Archive for July, 2010

Boot fairs: the thrifty gardener’s best friend

Went to local boot fair this morning and picked up six metal hanging baskets for £2.50! These will be fab for the rest of my Tumbling Tom tomato plants.

Weather is hot and muggy at the moment – if you lift the lid of our compost bin and poke your head inside, it must be all of 40 deg. C in there. At least. I have been doing a bit of research on compost, and it’s surprising the kind of things that will compost down quite happily – old wool and cotton clothes, human and cat hair, urine, cardboard egg boxes/loo roll cores… Actually, the latter are essential to provide a bit of “brown waste” to balance out the “green waste”, which is all your vegetable peelings, grass clippings etc. Having both types of waste ensures that your compost rots down consistently and ends up with a lovely crumbly texture and beautiful smell, rather than being all slimy. It might seem strange to wax lyrical about home made compost as I am here, but it really is fantastic stuff. As long as you’ve got a patch of soil to put your compost bin on, and ideally another patch of soil next to it, then it really is a worthwhile investment. Why is it good to have a bit of space next to your compost bin? Because it’s a great place for burying the nearly-useable-but-not-quite-there compost that you find in your bin when you “turn” your compost every few weeks in the summer. Stick some old carpet on top, leave for a fortnight and let the worms finish the job.

Mistyhorizon over at Hub Pages recommends using spent compost – mixed with a bit of sand – to grow carrots. That’s something I will definitely be trying next year. I’ve had a singular lack of success with container carrots so far, but I don’t think there’s anything to lose by giving it one more go – particularly as I won’t be shelling out any cash!

From colanders to containers

I’m quite proud of my ingenuity on this one. Basically, I’m very mean when it comes to spending actual money on my garden. So rather than shell out £££ on some hanging baskets to plant my Tumbling Tom cherry tomato plants, I bought a couple of old colanders at a local church jumble sale. This one is suspended from a metal bracket via the handle from a bucket, and held in place with a wire coat hanger. It doesn’t exactly look elegant, but at least it’s nice and secure. The white bits you can see in the photo are a piece of old net curtain, which has been used to line the colander and prevent the compost from coming out through the holes. Today I could just see some tiny flower buds on my Tumbling Tom plants. I hope the fruit will be worth eating, because the seeds were very expensive – nearly £3.00 for the packet!