I have been putting this day off for too long. Partly because it is not the most pleasant job of the season but mostly because it makes me sad to see the garden come to a close. Nonetheless it had to be done, just look at the state of all those withered plants! This year the weather was truly unpredictable, changeable and overall underwhelming. The garden suffered hugely as a [...]
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It really feels like Spring has arrived here in London. Finally I headed out to the roof terrace to tidy the garden and prune all the plants. I suspect I was supposed to prune last year but I never did as I was not sure how much to cut things back. By now many of the herbs have made it completely clear which of their long, dry stalks they no [...]
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Weee, my first seeds of the year have sprouted! The seeds have been in the soil for a fortnight now and I was beginning to think the pea shoots were not going to sprout; but here they are. The soil was a bit damp when I sowed them so some of the seeds got mouldy and in the end only about half of them have sprouted. The radish sprouted after one [...]
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Over the past year I have learned a few things -through trial and error- about growing food with limited space. Here is a re-cap of my top five tips for container gardeners; 1. No roots; this was not immediately obvious to me but growing root vegetables like carrots is pretty space inefficient. When you have limited space you have to maximise what you grow. Root vegetables are frequently pretty cheap [...]
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Well OK, not a party so much as an hour or so spent making all sorts of basil concoctions! Look how full of basil our kitchen window has been for months! It has been great, we have had fresh basil all through the summer and we already dried a batch which is almost used up by now and also made a batch of pesto. But the end has been in [...]
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Given the great weather in June there was still surprisingly little to eat in the garden. One thing we had was a few last strawberries before the plants got a bit excited about throwing out runners at any crack of land within a few metres reach. Other plants were mostly beginning to set fruit. The pea, tomatoes, French beans and courgette had all moved past flowers onto early [...]
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Wow, it is hard to imagine but we have had no internet for months… We finally moved into London to our new Urban flat. Putting the ‘urban’ back into urbanfeedstuff! Things have been busy in the garden too and harvest season is currently underway. Rather than try to backtrack and do a million posts I am going to offer up a couple of monthly summarys. I think that this will [...]
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I haven’t posted for a little while because I have been busy. I also haven’t posted for a little while because all is not well in the garden and I can’t bring myself to photo the state of the plants. The weather has been cold and overcast for almost two weeks as far as I can remember. There is no sunshine to ripen the strawberries which are all half grown [...]
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Since all the rain and cold weather at the weekend the vegetables are not looking great this evening I decided to fertilise them all, despite none of them really needing much water. The tomatoes outside looks really tired and unhealthy. The stems on all of them have turned quite a dark colour since the rain. I am not sure if they are bruised from being bashed around with the wind [...]
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The herbs have really cheered up since we transplanted them last weekend. They seem to be pleased with the addition of some compost, lots of water and more room. After transplanting them I read that both lemon balm and marjoram will spread so we will probably need to thin this pot out later in the season. We are really learning as we go with all of our plants. Each [...]
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