Potatoes vs. Weeds

Guess which grows fastest? Go on, guess? Does this image give any ideas?. Seems like every week no matter how many you removed 3 more spring up to replace them . . . and they grow 3 times as fast as the useful stuff. So a couple of hours weeding and hey presto!

Just about manageable. Question is, what do do with the weeds. Compost I guess, so time to

build some compost bins and see if I can get that ellusive 'hot heap' going.

Mushrooms

Having tried to grow mushrooms in the airing cupboard without any success some years ago it is with a certain level of expected failure that I have embarked on it again.  All you need is some mushroom plugs, fresh cut wood, a dark place and time.  Apparently.

Fortunately, the a guy on my street is a tree surgeon, so getting the wood was no problem. Fresh wood is essential as the mushroom grows by 'eating' the wood, so it needs to be fresh to contain enough moisture.

The plugs could be bought on the Internet and I live in Britain, so no issue with dark places.  When you get the plugs, the look like small dowling pegs with fur growing on them (well, at least mine did).  I hope this is a good sign.

Next thing that needs to be done is make some holes in the wood for the plugs to go into.  Out with the trusty drill and time to make holes.  Tricky this bit, drilling a fresh cut log ain't like making a hole in the wall or a plank of wood that stays still.  This wood is round a rolls, so ignoring all sense of health & safety I just stood on one end and drilled away.  The holes are in 3 columns at 90 degree separation and 8 rows, with about 4 inches (10 cm) between holes.  Each hole is the same depth as the plug and just wider.

Next, just push the plugs into the holes.  The holes are only just larger than the plugs (well, you don't want them to fall out!

Any finally it's recommended that you plant the bottom 1/3 of the log in the ground in a dark shady place.  Well, the place I have in mind is between 2 walls with a soil pipe underneath so no chance of burring there!  I'll just have to hope that the pots do the job.

So the burning question  is will I get any mushrooms?  I've *planted* Oyster and Shitake and the packet claims that I should get 3 to 5 crops a year for 3 to 5 years.

Here's hoping.

Famous Last Words

Cover them up, water them in and sit back and wait till June! ranks up there with the comments Sir Thomas Bloodworth made when he passed comment on the Great Fire of London for accuracy.  I went down about 10 days after I planted the spuds to see how they were coming along.  There were some signs of them coming though, just about.  The hard part was seeing the spud plants though all the weeds.  So several hours and 3 buckets of weeds later and the spuds could be seen.

Sadly no photos as I forgot the camera.

Potatoes

When you first get your hands on your allotment they tend to be a mass of overgrown weeds (you get one as the previous owner/caretaker hasn't been using it). This is an example of the one that I've just taken over

So the first thing to do is to start digging. And digging. The allotment I've got is about 20 metres wide by 120 long (65 x 400 feet). That is going to be a lot of digging! So rather than try to do the whole thing in one go I've broken it down into sections and started on creating some small beds - about 1 metre by 2.5. To keep the weeds down and to warm up the soil underneath once dug I cover the ground in weed proof matting

After a few weeks peel the matting back, hoe the weeds out and last weekend in went the first crop of spuds


Cover them up, water them in and sit back and wait till June!

Get Involved with this Blog

Now that the Cúram Gardening Club is up and running, you might want to get involved in collaborating on this blog.

Blogs are a great social networking tool and ideal to share:

• Tips and tricks
• Photos
• Garden plot layouts
• Ideas about your garden
• Your garden's progress

If you want to help tend to this blog as well as your garden, let me know: I'd be delighted to add you to the list of authors. Just add you name as a comment (below) - don't worry they won't be published - or contact me at my e-mail address.

If you're new to blogging, I'm happy to spend half an hour some lunchtime to go through the basics, if you're an experienced blogger just begin to contribute right away!

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A Dig for Victory allotment

So here's the thing: I'm completely new to this whole gardening lark, and while I'm very enthusiastic about turning my 120 metres squared allotment into a productive piece of land, I have really got the faintest idea where to begin.

So I rambled in to Chapters Bookshop in Parnell St and bought myself a second-hand copy of Gardening for Dummies (on the basis that the fundamental techniques of gardening don't really change between editions of the text; it's not as if there's new functionality in Version Next of a spade, for example).

Of course, I also had a look on Google.

While looking through some Web results on the topic "Starting your won allotment" I found some interesting references to a campaign called Dig for Victory. This intrigued me. This was an initiative for every adult in Britain to keep an allotment for the duration of WW2. Lawns and flower-beds were turned into vegetable gardens. People could have a little extra to eat outside of their government-sanctioned rations.

Here's the important bit for me - instructional leaflets were distributed describing how to create a productive vegetable allotment, aimed at people who had never grow anything but dahlias and roses prior to that time.

[Click image to enlarge]

So for my first attempt at allotment-ing, I reckon I'm going to grow a Dig for Victory garden. What are you going to do with your bit of earth?
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Welcome to our blog!

Hello and welcome to the Cúram Gardening Club Blog.

It seems Cúram has some real gardening enthusiasts, or at least people curious enough to give it a go (myself included). There are a few people around the place who are growing their own veg, including, it seems, some interesting construction efforts.

We are going to experiment with a blog on gardening. We hope to feature gardens and gardener, allotments and their owners, gro-bag enthusiasts and their produce, and anyone in between!

If you get a bit inspired, and start trying things for yourself, we might do a special post featuring a few gardens that are of similar styles (like city rooftop gardens, and gardens on a windowsill).
So the purpose of this post is to find out who might be interested in joining the Cúram Gardening Club Blog. All you have to do is send me an email of interest and you are in the club:-).
It isn't anything official yet, but we might be on to something.

This also a space for people wanting to share tips, and tricks, gotchas, "big bang" implementations, and incremental modernisation and transformation of their current green space.

Yours in being Green, Healthy, and Saving Money!
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