Advice for a hopeless gardener

[jennyjj01]

I cannot grow carrots. Until this year. I got some 2 gallon buckets from work ( they contained sausage seasoning), punched holes in the bottom, two thirds filled them with home made compost, then topped it with seed compost ( weed free). Thinly sowed Amsterdam Forcing carrot seed across the surface, covered with a thin layer of seed compost and watered gently. Kept them damp, and here’s the result.

Hey Jansman,
How do you pick the time to harvest your bucket of carrots. Mine are Amsterdam forcing too.
There looks to be a lot of greenery and ONE carrot in particular has shot up like a tree. I don't want to pull them up just as they start to plump up, but i don't want to be too late either.
I've had a feel around in the soil and I can't feel much carrot at all. I'm being impatient again, aren't I.

Your thoughts?

WAIT! The foliage will get much lusher, trust me. Look again end of July. Then sow again at that time. They will stand the Winter, and we had them at Christmas.

Yayyyyy. Tonight's dinner.
First carrot harvest today. 180g about 1/4 of what had been sowed in a 2 gallon bucket on April 9th.
These were Amsterdam Forcing variety sowed direct. They had probably crowded each-other out. Shortest about an inch. Longest about four inches. They had started to show above the soil and some needed a tiny bit of green carrot snipping off the top.
I've left the rest as undisturbed as I can and sprinkled a bit of extra compost and tomorite. That's a point.... I never did feed them.

No rot or carrot fly, I'm quite pleased with them. I know I could have served them with a bit of the foliage, but didn't want to upset the tasting panel.

So, doing the maths..... I think I need to grow five buckets worth to become self reliant in 'baby carrots' and five buckets of peas.

Not much sign of my Paris Market or nantes carrots.

Beetroots are ready to harvest.
Peas are ready to dig out and resow
Tomatoes have just a very few green fruits. very disappointing.
Onions bolted and have massive seed heads. I think I'll try germinating those seeds.
The courgettes outgrew the planter and suppressed the green beans and leeks that accompanied them.
Spuds have lots of foliage. Far too soon to look in on them.

[jansman]

Well done. Told you end of the month!

[jennyjj01]

Well done. Told you end of the month!

All bar one got eaten and I even sneaked a couple of courgettes onto the plates..
BUT I was a bit surprised that they took quite a while to cook to al dente, Steamed and then griddled in a bit of butter,
The carrots also tasted a bit bland Maybe a post covid symptom or rubbish cooking.

Jansman, You also told me to keep away from my Parsnips till OCTOBER!!!. It's a veritable Parsnip forest

[jansman]

October at least .

[GillyBee]

Well done Jenny. Keep up the feeding. It makes a huge difference to what you get, especially in containers where the food in the soil can all get used up.
(I learned that one the hard way!)
Our courgettes are now producing and the cherry tomatoes are too but not the bigger ones. The Opal plum gave us about 10kg of plums. It is 4 years since we planted it. The Victoria plum planted the same year gave nothing. If it does that next year too I will be digging it out.
We are picking green chillies from the greenhouse.
Beans are really poor. I am hoping they pick up with the cooler weather. Even with partly self fertile varieties, they do not set in the hot weather

[jennyjj01]

Yayyyyy. Tonight's dinner.
...
Not much sign of my Paris Market or Nantes carrots.

Officially the biggest thing I ever grew*....

Nantes carrot, one of maybe half a dozen that survived > 8 inches.
and a Paris Market one, also of very few that survived
and my biggest Amsterdam Forcing. grown with a bit of space in a loo roll in the raised bed.

Harvested another 1/4 bucket of baby Amsterdam Forcing. Quite small.

I take it all back about it being pointless to grow carrots.

Next time, I'll probably do more Nantes.

[edit] They were delish and drew rare praise from the tasting panel.[/edit]

[jennyjj01]

Harvested my beetroots this morning, about half a square metre yielded a small carrier bag full. Not as good as my late harvest, last year.
They were roughly in clusters of three and seem to have crowded eachother out. Very few bigger than a golf ball. Some had bolted.

Pickling them now.

I pulled up the chard that was in the other half of that planter, Gone a bit ropey and I was bored with it.

Harvest of TWO golf ball sized tomatoes. Nicely formed fruit, but pitiful yield. Went in a Dolmio bolognese.

So what shall I sow in that bed now at this late date? Too late for a second crop of peas? Should I start onions? to grow over winter?

I popped in two buckets of Nantes carrot seeds. The seeds were 29p from Lidl. The first ones that I have bought pre spaced on germinating tissue tape, so hopefully they will be well spaced. Hope they'r not too late.

[GillyBee]

This is from the RHS website:

In the south of England you can still sow quick maturing salad crops such as summer lettuce, radish, rocket, sorrel, chicory and fennel.
Continue to sow spring cabbage, turnips, Oriental vegetables and overwintering onions, in the south of England.

I live in a "warm" area which should help but it is noticeable how much plants slow down as the number of daylight hours drops. After September 21 the light level is the same as in March but getting less each day and the plants grow acordingly.

I do want to grow some more fennel. It overwinters here so if I can get it big enough it will then sit there happily all winter for me.

[jennyjj01]

Spuds in a tub...... A follow up to 'Peas in buckets'

Trying it in a largeish rectangular tub, that the council once gave us for newspaper recycling. I popped 4 sprouting spuds (not bought seeds) in , half way down in 6 inches of nutrient free compost. Then I drizzled it with made up fertilizer. Anyone care to wager on how I kill them
I'm guessing that their demise will be from overfeeding and digging them out every week to see how they're growing* Vis-a-vis impatience!
...

The plan, for what it's worth is to earth them up with just neutral Coir and feed them fortnightly on just dilute tomorite. Almost hydroponic.

I
* I won't really dig them up weekly.
** No way on god's earth will I pay a fiver a bag for garden centre seed spuds.
*** The peas in buckets are doing fine

The foliage had all died off, probably from a few periods of drought.
So today, I plunged my hands into the coir compost. Very easily pulled out about a dozen small spuds and the soft and mushy seed spuds. Size up to about golf ball sized.
At first I thought they looked like an edible meal or two, but on closer inspection, they looked warty. Dark warts up to roughly 1cm diameter. A few spuds were nice and smooth. A few were very warty.. I'm wondering if it was blight. I decided to chuck them, not compost them in case it was blight.

Reminder: The seeds were just some shop bought Maris Piper that had chitted. The growing media was rehydrated Coir bricks with 3 or 4 watterings of made up tomorite.

[GillyBee]

Jenny; That sounds more like scab than blight. You can just cut it off and eat the rest but it may not be worthwhile for small spuds. It is worst in dry soil or if you have alkaline soil.
https://www.rhs.org.uk/disease/potato-scabs
Watering consistently is always the challenge for container veg. I have just come back from a long weekend to see that all my Trombocino were wilting as the son in charge of watering hadn't noticed they were wilting... I think they have survived but it won't help the crop.