A hot bed experiment.

Read on to find out what's going on here...

I have a perennial problem. But I'm not talking nettles, dock or dandelions. It's the problem which is perennial.

For every year I am itching to start off my first seeds, as is every other keen gardener. But patience is required. For there's no point putting time and love into germinating trays of seedlings if there's nowhere for them to go. There's a good 10 weeks yet before we reach that all important frost-free date and we can't let ourselves get fooled by the absurdly mild winter we've had thus far. After all, it was only two years ago that we had a severe frost in early May which really did a lot of damage.

To some extent, I can bring this May date forward at least a month by using the polytunnel as an interim home for young plants. But if only I could find a way to bring it even further forward without going to the expense of heating a greenhouse or building a conservatory!
An extra three or four weeks would make such a massive difference to those exotic crops which normally grow in the tunnel, the peppers, tomatoes, aubergines and chillies. Germinating the seeds indoors is no real problem, but it's the next bit which is rife with difficulties, raising the seedlings. For, to be honest, there's not really anywhere in the house which is warm enough, light enough or airy enough for such delicate young plants. The polytunnel is tempting and will probably keep the frost at bay, especially if I watch the night-time temperatures carefully, armed with fleece and bubble wrap. But it won't give them the sort of temperature they really need, not for a good few weeks yet.

But I have a cunning plan! A HOTBED.
Free heat in the polytunnel, powered by bacteria, the sort which can raise the temperature of a compost heap to scalding. I don't know how well it will work, so my early sowings will have to act as guinea pigs for this year.

 

I've been reading this book and discovered that it is perfectly possible to be producing a whole range of crops outside even at this time of the year. All you need is mountains of horse manure, forests of scrap wood and quite a bit of glass. It was all the rage in times gone by - times gone by when horses were more widely kept and the world hadn't yet ran out of raw materials. I guess it could be scaled down a bit, but you still need a lot of manure. This does not quite sound like the system for me, but the theory is a good one.


It's amazing how the deep litter builds up.
Clearing it out is quite a job.

And so I resolved to experiment with building a hotbed in the polytunnel over which to raise my delicate seedlings. I managed to source some scaffold boards very locally, so all I needed now was some poo and used straw. I don't know whether it will work quite so well, but it was time to clear out the deep litter from my goose stable. I figured that this straw, mixed in with the bags of horse manure which I regularly collect, plus a couple of bags of leaf litter which have been sitting outside, should hopefully do the job nicely. I dug the bed out to a depth of about 9" before proceeding to fill it back up with my mixture. I actually don't want it to heat up too quickly, as it will not keep its temperature. I am hoping for a gentle heat within the soil which covers the heap.
An outdoor hotbed would be covered with lights (frames of glass or plastic) to limit the amount of air space which would need heating and to provide insulation to keep the heat in the soil.
My idea is to place those cheap plastic 'greenhouses' over the hotbed. It's a large airspace, but I'm hoping that inside the polytunnel this arrangement will do the trick.

If it works, I might finally get my aubergines to ripen properly, I might get ripe tomatoes when all the other salad crops are ready and my peppers might thrive rather than limping through the year.
The added benefit is that I should have a warm bed, full of nutrients to grow crops in once the seedlings have moved on. This will be my raised bed next year and the hotbed will be rebuilt on the other side of the polytunnel... if it works, that is!

The first layer

Building up the hotbed

The soil goes back on top

I constructed this raised bed too. This will be next year's hotbed.

I still had too much straw from the goose stable,
so I mulched this bed which I will use for pumpkins this year

And the geese have a nice, clean stable.

Here Comes A Frost



Friday 4th May 2012

The weather forecast today warned of two nights of unusually extensive frost. I guess I got spoiled living in London where the urban air protected the garden from this menace. But here in rural Lincolnshire, Jack Frost strikes more frequently and more deeply, and he can quite easily still come in May. For this reason, patience is most definitely a virtue when it comes to more delicate subjects such as beans. In fact, even in the greenhouse my first sowing of Borlotti beans was decidedly bitten, along with a few nasturtium seedlings. I thought some had been tough enough to survive, but over a week or so they all succumbed, stems slowly collapsing and leaves wilting brown.

Seedlings and staging come back inside.

Bearing this in mind, the bottleneck of seedlings all took a step back today. From outside into coldframe, coldframe to greenhouse, greenhouse to inside. And improvised night blankets for the spuds too. I began earthing up, but this was not so easy as the textbooks make out. For starters, the marigolds, nasturtiums and California poppies just emerging in amongst the trenches would not appreciate the upheaval. And secondly, the soil is more water than soil, virtually immovable with a rake or hoe.

Improvised frost blankets for the spuds



A protective film of bubble wrap in the greenhouse.

Fingers crossed, my evasive measures will work. If not, I will learn more valuable lessons for next year. 

Welcome To The World!

A Celebration of Spring Growth

Today, two of our dark brown eggs hatched - French Copper Black Marans. After our dismal attempts at hatching eggs, and with 2 of these already being smashed courtesy of Royal Mail, we were just about ready to give up on these eggs and the whole idea of trusting our postal system with delivering fragile eggs.

Your old home is needed. Out you go!

2 Crested Cream Legbars and 2 Cornish Dark Indian Game chicks take on the outside world. It didn't take long to start squabbling over a worm!

Meanwhile, in the veg garden, fending for themselves...


Glad I held off with the potatoes, or I'd have been busy heaping soil
on new sprouts to protect them from the frost.

 

Parsnips pushing through



Turnips should give a quick crop







Broad beans always seem to take an eternity to come up



 

Up come the peas

And the first asparagus - two different types. I won't harvest much this year, but from next year I can take as much as I like till about June.

The natives are well advanced now.

I love Red Dead-Nettle,
but not as much as the bees.

 

And in the orchard the young plums are in full blossom.

 

While, in the protection of the greenhouse...

These young lavenders are doing brilliantly.
Reckon I should get well over 100 plants
for the price of a packet of seeds.

Young poached-egg plants,
excellent for bees and hoverflies.
They will go under the fruit trees where the hoverfly larvae will munch any nasty aphids.

and how many Gypsophila plants will I have?

All my pepper seedlings are looking very healthy this year.

Back in the herb bed the Angelica is going mad - now in its second year it will flower and produce thousands of seeds.

And, judging by this sequence of events,  young guinea is definitely a female

Bring on frost-free nights, then things really start moving!

Winter, Spring or Summer? ...No, It's April.



Monday 16th April 2012
An icy start to the day - ice inside the greenhouse could spell trouble

 A gardener faces difficult decisions at this time of year. Plants have to get growing so they have time to produce a crop, yet start them off too early, or put them out too early and you can be set back a month.


Prompted by the possibility of a house full of nasty fumes on Saturday (see Nasty Bugs post) I decided to give my tomato and pepper seedlings a taste of fresh air. I seem to have avoided the mistakes which led to the total loss of my first batch of seeds, and have learned not to kill them with kindness! More precisely, that their need for plenty of light cannot be made up for with plenty of water.


So out they went. The chill breeze would make them sway, but this would harden them up a little anyway. However, there is hardening up and there is hardening up!! For, while I was out watching the Black-winged Stilt yesterday, April's typical mix of weather delivered us a pelting of hailstones. Those poor seedlings!


Anyway, the strong and the lucky survived, which fortunately was most of them. Faced with the prospect of transporting all the trays and pots back inside for the night, I decided to take the plunge and move them to the greenhouse...

... where a growing queue of baby plants await their chance to go outside or to go into the bigger greenhouse and polytunnel (both still yet to be built!)

But that can't happen until this stops happening...

The nettles and thyme can withstand the icy night air, but for others there's a few more weeks to wait yet.

Stopping The Rot

Saturday 24th March 2012
Pea soup

Actually, my research tells me that a pea souper refers to an industrial smog. In fact, it's called a pea souper precisely because it's not like the white fog of rural areas. You learn something every day.

The Bluebird
One of the blue eggs has hatched! If it's a girl, it will grow up to lay more blue eggs for us. If it's a boy, it should be very tasty in the autumn. Cream Legbars are autosexing - nothing rude, just means you can tell boys and girls apart as chicks... except, I can't remember how and I don't have any others to compare! For the moment, this very chirpy chick is living in a plastic box with a light bulb to keep it warm. None of the other eggs is showing any signs of life. Apparently they usually pip once one has been born. It will be disappointing if we only get one.

The Rot Sets In
More disappointment with the seeds I sowed back in February too. Germination was generally very good, especially the ten varieties of tomato I sowed. However, I have been having a serious problem with damping off, a fungal infection of the soil which affects the roots of the young seedlings, causing the stem to collapse. It spreads like wildfire, becoming airborne, and can kill off a whole tray of seeds in no time. Damping off is caused by poor conditions, in particular not enough light. I'm a bit stuck really though. The greenhouse is not heated and won't be warm enough for them, the dining room is just not bright enough. But mostly it's my own fault for making the same mistake as I've made before, killing the seedlings with kindness by making the soil too wet.
I have read that sprinkling the soil surface with cinnamon powder can solve the problem, so I have raided the spice cupboard. I'm not sure if it's too late to save some. In desperation I moved the worst affected trays to the greenhouse anyway, but this merely sped up the demise of the poor seedlings.
I'm still hoping to keep enough alive to get a decent early harvest, but I'll have to resow some varieties and accept a one month delay. Having said that, I often find that the slightly later sown seeds virtually catch up anyway.

Peas On Earth
No point worrying about it now. What's gone is gone and I'll just move on and take the best course of action from where I am now. Back on a more optimistic note, today's early fog gave way to a glorious day by early afternoon. I spent a very enjoyable couple of hours in the garden with Sue planting peas - Kelvedon Wonder and Early Onward. Also Sugar Snaps and Purple Mangetout. Peas like to clamber and climb, so various structures were improvised for them. For this we used the sticks and branches saved from pruning a red dogwood. It looks excellent. I guess the dogwood may just decide to root itself, but I don't think it'll compete with the peas and I may even get some new shrubs at the end of the season.