Repurposing Old Polytunnel Plastic To Make A Sheet Mulch to Suppress Weeds An A Place For My Planting Nursery.

 I said on yesterday's post that the veg plot is very weedy and I have decided to put old  polytunnel plastic down to smother the weeds and grass and I will place my plants nursery on them in between the raised beds.

Part of the cover of my last polytunnel that was ripped and destroyed by the many Atlantic gales we get on our peninsula living in the countryside next to the sea.

Me being a tight wad organic vegetable gardener and smallholder.  Didn't rush to buy horticultural plastic.  I reused and repurposed my old polytunnel cover.

A newly plastic mulched area for my carboot perennials nursery.

Anyone else repurpose plastic in the veg plot?  I have bought Mypex landscape fabric in the past.  It's  porous but the weeds grow through it after a while.

Finding Big Vegetables And Weeding.

 My poor old beloved veg plot is looking rather unkempt, wind swept, bedraggled, weedy and unloved at the moment.

I have course offered it my humble apologies for being absent with out leave.

I have decided to literally grasp the nettles and manicure the plot back into some kind of horticultural order.

Being a organic gardener I know weeds and nettles especially are a sign of fertility and a lot of weeds are wild flowers in the wrong place.

Not forgetting all the recent sunshine and recent rain and being situated between fields next to the sea on a some times very windy peninsula.  Plus I do give my plot lashings and dollops of fym and poultry manure pellets:

A bucket of poultry manure is a lot easier to sprinkle a few hand fulls rather than  pike big piles of fym.  I have both and my Autumn jobs will be topping up the beds.  I might bag some fym up and see if I can sell or barter or some?🤔

So yesterday for a couple of hours.  Joan Jett on Spotify on my mobilise phone accompanied me weeding and harvesting some vegetables.  Oh what pleasant surprises I had:

Japanese onions 🌰 in my repurposed baths.  Full of home made compost, fym and top soil.  A friend saw them and said they could be show 🌰 🌰. 

Two beetroot for our tea.  Wonderful. 

A big red cabbage ready for pickling.  Tater hash here we come!

What a fantastic year for smashing weather, flowers and vegetables.

Here's Joan Jett singing Crimson and Clover;

I would love to see Joan play live.  

"When you coming to play West Cork Joan?"

I Was Moved Watching Glastonbury.

 I have blogged before on here about Glastonbury music festival.   Especially when I visited England's Woodstock, way back in 1989.  

200,000 punters camped in the four day canvas city with it's  biblical multitudes, scrumpy cider and a Rastafarian pot seller openly shouting: "Rocky, rocky" like some one selling apples or ladies knickers for 1.99.  I thought he was shouting for his missing four legged friend. 😀

Jarvis Cocker said last night;  

"You have to submit to Glastonbury". 

 Of course he's spot on and it is something that consumes your mind, ears, taste buds, senses and sleep.

One band who I never thought I would get into are the the Irish band:The Script.  Hailing from Dublin with a lead singer who to me is a cross between Donny Osmond and a young Bono.

Danny O" Donohue wrapped the two hundred plus crowd around his lyrical fingers 

He talks to his audience like any great orator   I have seen great Christian Evangelist and political orators live like: Malcolm Muggeridge, David Watson, Billy Graham and Barbara Castle.  Danny is up there with his lingual skills.

Danny like a lot of us wears his heart on his sleeve and he shares our personal parental and friends losses .  I can relate so much to what he says.  He's also a Manchester United fan like myself.

Well Danny you genuinely moved me last night.  Thanks for showing the world it's not just about being in the lime light and fame and fortune.

Here's the song that moved me emotionally last night:

Tesco Shopping For Bottled Beers And Tins of Ravioli.

 Tropical Shore Juicy IPA, a tin of Ravioli and a bottle of Czech beer:  IBU.

Yes it's by hissy fit blog. rant again.

Since Brexshit you can not or rarely  can purchase English beers here in Ireland.  You can buy beer from all over Europe but no English beer like my beloved Newky Brown Ale.

We had a run over to Killarney and carried out some retail therapy and I tried two bottle beers.  

The Irish IPA was not very nice at all even though it was 6 percent.  The Czech pils was 5 percent and much much.

We also bought two tins of Ravioli for our tea.  We can't buy this in West Cork.

I can't wait for my roughing it prog festival  trip in Cornwall in late summer.  

Oh what English beers will I drink and eat great regional food like Cornish pasties.

The First Daisy Of Summer.

 

Our first Shasta Daisy came in flower this week.

I propagate these every year by division.  I have also grown them from cuttings.

Apparently they are named after the snow capped mountains in California in north America.

I love them.  I have never known such a good year for flowers.  Its been glorious.

I have been working all week and been too busy to blog until now.  Will catch up with your blogs.

New Potatoes 🥔 😋 Every Day.

 Gosh it's been a fabulous spring and early summer.  Especially for flowers and vegetables.

Today I took the colander to our veg plot and dug fresh Homeguard new 🥔 potatoes and lifted a onion for our tea tonight:

Newly washed new potatoes and a onion.

We are going to cook honey and mustard sausages  in the air fryer and make Colcannon with mashed new potatoes, Savoy cabbage. Covered with onions and Guinness gravy.

The veg plot keeps us well fed.

Pize Winning 🐖 🐖 Pigs Again.

 Number one son and his girlfriend took some of their pigs to Cork Show at the weekend.

Two of the Saddle Backs were awarded Champion sashes:

Champion Saddleback.

Mummy Saddle Back and her piglets.  She's eating her breakfast.  Aren't her piglets gorgeous?  They enjoyed their trip in the  box trailer all the way to Cork.

Fly Papers And Eco Warriors.

 One thing I don't like about summer time is having to leave the windows slightly open to let a bit of fresh air in.

Someone left our bedroom window open last night. It was like one of my annual roughing it camping trips to a Prog Rock festival in Blighty.  

We had 20 minutes of pure rooks prog dawn chorus.  What a racket!

Mean while back on the ranch.  Or even in the front room.  Blue bottles have been playing at Battle of Britain dog fights landing on our heads and limbs.

J came back with fly 🪰 papers.  They even came with individual drawing pins or thumb tacks like they say across The Pond.

I attempted to press it in a door frame and had to resort to using a Manchester screw driver (claw hammer) and knocked the head off the drawing pin and had to find a nail instead to hang the fly paper on.

A few swear words later:

Waiting for a fly to land.

Fly paper with it's individual drawing pin.

After all we are trying to be ecological and protect the Ozone Layer like Eco Warrior Dave Angel:

What a character and another Dave.

Here's me holding a antique glass Spanish fly catcher.  You put some glass in it and hopefully it entices the fly 🪰 (flies) to climb up the hole and it has its last 🍸  drink and drowns like my slug pubs on the veg plot.

I have NEVER known a single fly to use our free insect bar.  

How do you keep the flickers away from you?  

I have heard of filling clear polythene bags filled water and hanging them from the ceiling.  Apparently old Mc fly looks at the water and sees a massive fly in its reflection and scarpers off.

We could with one of those big fluorescent blue lights you  use to see in chippies and butchers in dear old Blighty.

A Little Light Weeding Of The Repurposed Oil Tanks/Raised Beds..

 The veg plot is getting a bit overgrown and neglected at the moment.

I decided to weed several of the repurposed oil tanks/ raised beds and J will sow more vegetables when I clear them.

Beetroots.

Cabbages. 

Leeks planted in half a IBC tank.

Red cabbage with Alchemilla Mollis (Ladies Mantle) planted next to them.  Yes I know A M is poisonous but we won't be eating them hopefully🤔.

The raised repurposed beds  have been a great success and it's good to grow veg at knee instead of beneath your feet.

I also use old plastic baths with drainage holes drilled in them and I have old fish boxes for planters and some raised beds made out of old recycled decking planks.

I have a big pile of rotting fym and I will top up the beds with it this Autumn/Winter.

A big pile of fym sheeted up to keep the weeds out and heat it up to kill any weed seeds and aid decomposition of the mixed fym.

The best thing about raised beds, container gardening means you can grow vegetables anywhere.  Even on concrete.

Home Baked Pies, Pasties And Brown Bread.

 One of the things I love when I visit Blighty for my prog rock festivals and hiking/ roughing it, literary tours.  Is the home baked regional food and drink.  

There are not a lot of bakeries, pie,cake shops left here.  

Well there is an excellent one in Sneem on the Ring Of Kerry that we have visited several times.  I think the lady who owns the shop is English.

Any way or any road.  The veg plot is producing a lot of new potatoes and onions at the moment.

Yesterday J decided to make some Cornish mince and onion and potatoes pasties:

Cornish pasties home baked in West Cork:

Minced meat, onion and potato  pies.  Just like my dear old mum would make and what you can buy in any grocers or chippy in the north of England.

Odlums soda bread mix.  We buy the mixes in Supervalu.  It's very much like the soda bread 🍞  my Irish grandfather use to make us.

Our motto is if you can't get it in the shops make it yourself!

Anyone else baking at the moment?

I must get J to bake me some scones.  They are amazing.  

We should champion our regional foods and drink.  

Anyone got a Newcastle Brown homebrew or Vimto recipe?

Round About The Haggard.

 

I took this photo of some of the piglets the other day.

They decided to leave their mother's for a while and have a look round about the Haggard.

I took the photo and they quickly ran back and found their mums.

Hopefully they will soon put on a bit more weight and will not be able to squeeze through the head feeder.

Here's Roundabout by English Prog band Yes.  I saw them play the Night Of  The Prog Festival in Loreley in Germany 🇩🇪 in 2017:

Another New Potatoes Meal..

 Sliced 🌰 🌰, sliced 🥔 🥔 and a tin of corned beef. Covered with a dash of HP sauce.

That was my tea today.  I dug far too many potatoes again and we made too much food for the two of us again.

I think we would be good catering for an army.

The potatoes were washed and sliced along with one of my whopper Japanese onions and placed in the air fryer.

The onions turned nice and crispy.

We sliced up a tin of Lidl corned beef 😋  to go with the potatoes and onion.

It was very plain but tasty and filling.  The kind of grub my mum would give us when we were kids.

The tin of corned beef was 3 Euros 49 and we get two meals out of it.  Was a very cheap tea.  Food is cheap when you supplement the meat with your own homegrown vegetables.

New 🥔 Potatoes Blight.

 It's potato blight weather this week in the Emerald Isle.

My cheap Homeguard seed potatoes from the discount supermarket do not appear to be blight resistant.  Next year I will grow the Hungarian Sarpo Mira blight resistant seed potatoes again.

Being organic gardeners we don't use chemicals.  This is what we did on inspection of the blighted haulms before and after:

Yellowy turning black foliage.  I wore a pair of gloves and cut off the foliage with a pair of garden secateurs and piled it in a heap and covered it with grass and weeds.

Foliage removed.

I will leave the seed potatoes in the ground for a fortnight before lifting them.  Hopefully when Scorchio returns next week any blight spores will be killed off with the heat.

On hindsight I deeply miss my polytunnel and starting the seed potatoes off in the polytunnel in February early March.

We're digging and eating early  potatoes for our tea every night.  Even Diesel and the other four legged pals love our new potatoes 🥔 😋. 

Have your potatoes got blight?  How do you deal with in a organic none chemical way?

 

Aston Martin Plant?🤔

 The other day some one asked me if I knew what was eating the leaves on their mother's Aston Martin plant.

I nearly answered:

" James Bond perhaps?"

I didn't of course.  I asked if they had a photo of the said plant on their mobile phone?

They showed me a photo of a beautiful Azalea in flower and it's leaves with holes in them.

I consulted Professor Google like I do for most things and sure enough it came up with Azalea Leaf 🐛 🐛.  

One should spray them with Neem oil.  I suppose physically removing any flickers would also help?

Whopper Winter Onions Grown In Repurposed Baths.

They're crackers.

Regular readers will know I plant Japanese or winter 🌰  🌰 sets every September and they are ready to harvest in June.

I planted some of them in baths complete with drainage holes.  The repurposed baths were filled with fym, topsoil and home-made compost.

I think a combination of the wonderful sunny weather in May and now the frequent showers and a good sprinkle of pelleted chicken manure.  Have all helped to  give us such a bountiful harvest.

You will see in the above picture that the weeds are getting plentiful.  I must get my gardener back.  He's very inexpensive and a couple of cans of lager or Newky Brown always suffice for wages.

So take heart would be allotment gardeners on allotment waiting lists.  

Start collecting old plastic baths and heating oil tanks and grow veg in your back garden or garden.  You could even grow them on concrete.  

The repurposed raised beds/baths may not be aesthetically pleasing on the eye.  But you will be growing your very homegrown organic vegetables.

 

Pigs And Potatoes 🥔 🥔.

A Boar and A Sow going for a saunter along a boreen down to graze in a field.

I took out my mobile phone to take a new photo of my newly extended veg plot.

It was formerly a lawn with shrubs and perennials planted around it's perimeter.

We had a digger in doing some work and number one son duly cut up the lawn.

Instead of putting it back to grass.  I decided to extend my vegetable plot and planted ordinary every day vegetables like new potatoes, onions, red cabbage and leeks.

No longer do I need to listen to the not very pleasant dulcet tones of my petrol lawnmower.

I have course lots of weeds to take care of but at least we will eat well.

Anyone else done their own Dig For Victory job on the lawn?

I might put it back to grass one day but then again it's great to have more veg growing space.

 

My Plant Pot Runneth Over.

 

A big plant pot full of Homeguard new potatoes and a big Japanese 🌰 winter onion.

This mixed weather of 🌧 rain and sunshine 🌞 seems to just be the ticket for the flowers 💐 and vegetables at the moment.

I seem to be just growing basic everyday vegetables this year.

It's good to go out to the veg plot and dig and pick your homegrown and chemical free vegetables.

The taste and freshness of freshly picked vegetables is exquisite and you can't buy that freshness in the supermarkets. 

I would imagine you could buy freshly picked vegetables at a farmers market.  

What are you harvesting at the moment?

A Kansas Song For Our Times.

 Regular blog readers will know that I am a big fan of American Prog Rock band Kansas.

I have often mentioned that I finally got to see them in Warsaw in 2014.

Some of the band are new members and Ronnie Platt replaced Steve Walsh on vocals.

In 2019 they released the following track.  I think it's very apt for our times.  I especially think of the plight of refugees in and escaping countries like Ukraine and Palestine:

"Pack up Your Rubber Duck. I Wish You Luck".

 I was watching Top Of The Pops from 1977 on the television the other night.

The following song came on our television 📺 screen.  Some how it seems to have passed me by:

The lyrics are great and I found it really unusual but catchy.

"So Long" by ABBA was a song I once featured on here that had also  passed me by.

Is there any famous songs you some how missed when you were growing up?

Another Repurposed Railway Line Walk.

We went to County Limerick the other day and myself and  Bronte walked a very short section of the Limerick Greenway.  

I have only 2 sections to walk and I will have walked all 40. kilometres .  Stretching from Listowel in north Kerry to Rathkeale in County Limerick. 

We walked just 4 KM from Ardagh to Newcastle West in total.  Which is two and a bit miles in old slot electric meters.   

Here are some photos 📸 for your perusal:

Ardagh train station now boarded up.  

Ardagh oak carving with carved wood chalice.

Ardagh is famous for the Ardagh Holy Communion wine chalice.  

It was found by two brothers under a stone.  When digging up potatoes 🥔. Their mother sold it to a Bishop and it now lives in a museum. I managed to mention potatoes in a blog post again.😊

The GAA Sam Maguire Trophy was modelled on the chalice.

You can replenish your water bottle for free.

Bronte ready for her walks.

Old railway  bridge.

Somebody's been busy strimming the weeds and grass. 

Picnic  tables.

Cattle chewing the cud.

Perhaps it could be the name of an Irish prog rock band?

Newcastle West.

J was waiting for us in the carpark.  She'd been in Tesco's buying tins of Ravioli and a bread mix and some beer and wine.

Hope you enjoyed  our saunter on the Limerick Greenway?

Good old Saxon and Yorkshire's finest.  I was lucky to see them once at a Rock festival in England 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿. 

Air Fryer New Potatoes

 We had our first early potatoes 🥔 😋 for tea last night.

They are Homeguard potatoes.  Developed during WW2 and named after the Dads Army civilian soldierss who guarded Blighty by day and night.

I once heard of a local Homeguard volunteer in Lancashire on night manoeuvres shouted:

"Halt.  Who goes there?"

The recipient replied:

"MOO!"

Any road or any way:

We cut the new potatoes in half and placed them in a plastic zip lock bag in vegetable oil, garlic granules, a chopped up one of our homegrown Japanese winter onions and a couple of sprigs of freshly cut Rosemary.

J popped them in the air fryer basket and cooked them until the potatoes were soft yet crispy.   They were beautiful:

New potatoes imbibed in vegetable oil and mixed with Japanese onions, garlic granules and sprigs of Rosemary.

Air fryer set for twenty minutes or until they are cooked how you like them.  We just stopped it now and again, gave them a shake and decided between ourselves that they were ready.

A feast for a queen or a king.

Complete with a Lidl tin of corned beef.

It was beautiful.  We still have some new spudatoes and half a tin of corned beef in the fridge.  So we are going to have the same meal again tonight.

Do you cook your new potatoes in the air fryer?  Have you made bread in it?  Aren't air fryers brilliant?

"Here's Some I Planted Earlier".

 I remembered that I had planted some seed potatoes a couple of weeks earlier than the one's I harvested.

My trusty long handled fork and me found this hidden treasure:

Newly discovered buried potatoes treasure.

Enough to fill a plant pot.

Newly washed and ready to be steamed or placed in the air fyer.

Our first meal of new potatoes at the end of May.

Normal service is resumed.

Are you eating your new 🥔 potatoes yet?

Not Ready Yet!

Very small new potatoes in a plant pot.

Usually we are digging and eating  our homegrown new potatoes 🥔 by the end of May.

Yesterday when weeding I unearthed a few potatoes 🥔  from under a flowering potato plant.

To my disappointment they are far too small to harvest yet.

They have obviously not had enough rain or water when I watered them during the very dry spell.

We will just have to wait or take the frozen 🍟 out of the freezer 🤔. 

 

Heavy Horses And Songs From The Woods

 Tasker from A Yorkshire Memoir wrote an excellent post on Jethro Tull yesterday.

One of Blackpool's finest and a super prog rock band.

I have seen Jethro Tull five times and the Martin Barre band once in 2019.

I last saw Jethro Tull in 2022.  Ian Anderson can still play the flute magnificently but unfortunately his voice is a whisper of what it used to be.

They still keep the Jethro Tull name but without Martin Barre they don't seem to be that great band I loved.

In 2019 I saw The Martin Barre Band at A New Day Festival in Kent.

I particularly like the vocalist Dan Crisp who reminds me so much of a young Ian Anderson.  

Here's two songs from probably my two favourite Tull albums:

Leek Planting Time.

 

Leeks dropped into holes and I puddled them in with my watering can with no rose attached.

Wood dibber.

Holes made with wood dibber to drop the leeks in.  The holes create girth and a wide white sock.

Leeks in plastic modules ready to be planted. 

I couldn't find any leek plants at the flower show but we managed to source them from a garden centre.  

My new greenhouse/potting still awaits it's construction and I haven't been able to sow my own leeks this year. Bought vegetables plants are still very inexpensive especially when you get at least fifty meals out of the trays of leeks.

It's monsoon season again this week here and also very windy.  At least the vegetables and plants will like all this very much needed rain.

Leeks originate in Egypt.  Saint David told Welsh soldiers to wear leeks in their helmets to ward off evil.  There are also tales of Welsh archers  fighting in fields of leeks. This is probably why the leek is a national symbol of Wales?

I bought two trays of them and of course I purchased far too many.  Just for a change.😀

We counted over fifty of them.

Any surplus ones will be fed to the pigs.  I fed some going to seed leeks to them yesterday and they devoured them.  Nothing goes to waste.  Even the green onion tops are ate.  In return they provide us with copious amounts of fym.

What winter vegetables do you grow?  

I can't wait for our home grown and home-made leek and potato soup.

The plastic modules trays cost me 3 Euros each.  Where else could you get fifty leeks for six Euros.

I will give them a couple of handfuls of poultry manure pellets and hand weed them and water and maybe some of our fym when it's ready to use in September.

Organic vegetable gardening is a very inexpensive hobby that you reap lots of homegrown and pesticide and chemical free.