About Me

Hi I'm JAMES 60 and married with three daughters all left home now, daughters that is not the wife.I enjoy Gardening /Football and working on my Farm.The picture above in the header slot is where i live and work.

Sunday 31 January 2010

Getting impatient

Well it's a few days since I got back from holiday and although all the snow and ice has gone thank goodness, the ground is frozen solid which is a bit of a pain as I had planned to get stuck into doing a bit of late digging and finish erecting my new greenhouse, I knew I should have done it in late summer early October when the weather was good but as I had to build it on the site of my old smaller one it seemed a shame to take that down when the tomatoes were fruiting away furiously and now I'm stuck trying to do it at weekends as the days are too short for working in the evenings and as you can see it looks a bit like a building site at the moment. It is going to have a solid floor made with spare bricks that I have had left over from other projects and others recycled from the previous greenhouse, as I prefer to do all the growing in pots. All of the pots that I used in the past have come from the farm that were sold to us full of animal feed but just recently Health and Safety has meant that we can only get every thing in smaller lightweight buckets so we don't hurt ourselves lifting them, OK for us I suppose but they are a bit useless for growing in so I have had a look on the net for some large pots and the cheapest I found were about £6 pound each.

My shallots are now potted up, a bit later than last year but as it has been so cold I don't think they will be very far behind come planting out in the spring and I got my NVS Sherine and Amour potatoes this week from Jamieson's of Annan they look clean and healthy and should be interesting to grow this Summer, also I picked up from our local garden centre some Kesterel but they have decided not to stock Winston this year for some reason so I will have to try some where else for them this week, I gave the Kesterel a good wash under the cold tap as shown in Sherie Plumbs DVD to sort them out and I must say I was I bit disappointed with them when I looked at them closely they had a fair bit of scab marking on them, they say it doesn't affect the new crop but I'm not so sure as last year I had a lot of scab on my Winstons especially and they were grown in clean fresh peat not in garden soil. An old trick I was told to kill off the scab bacteria used to be dipping the seed potatoes in a weak solution of formaldehyde for a hour It sounds a bit drastic but I wonder if that would work or even if it's still legal! does anyone know?

3 comments:

Dan said...

James,have you ever visited LBS Garden Warehouse ?
They are in Colne and have a website too.
They are the cheapest supplier of big pots anywhere.
10 litre 76p.
20 litre £1.59
30 litre £2.41
or even 500 litres £36,I bought some of these for compost bins.
If you go to their website : www.lbsgardenwarehouse.co.uk then enter "Heavy Duty Container Pots" in the search and you'll find them.
Cheers,Dan.

James (Digtoplant) said...

Cheers Dan I will give them a try.

Mrs. Mike said...

Alternating garlic and potatoes from year to year in the same bed controls scab. Could you plant garlic with potatoes to achieve a similar result?
That ol' garlic is good at killing all sorts of ailments!

The floor of the greenhouse looks great. I love a job well done! I'll enjoy watching your progress on your building site.

My husband has acquired a hot house for me and I'm very excited to accomplish much more this year through it's use.

Welcome home from your Potugal trip. Hope all went well.