Fertiliser Experiment - Miracle-Gro Chicken Manure or Westland Jack's Magic?

 

We are experimenting! We're using two off the shelf fertilisers on our growing beds Tom, Dick and Harry, and are fascinated to see if there is a difference in performance. It's Miracle Gro's Chicken Manure versus Westland's Jack's Magic fertiliser....

The recommended amounts have been applied to the beds, splitting each in half, lengthways. Our rows will be crossways, so each crop will grow in equal amounts of both competitors.

You can barely see the dressing but it's there. So interested to see if there is a difference in yield.

Perfect Garden Day

What a beautiful day Sunday was, dawned warm and sunny and stayed that way all day long. For the first time this year I enjoyed the first cuppa of the day outside, among the feeding birds and a garden full of new season potential.

I just pottered in the home garden all day long (with a break to watch the Australian Grand Prix, obvs). We've decided to remove the rampant holly bushes this year, so I attacked the first blighter - which proved to be rather stronger than the aged fork that I have been using to work the compost! Ooops. Another one bites the dust.....

Next job was to empty out the pots then refill them with compost and fertiliser. Ruth will probably be all creative when it's time to plant them up.

We saved a lot of seeds from last year's tallest sunflower, so these were popped in today. Everybody loves a sunflower right? Wrong! My son Sam thinks they are the work of the devil! Hard lines Sam, we're growing them anyway.

The tomato bags were also refilled and fertilised, and moved into position. Our tomatoes last year were fabulous and gave us more fruit than we could manage. Same again in 2017 please.

My final little project was to turn the compost. Everyone else sees this as my crazy little scheme, but they will love it when we have a lovely source of homemade crumbly plant food. It's doing OK but is a little on the slimy side, so there will be much more brown stuff going in this week. Back in you go....

March Dawns

Beautiful day in South Lincolnshire and it coincided with a day off. Result! After heading to the farm shop for some high quality Lincolnshire sausages, popping to the storage to retrieve my orienteering kit for this weekend's big race, and popping to Sleaford for Friday tea for the family, I headed to the allotment. Plot 13D was warm and sunny.

We have experimented with carrots this year. We sowed seeds last summer and the seedlings have over-wintered outside, so they should - in theory - be capable of handling any weather from March onwards! We shall see. Here they are waiting to hop out of pops and into the ground.

And they're in! Good luck little plants. Eat you (hopefully) in a few months.

As with most allotmenteers we are getting the place into shape right now. We're splitting into three beds for crop rotation, which will be named Tom, Dick and Harry, a la Great Escape. Tom is at the far end here and will be home to our root veg this year. Dick is currently empty, and Harry houses our greenhouse Meccano set.

Today also saw two varieties of onion sets popping in, one red, one white. Yes it's cheap and easy to buy veg such as onions, but NOWHERE near as satisfying....

So here we are. Garlic, carrots, onions and strawberries in the ground. It's such an exciting time on the allotment!