructible: a welcome change from the variously tender, fussy or just plain difficult unusual veg I generally try to grow.

Jerusalem artichokes have been here since about the 17th century, but aren’t widely grown – possibly because of an unfortunate side effect which has given them a very rude nickname (just try saying the name with an ‘f’ in front and you’ll see what I mean). When we had a go at cooking them up into a soup the first time we tried them, that wasn’t so much the problem as the screaming heeby-jeebies they gave us at night: I’ve never heard of nightmares as a side effect of Jerusalem artichokes and am willing to believe it may have been some entirely unrelated factor, so we’re giving them another go.

Even if they don’t agree with us, Jerusalem artichokes are beautiful in the garden. They’re related to sunflowers so make big plants, a good 2m tall, topped with those lovely cheerful yellow blooms. They’re so sturdy that they make good windbreaks (no pun intended) for more exposed veg patches too.

I’ve planted mine in what I optimistically call my ‘jungle garden’ – devoted to big, lush plants like bananas and the like (there’s an edible passion fruit in there too but I’m having a battle over it with the slugs at the moment, and the slugs are winning. But that’s another story).

Thanks to the truly connoisseur selection of everything at the Potato Day this is no common-or-garden Jerusalem artichoke, either (that would be the variety ‘Fuseau’, in case you like common-or-garden). Oh no: this is ’Boston Red’, which as you can see has a nice pinkish tinge to the tubers. I don’t know much more about it than that, although apparently it’s a fiddle to clean up as it grows so knobbly (though you wouldn’t know that from the tuber I’ve got).

You’ll notice I’ve only bothered buying one tuber: that’s because nothing, with the possible exception of bamboo, spreads faster than a Jerusalem artichoke. I should have at least half-a-dozen of these and possibly more by the autumn. I’ll be eating some of them – but the rest I’ll leave in the ground to bulk up to a nice big patch of sunflowers. I expect in a few years I’ll be cursing them bitterly as I beat them back from the rest of my garden, but until then I’ll just enjoy the show.

Posted in Unusual veg, sowing | Tagged , , | 3 Comments »

The eyes have it

February 7, 2010 by crocuskitchengarden

Get a room full of keen veg-growers together at this time of year, and sooner or later you can guarantee the talk will turn to whether or not you chit your potatoes.

It’s one of those pieces of wisdom that’s handed down unquestioned from gardener to gardener through the ages: when your seed potatoes arrive, you stand them up in a bright but frost-free place – not too warm though, and out of direct sunlight - with the end with the most ‘eyes’ (little tiny buds) uppermost. This, they say, encourages your spuds to form little sprouts, giving them a head start on the year.

When I first started growing veg I chitted my potatoes religiously every February: that’s what the books told me to do. Then one year I forgot. I couldn’t quite face chucking out a whole years’ worth of tubers, and if I waited another month to chit them it was going to be too late to plant them: so I thought what the hell, I’ll put them in anyway.

Result: bumper crop of spuds and you couldn’t have told the difference. A few years later I did the same thing again under trial conditions. Not quite to RHS standards, you understand, but I did scribble down what I did when and what happened next in a slightly muddy notebook.

I planted two lines of new potatoes next to each other, one chitted for a month from early February, the other planted straight into the ground from the packet. The chitted potatoes appeared above ground much sooner, and grew on more strongly to begin with: but by May the non-chitted spuds had caught up, and by harvest time you couldn’t have told the difference. What’s more, I weighed the crop I got: there was no more than a few ounces in it.

All this has firmly convinced me that you don’t actually need to chit potatoes.

Why, then, have I just painstakingly laid out my lovely selection of new, second-early and maincrop potatoes in eggboxes under the staging in my frost-free greenhouse?

Because if as most gardeners do you buy your seed potatoes a month or more before you’re intending to actually plant them, you’ll quickly discover that they start chitting themselves anyway. If you’re storing them in your shed in a netting bag while they’re doing this, the sprouts tangle themselves up with the netting, grow in all sorts of funny directions and by the time you get around to planting them are so pale and weedy that they snap off the moment you touch the seed potato (if you haven’t already snapped them all off getting them out of the bag, of course). Which is a big waste of potential potato plant if you ask me.

I lay my potatoes out anyway, just as you would if you were chitting them, so that they sprout more normally and are easier to handle come planting time. So in answer to your question: yes, I do chit my potatoes, but no, I don’t.

Posted in Allotments, Greenhouse growing, Storing, sowing | Tagged , , | 3 Comments »

Spud-ilicious!

February 2, 2010 by crocuskitchengarden

I don’t know if you’ve ever paused to wonder how many potato varieties there are. Take a guess. Maybe 30? Or 50 if you count all those wierd knobbly heritage varieties?

Well I counted 128 on offer at the 12th annual Hampshire Potato Day, held in Whitchurch, near Andover, at the weekend.

There were French gourmet varieties like ‘Anais’ (first early) and Scottish stalwarts like ‘Kerr’s Pink’ (late maincrop). There were blue ones – ‘Edzell Blue’ (second early) and ‘Salad Blue’ (early maincrop) among others - pink ones (maincrop ‘Pink Fir Apple’)  and red ones: ‘Highland Burgundy Red’ (second early) has a red heart when you cut it open, which is intriguing but slightly unnerving.

There were very modern ones: ‘Sarpo Mira’ and ‘Axona’, maincrops bred in 2002 and 2003, have a deserved reputation for blight resistance; and very, very old ones – late maincrop ‘Fortyfold’ has been grown since 1836. I was very taken with this one as its knobbly tubers are bright purple with white blotches, but since it was bred about five years before blight began ravaging its way through potato growing everywhere (amazing to think there was a time when potato blight didn’t exist) I suspect it would be a martyr to the disease.

And that’s not even counting a number of varieties on display which are so rare there aren’t enough of them to sell, and as well as potatoes…. look, why don’t I stop going on and just let the pictures tell the story.

'Black Bishop Choir Boys' - super-rare and gets my prize for best name of the day

Another old variety so rare it's not sold but handed down through the generations

'Salad Blue', a good-looking Victorian variety which stays blue on cooking

Four double rows of potato crates stretching right across the hall offered a bewildering choice

It wasn't all potatoes though - veg displays and heritage seed merchants were there too

... and peas and beans by the half-pint, as well as onion and shallot sets galore

My haul at the end of the day was 10 tubers each of the maincrops ‘Majestic’ (Scottish, 1911), ‘Mayan Gold’ (yellow-fleshed, 2003), ‘Pentland Squire’ (all-rounder, 1970) and ‘Vitellotte’, a French potato dating back to 1875 which I’m very intrigued by as it’s dark purple, right down to the foliage, and the taste is said to be astonishingly good. I also snaffled some Broad Bean ‘Crimson Flowered’, a Jerusalem artichoke (of which more later) and – my find of the day – a yacon crown, courtesy of the wonderful specialist nursery Edulis.

Potato Days were started by Garden Organic, who still hold the biggest of all of them at Ryton, near Coventry. That’s a bit of a hike from my neck of the woods, so I just went to the nearest one: there’s a list of all the potato days held across the whole country here. They carry on well into March so there’s still plenty of time to go to one near you.

Posted in Shows, Unusual veg | Tagged , , , , , , | 4 Comments »

Blackberry Way

January 30, 2010 by crocuskitchengarden

Don't be fooled by the twiggy look: blackberries grow into monster plants

A lovely big package arrived on my doorstep the other day, with those magical words “Live Plants” on the side. This never fails to make me go all quivery with anticipation.

Inside was a twig, with some roots on the bottom. Not something to get many people excited, unless they’re fanatical kitchen gardeners and they happen to know this is the bare-root blackberry they ordered a few weeks back, arrived at last.

I have a rather attractive slatted fence my carpenter hubby made, disguising my shed nicely and just begging to have things growing up it. Since this particular patch is a bit on the shady side, it’s ideal for berries, which are among the few fruit which don’t need full sunshine.

Buying bare-root is the only way to go with berry fruit: you get twice as much choice and you pay half the price. It never ceases to amaze me that a plant will quite happily put up with being dug up from its nice cosy home somewhere in, say, Devon, settle into a paper bag and spend a couple of days in the postal system travelling along motorways and doing all the other mysterious things parcels do before arriving on my doorstep, and then after all that spread its roots out in a hole in my back garden and grow like topsy as if nothing had happened.

But that’s how it is, and far be it for me to question it. The only thing that seems to kibosh all that is if you let the roots go for long without planting them back in the ground: three days at most. If you really can’t plant – and with the recent snow I was pretty lucky mine arrived while the ground was thawed – you can plant them temporarily in to a container of compost and plonk that outside while you’re waiting for the ice to melt.

Anyway, so the blackberry now snoozing quietly by my fence is the very nearly thornless ’Ouachita’, bred in Arkansas, growing in Surrey. More prickly, but with, I’m promised, pretty double pink flowers is the other blackberry I’ve put in alongside which is ‘Loch Maree’. The reason I haven’t yet seen the flowers, despite having owned the plant for a year, is that it’s been languishing in a container on my patio: a process which has convinced me that it’s not worth trying to grow blackberries in containers. They just don’t like it – though a smaller variety like ‘Loch Ness’ might have been happier.

So I’ve liberated the ‘Loch Maree’ and it’s now growing on Blackberry Way too – you can just see it at the back in the picture. Later additions I hope will be tayberries and maybe loganberries too. Now all I’ve got to do is get that old 1969 hit by The Move out of my head…

Posted in Fruit | Tagged , , | 2 Comments »

Forcing the issue

January 27, 2010 by crocuskitchengarden

Forced spuds should be sprouting by mid-February

Still confined to the greenhouse but too soon to sow seeds – what’s a girl to do? I need something to keep me going through the gardening doldrums, so I’ve decided to use a little force.

By which I mean using the relative warmth of the greenhouse to persuade things to get going a bit earlier than they usually would. Permanent crops like rhubarb and seakale are easy-peasy as they live in the soil all winter so warmth for them means spring has arrived – all they need is a bucket over the top and a packing of straw to persuade them to wake up early.

But with a bit more effort and a greenhouse kept just above freezing with a little electric fan-heater, you can also force strawberries – on my to-do list – and potatoes, for which you need no more than a small packet of tubers and a couple of compost sacks.  

This is a great trick for getting very early new potatoes - as long as you get them started by the end of January, you should be harvesting at the beginning of May, a full month before the ones you grow outside are ready.

The first thing to consider is the variety. A super-fast early is usually what’s recommended – ‘Swift’, for example, or ‘Rocket’. But though I’ll admit I’ve never tried growing them myself, I’ve heard they’ve bred out some of the taste in the race for quick maturity.

Though I’d probably get faster results with these types, I want to try a little experiment by choosing ‘International Kidney’, which on paper at least is an early maincrop variety. You’ll probably understand the method in my madness when I tell you that it’s also known as the ‘Jersey Royal’. The flavour should be second to none – yet they should behave just like new potatoes when I harvest them early.

So here’s how you do it:

Place the tubers upright, two to a sack, resting on the surface of the compost

1. If you’re using compost sacks, turn them inside out – this means the black side is facing outwards which absorbs sunshine and keeps it warmer for longer. If you don’t like the allotment aesthetic and can’t hide them away out of sight, you can use the undeniably more attractive purpose-made potato barrel planters or potato sacks.

2. Put your sacks or barrels in place before you fill them – they’ll be far too heavy to move once they’re up and running. Make sure wherever it is that it’s completely frost-free as potato plants are tender. I’ve got mine in a corner of my frost-free greenhouse, but a conservatory would do just as well (as long as you have a very tolerant other half who really, really likes new potatoes). The warmer they are, the quicker they’ll grow.

3. Roll down the top of the compost sack to reduce the height by about two-thirds, and snip some holes in the bottom with scissors to allow drainage. Then fill to about 15cm with multi-purpose compost mixed about 2:1 with a soil-based compost – I used John Innes no. 2.

4. Place your tubers on top of the compost: two per compost sack is plenty, and you don’t have to bother with chitting them as you’re getting them under way so quickly anyway.

5. Now cover them with more of your compost mix so they’re buried by about another 10cm. Water in thoroughly, and keep them damp but not soggy all the time they’re growing.

That’s it! Told you it was easy. I’m looking forward to the first shoots appearing in about three weeks’ time. Once they’ve poked above the surface, the idea is that every time they reach 10cm tall, you roll up the sides of the compost sack a little more and fill to just under the top leaves with more compost. When you get to the top, leave them to flower and then harvest. Now, how’s that for something to look forward to?

Posted in Container veg growing, Greenhouse growing, sowing | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment »

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