A Text Message And Some Windfall Apples 🍎 For The Livestock.

I had got a text message from one of my neighbours when I was working in the veg plot.

He had left me a wheelbarrow full of apples that he had collected from his orchard and I could give them to our livestock

Happy apple eating pigs.

Apple munching  ponies.

The pygmy goats 🐐 loved their 🍎 🍎. 

Wheelbarrow of windfall apples.  

It's been a great year for fruit, vegetables and 💐flowers.

 

 

Homemade 🌭 Hotdogs.

 Another snacky post or: "What We Had For Our Tea Last Night!"

Our homemade hotdogs 🌭  made with our organic homegrown Japanese onions 🌰. 

A jar of cheap Bratwurst Lidl sausages, hot dog rolls, onion, mustard and tomato sauce.  Very nice.  Quick and easy.  Perhaps I should get a hot dog van and paint "Dave's Dogs" on it?

I could go to rock festivals and charge a 🤴 ransom or  a "tenner" for one of my hotdogs and listen to the music?

I watched Robert Plant at Cropredy festival on You Tube at the weekend.  I went last year and in 2022.  He's still got an amazing voice.

I never got to see Led Zep but I did see Jimmy Page play at: Monsters Of Rock festival once.

Hope you like the tune?  

I wonder what other snacky snacks we can come up with?  Vinegar butties, banana 🍌 butties..🤔

Growing Beetroot Vegetables Which Are Really Swiss Chard.

 You know how "Algarve' and "Portugal " my beloved polytunnels plastic were ripped and torn by the Atlantic gales?

We still haven't got round to building my new sturdy potting shed/man cave yet.

I bought quite a few of our vegetable seedlings in trays from a garden centre up in  County Kerry.  Their vegetable plantss are excellent.

Unfortunately they had not labelled the seedlings and veg plants.  I had even remembered to bring my Lidl reading glasses with me

Old Clever Clogs (me) jumped in with my size 11 boots and picked what I thought (" I taught I saw a puddy tat") were beetroot.

I have been watching them growing with caution and wondering why no beetroots were not forming under the leaves?🤔

I was weeding the repurposed plastic tanks yesterday and the penny finally dropped:

"They're Swiss chard".

Yes I know they are related to each other in the vegetable family.  Same factory, different department:

Swiss chard with some Nasturtiums invaders.

Anyone else grow Swiss chard?  Do you eat it raw or cook it?  I believe it's a good idea to cut out the hard spine before cooking or eating it?

Snacky Time.

 I am a great believer that the sun feeds you when it's so hot like this fabulous summer.  I have never known a summer so good.

We have a big Kenwood Chef mixing bowl of new potatoes waiting to be ate.  But it's just too hot and we much prefer snacks like corned beef toasties.

I have blogged  about the Kenwood Chef stainless steel  bowl before.  I bought it for a pound on a car boot sale twenty five years ago and we still use it every week.  Especially for collecting new potatoes from the veg plot.  There are still plenty left for me to dig.

Of course I am using our home grown onions and lettuce to accompany the corned beef and toast:

What I had for my tea last night.

What's your favourite snack at the moment?

Do you hear yourself saying:

"It's far too hot 🔥 for 🥔 potatoes. "

"Is it hot or is it me?"

Here's a little bossanova tune to go with this post:

Leeks Growing In A Fym Filled Cut Down IBC Tank.

 I went out this hour to pick one of my Redina lettuces for a corned beef toasty for our tea.

I noticed my leeks growing in a cut down IBC tank.  They seem to be absolutely flying it.  

The docks and weeds outside the tanks seem to also be flourishing   My raised beds have drilled drainage  holes and no doubt the soil nutrients feed the weeds.  If the weeds don't  grow.  Nothing will grow.

I am so pleased with our repurposed plastic tanks filled with fym and planted with organic bought vegetables.

One often praises clay plant pots.  I rarely see any over here.  I am starting to praise plastic pots and containers.   I think they warm up the growing medium and the veg plants flourish.  Have you had similar thoughts?

We harvested one of our first leeks the other day.  It tasted wonderful.  You can pick stuff young and fresh when you grow your own.

The vegetable sugars have not got old and turned into starches like a lot of supermarket old vegetables.

I definitely think the better the depth of soil.  The better the vegetable grows.

A Gunnera And A Tree Fern Growing Here On The Irish Riviera.

 I spotted this Tasmanian tree fern and this Chilean Gunnera growing side by side in a garden on our peninsula in the south west of Ireland.

We live on the Gulf Stream and it is remarkable what will grow in such a mild climate.

Tree ferns or man ferns go for astronomical prices.  You can buy small ones for about 30 Euros.  

If you go to Kells over on the ring of Kerry there is a tree fern forest, garden centre and their head gardener recently won a gold at Chelsea flower show.   I think they also " put you up" or accommodate you even and there's a restaurant.  I have been there once and featured it here on my humble blog.  Way back in 2015.  It's  on my blog search.

The tree ferns were originally used for convict ship ballast returning to Blighty after dropping off deportees in Van Diemen's Land.  The ships returning were empty so they cut down tree ferns and used them for ballast for the long sea journey back to Falmouth.

On return.  They threw the plants into the bay and some people planted them in their estate gardens.  Amazingly they grew and have aerial roots and people started collecting them.

Gunnera originate in Chile and Brazil.  They look like giant rhubarb and their leaves and stalks go brown in Autumn and they do not like frost.  Fuschia is also a Chile native and it grows profusely here in West Cork.  I have also seen growing happily in Devon and Cornwall. 

It was good to see to two plants from different continents growing side by side.

Would you have them in your garden?  I would love a tree fern.

Topping Up The Repurposed Oil Tanks/Raised Beds With FYM.

One of my tv gardener heroes was Geoffrey Smith and I often still watch his gardening videos on good old YouTube.  Here are two gardening quotes by him:

"Put the brown end in the soil, the green end above it , and you're in with a much better chance."

"If I am depressed,  or I think the world's  a filthy place, I just go and look at a flower".

Geoffrey like myself came from Northern England and he believed in hard graft and forking over the ground and leaving the rough clods for the Winter frosts and rain to break them down and make lovely friable soil.

My gardening digging habits have evolved to the Irish climate.  Ireland gets its fair share of gales and very wet winters.  But we rarely get the snow and frost like they get in the north of England.

I am 62 this December and I still grow some crops like new potatoes in the ground.  But in recent times I have been repurposing containers like plastic baths, heating oil tanks, Belfast sinks, rear wheel tractor tyres, mussel and fish crates and IBC tanks...

They give me a lot deeper depth of growing medium and I am gardening at waist or knee height.  I am not no dig and I climb on top of them and dig them over after a crop is harvested. 

The weather is very good this spring and summer.  I took the black plastic cover off the dung heap and filled up my weeding big bucket 🪣(tree plant pot) with fym and filled up some of my vacant plastic raised beds:

Topped up raised beds.  Already for next spring.  The fym contained a lot of fat juicy brandlings worm.  They reminded me of coarse fishing days when I would use such worms 🪱 to lure Perch and other fish to the hook.  

Fishermen are the watchdogs of our waters and gardeners and allotment holders monitor the soil.  The worms will take the fym down into the soil.  I could cover them up with plastic but I will allow the rain to add nitrogen and wash the goodness from the fym into the soil.

I have had great harvests this year in my repurposed raised beds.  You don't  need to have a garden or allotment just some containers to grow your veg and some muck and magic.

Anyone else making use of the fine weather and getting their veg plot topped up with fym and ready for spring?