Be Excellent To Each Other

Wait for the cat to die of natural causes

I will try that.

You can buy sprays that claim to be tiger piss that you spray around. This discourages the cats.

You can borrow someone's dog to do the same thing, basically mark the territory as "claimed".

Or you can man up and piss on your own garden.

Turtle power!

Quite happy to piss on my own garden.

These work quite well in small areas to deter cats. Do absolutely fuck all to deter dogs, though.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Prickle-Stoppe ... 098TKBFJQ/

H&K MP5

My crop so far.

I got given a strawberry plant, it is now trying to take over. I might have to put another bed in for strawberry’s.

These seem to be working well. 2 days and counting.

Oh, they look perfect. Mine haven’t ripened yet. Are you going to grow a couple of runners on?

My strawberries are just starting to colour up.

This one is a blushing bride in her wedding gear.

Is that to stop them being eaten by bugs.. what a good idea

Bugs and/or magpies and other birds. I only pop the bags on for the last few days as they show the signs of ripening as they leave the green ones alone. I got them last year and they worked well and you can just keep reusing them.

They are just little organza bags for craft that I got from eBay

My friend picks them when they first show the initial signs of pinkness and ripens them at home, but I think they’re sweetest ripened on the plant in the sunshine

I will get some, what a fab idea...

Mine are 9x12cm, which should be fine unless your strawberries are comedy giant ones. They’ve fit every strawberry I’ve grown thus far.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/264543572872 ... media=COPY

White will let the light through for best ripening.

Brilliant, just ordered some.

Do you put the little bags over every strawberry individually?

Only as they start to get big enough. So it's just a few to do every few days.

It is a great idea, as i have lost a few, to bugs..

Yeah, you tend to find that as they ripen you just pull the bags off with the strawberry and put them on the next few strawberries that are starting to ripen. Bugs (more usually slugs) and birds (and squirrels or mice if you have them) only go after them when they get to a certain level of sweetness. They’re drawstring so it takes about one or two seconds per fruit and is worth it for the fruit that you stop being eaten.

You can cover the whole plant, but that depletes photosynthesis somewhat as you are covering the leaves, so you get a smaller yield, plus if slugs can get under or through your covering (and up under the soil) that plant cover makes absolutely no difference.

You might find that strawberries take an extra few hours or a day longer to ripen this way, but a slower ripening strawberry develops greater sweetness, so it’s the way I preferred doing it after my experiments as it makes for super strawberries and no loss.

Planted out our first ever pumpkins yesterday. Three plants. I think I’ve got the oriented correctly to spread across the patch.





They’re just Halloween carving pumpkins. It says to only let four pumpkins form on each vine to get them to a good size, but if I get any fruits on them I might limit one of the plants to a single fruit to see if it can get big.

Current garden progress. It’s all veg down the far end which you can’t really see, plus swings and slides, a few fruit trees and the wildflower area we planted. But so far, so good. We’re trying to push back some of the planting on the right about half way up the garden, and re-sow it as lawn in the autumn.

That looks amazing. I have serious garden envy.

I went to RHS Wisley today. They have 100+ grounds staff and it looks significantly less neat than that.

Aw, thank you both. It’s not going to win any prizes, and it will be *years* before we knock some of the problem areas into shape as we are trying to tackle things whilst also having the space work for us (so we work on an area whilst giving most of my time to the vegetables) but it’s not bad for an urban garden.

I think it would probably win prizes.

One day I will take photos of our garden. But right now it is not a garden.

Edit: wait, here is the still-not-finished new 2x7m chicken run! I need to order bits to make a pitched roof on half of it.

Ok sure the weather's nice and I've had a beer, a lap-ish of the garden why not....

Quince (hiding behind hibiscus and clematis), potatoes (hiding behind nettles), chickens, raspberries, bees, veg patch panorama (bonus oregano troughs!), herb-bed-in-waiting temporarily housing must if the strawberries after we reshaped the main veg patch.

moar

Nursery greenhouse, *one* bramble, wide shot including a lovely red acer, pea-sized cherries on random cherry trees we found, damsons, grapes, apples, BEES!, 8'x12' greenhouse (with basil and tomatoes) in front of 100m^2 of chest-high grass which will be our "orchard" but currently has a couple more damsons blocking next door

MOAR

Strawberries which I really should be picking from about the place, redcurrants (lazy blackcurrants not shown), gooseberries, Japanese wineberries, tayberries

I didn't bother snapping the main veg beds in detail, they're full of stupid salad and beans and stuff.

I also forgot to show the rhubarb - albeit mostly dead - or blueberries - hidden by the fig I also forgot to snap. And the greengage.

Oh, and all the chillies in the conservatory, but I had a shot of them already.

Our garden is not pretty. This is mostly my fault for alternating between asleep and anxious, leaving Helen to try and cope on her own.

Mods feel free to shift all this to somewhere that doesn't decimate internet connections or server bills.

I am getting proper getting garden envy..

Ooohhhh! I’m so jealous! I’d LOVE chickens (only slightly less than I’d love ducks) How many do you have? All hens? The run looks smashing. Are they laying?

Your gardens are incredible, Bik. The variety of berries alone is amazing. What are the Japanese ones like? I remember you mentioning them last year. The raspberry canes I put in last year are fruiting this year and they have what seems like a billion berries forming.

Are the bees hard work?

@grim... I got a "this post happened while you were typing" but I couldn't post, getting the attached error every time.

It implies the post was broken but it was just text... And annoyingly while I did select all/copy it bloody didn't.

(It then happened again, so somehow I did put invalid text in? Absentmindedly a smile maybe?)

3 - all hybrids so daily layers, and at 4 years old but still giving us 2-3 a day, well beyond their rated eggspan, it's supposed to be 80% year on year. Big run is part of preparing for adding more, and also easier and safer than we had before, which was a 2x4 enclosed run with 21m open loop of net, we had to let them into that and always at risk of foxes, badgers and cats which are all round here.

Ta. It's taking ages but plans are moving, slowly, turning over from "two retirees" to "two workers wanting less effort, more produce". Helen's well into rewilding, sustainable (no dig/turn) beds and so on. 5m^3 of compost plus leaf moulding, all that.

Bees are a consistent arseache, at least here. Noone else in the local bee club has as much trouble. Helen has basically given up on them again because while she split this new colony they still swarmed twice, and we spent hours failing to catch from next doors damson. I'm gently trying to nudge her through because she dearly wants to make it work.

Something really odd is going on with my phone, I definitely replied to you already!

I think you don't live too far from us, feel free to come round to mow, strim, prune, chainsaw, axe, dig, heft, drive to the tip, be stung to buggery by 6' nettles, to no visible effect, it'll soon set you straight

@mimi the wineberries haven't fruited yet, they were pot bound then almost died when put in the ground; recovering well this year with plenty of flowers so fingers crossed!

We've got loganberries knocking about somewhere as well, like tayberries a raspberry-blackberry cross but different varieties.

Edit: Helen and I were independently thinking about ducks at the weekend! Her because we could put them in the veg patch to eat slugs, me because they're safe to house in the new chicken run and could keep the lawn under control for us... So you never know.

Editit: there's a crabapple that produces hundreds of crabapples every year that we don't do anything with because we're scared. And a sloe... thing?... that is getting very tired and closed in, along with a few more apple trees, so there were about 3 berries last year. But that's ok as we don't distil gin. And another fig. And oregano growing out of basically every crevice, good job we use tons of it, and rosemary, and a bay tree. Ooh, and wild garlic really likes our spot too! Chives keep popping up too. And alpine strawberries are basically a weed for us. Then we're onto nuts, we've got hazel and sweet chestnut... I can't think of any more edibles now, unless I go into the weirder stuff like nettles, dandelions and so on.

When I was very young I had a pet duck, and they’re just the loveliest animals. They’re happy with chickens and they often sound like they’re laughing when they quack, so they just make me smile.

Of all the different berries you’ve grown in previous years which would you say were the best fit eating? I’ve seen a few different berries about in the garden centres and am always very tempted by them.

I’m trying to increase the amount of fruit we have, as last year was mostly vegetables and strawberries, and the pear tree we put in.

We also put in a cherry, but when we got it it had no roots, just a short central tap root, and we didn’t know if it would root more. It didn’t. So we’ve replaced that with a dual variety family cherry and also put in a dual variety family apple. I really wanted one of the five variety ones but they’re impossible to find.

Darn, I didn't get in a mega-edit before you posted

Tayberries are *amazing*, though ours were already mature when we moved in - hopefully the loganberries and wineberries are in the same ballpark.

All the sweet raspberriness balancing the tart blackberriness, there's no other "mass market" soft fruit comes close - that one bramble we're cultivating out of what was an awful mess a few metres deep along the boundary gives us *incredible* blackberries, huge juicy sweet tart things, that's a close call, but purely the whims of evolution.

Happy to try and catch a runner or two off any of them if you like - wouldn't be this year now, I think. And I will forget a lot.

Do you like the alpine strawberries? I hear mixed opinions on them either tasting super sweet or really bland.

Wild garlic grows EVERYWHERE here, though thankfully not in our row of gardens, but the whole town is full of it. When Darwin was small I’d take him on a 30 minute walk to the park in the pram and every single garden had it growing, and it was growing everywhere in the park as well, and once it’s been thick in your nostrils for over an hour it starts to get a bit much on a humid day and it used to make me feel queasy, and then I’d have to walk back for another 30 minutes

Oh yeah, technically we've got a pear too. No idea what variety, hard little things - incredibly abundant the year we moved in, to the point we got the apple place up the road to press them for us, but hugely infected with rust every year since with not a single pear we're not massive fans anyway so will probably replace it with something else next year.

Alpine strawberries are bland until the day they're perfect juice bombs - never sweet, but super concentrated strawberry flavour - and then they're bad a day or two later. And they're so small you really have to pop a couple at a time

Again, I think our microclimate is good for them, like oregano they're supposed to not be easy England growers and we can't get rid of the fucking things. There are worse problems to have.

Yeah, you'd tried to sneak in "grinning face with smiling eyes", apparently

I missed this last night. That would be lovely. I’ll try and remember to make you remember next year

The strawberries have really started to come in now.

i would show pics of my strawberries, but I have eaten them all.

That’s the best thing to do with them. I’ve eaten half and given the others to the neighbours. There’s no point saving them day to day as at the moment there is plenty for daily strawberries. Next year I’ll get the stuff I need to make jam (jars, a thermometer, etc)

Those are so pretty!

Also very glad to have photos. Imagine the sentence just on its own "The strawberries have really started to come in now". Day 25, and the barricades have been eaten away by the ivy. First the blueberries started to roll in and were fairly easily squashed before they could start assimilating, but now strawberries are breaking through and the green ones resist my initial stamp, allowing a few tiny arctic berries to start swarming my leg. For now, we are safe, but I worry for the March of the Marrows.

They are berry, berry scary.

I’ve grown my first ever garlic. It’s not going to win any prizes, but *I grew some garlic* and I’m really happy with it
And after I’d cleaned it up a bit. Ichthyosaurs leave it to cure for another day or two and then make the world’s smallest garlic plait.

That garlic is gorgeous!