Judith Proctor's Journal

I don't post nearly as often as I used to, though I frequently comment on my friend's journals.

I think it's probably due to a combination of background stress, asthma and sciatica...

However, a new office chair with decent adjustment has made a noticeable impact on the sciatica, so that's good.

I'm going cold turkey on reading the news for a few days, and that's helping the stress a little.

I'd like to go cold turkey on Facebook, but I'm moderator for several groups, so I do need to check the posts.

The one on Morris history occasionally gets people trying to rehash arguments on blackface, but we've managed to keep it pretty much under control. The hard part is ensuring that polite and informative discussions on the subject are still allowed, while ruthlessly deleting any comments about people being either racist or pc (ie. staying strictly neutral apart from requiring views to be back up by historical documentation).

On the whole, it's a very polite community with some interesting discussions on a wide range of topics, which is reflected in the membership which is now over 700.

I've been doing a lot of gardening. I've got good neighbours on both sides, but one is short of time as she's caring for her mother, and the other is still a learner gardener.

So, I'm pottering about in both their gardens as well. When I've got spare bits of plants, I'm planting them next door in the borders, and in spite of the hot weather there's been a pretty good survival rate. The rain has helped a lot.

 the neighbours were mowing their lawn today and putting the clippings into a bin bag to take down to the tip, so I asked (as I've sometimes done in the past as well) to have the cuttings.  They are happy to give them to me.

I've used most as  a surface mulch around the raspberries - grass clippings are very good at suppressing weeds.  They also add nitrogen to the soil and add organic matter.  They vanish totally in six months to a year, probably due to worm activity.

The remainder I put on the compost heap where they will mix well with the twiggy stuff and weeds that are already there.

Amazes me that anyone can just throw away such wonderfully useful stuff.


If using clippings at home, try and put them round your plants as soon as possible. If you leave them for long in a bin bag, moisture and heat will combine them into nasty, smelly clumps.  IF you get them onto the ground quickly this problem is avoided.

When spreading them, don't use more than  one or two cm thickness, or you'll run the risk of it getting clumpy.  Try and sprinkle them with your fingers to get plenty of air in the mix.  That will reduce any risk of smell ( it dries out like hay, rather than rotting soggily).

If composting grass cuttings, make sure they aren't the only thing on your compost heap.  Mix them up with kitchen waste, weeds, twigs and hedge cuttings, even egg boxes and cardboard.  Different types of material ensure that you have a mixture of 'greens' and 'browns'  and results in better compost (and it's produced faster).  Don't pack it all down hard, let a bit of air circulate.  You want it to decompose aerobically, not anaerobically.

 I glanced out of my front window just now and a passer by pointed to my rockery (which is currently a mass of flowers) and gave me a double thumbs up.

That was a really nice moment.

 We dug up some hellibores from Molly's garden last week and they're now in our back garden.  They seem to be settling in, in spite of being transplanted while in flower.

Plants are good things to remember people by.  They need a degree of tlc to do well and the act of looking after them reminds you of the giver.

Molly and I shared a love of gardening - indeed, she helped to increase my own interest in the subject. Even in her eighties and nearly blind, she was still growing most of her own vegetables.  She's one of the reasons I have an allotment.

We've also adopted a little mini-rock garden of sedums in a shallow container.  It was made for her by my husband when he was a boy.  For half her life it reminded her of him, and now it will remind us of her.

She was a wonderfully pragmatic person. (I'm speaking in the past tense, even though she isn't technically dead yet.  I do not believe I will ever speak to her again.)

Entorien (my daughter-in-law) sums it up well in her description of her last meeting with Molly - http://entorien.livejournal.com/518028.html

Molly has no religious beliefs, she doesn't fear death and she wishes the doctors would let her get on with the business of dying.

She did the paperwork several years ago to donate her body to science and we've made sure all the doctors are aware of that.

 This is the planting season.  A bit later this year because of all the weather, but Richard has been really busy this last week (I managed to do my back in trying to move the shredder, but I'll be weeding again soon)

Broad beans survived the winter reasonably well, though we lost about a third of them.  A new double row of seeds has been planted now to give a succession when they crop.  I love broad beans - they are one of the veg that really justify growing your own.  I never knew that fresh broad beans had a scent until we had an allotment.

Manure has been spread all round the fruit bushes and almost everywhere except where the brassicas will go.  Cabbages and their relatives do not like freshly manured soil - they prefer things a little more alkaline.

The propagator and our mini-planthouse are working overtime.  The peas are all up and being hardened off prior to planting out.  If you start things off in the warm, then you need to introduce them to the real world gradually - otherwise they're liable to die of shock if you take them straight from a warm greenhouse and plunge them into the cold soil.  Put them outside during the day first to get used to the idea.  It will also make them harden their stems (to resist the wind) and become a little less of an easy target for slugs.

Cabbage, lettuce and purple sprouting broccoli seedlings are emerging.  Our luck with cabbages is usually dreadful as we have clubroot.  We're trying a resistant variety this year.  Fortunately PSB (purple sprouting broccoli) is the one brassica that is immune to clubroot.

Squashes and courgettes are growing on the bedroom windowsill - they won't go outside for a while yet as they are tender plants.

Went to the dentist this morning - he's growing a few veg at the back of the surgery and was asking for tips.

A lot of my friends are also starting to grow things for the first time.

So, here are my handy tips on compost.

1.  Anything organic will rot.  (by organic, I mean 'made of organic material', not 'grown without pesticides')

You can compost: cotton shirts/towels, woollen jumpers, all kitchen waste (if you're worried about rats, then either exclude meat or else put chicken wire underneath your compost bin), all weeds (some people exclude dandelion and bindweed roots, but I find even those usually get killed, though I wouldn't put bindweed roots on a heap in the shade), all grass cuttings (but do mix them up with the other stuff if you have a lot of them), corrugated cardboard, cardboard egg boxes (don't squash them, they provide handy air pockets), used straw bedding from hamsters, rabbits, etc, sawdust, hedge clippings (but only if well chopped up, and do mix with other stuff) and probably other stuff as well.

I'm just editing a book on the history of Loose allotments ('Loose' is a village in Kent and is pronounced 'Looze').  In the last century, there was a butcher who annoyed his neighbouring plot holders by putting all the left-over bits of meat on his plot.  They rotted down just fine, but the smell and the rats weren't popular...

Another plot was found to have lots of small buttons on it.  My mother-in-law (keen gardener and social historian) worked that one out.  The plot must have been fertilised with 'shoddy', which was what cheap clothes were made of - it was made from recycled woollen cloth.  The clothes rotted away and left the buttons behind.

Hop waste was also popular as a mulch in Kent.

2.  Kitchen waste is easy to collect.

Everything from the kitchen: potato peelings (If you really must peel your potatoes and lose all the vitamins...), veg peelings (same comment about vitamins - there are almost no vegetables where you gain anything by peeling them, expect possibly squashes when the rind has hardened), stale bread, food scraps, left over takeaways, past the date foods, apple cores - if it's food of any kind, you can put it in the compost.

Keep a small compost caddy in the kitchen - I line mine with newspaper which makes it easier to empty and to clean - and the newspaper can, of course, be composted as well.  There are lots of compost caddies on the market.  A few examples can be found here, but there's lots more.

A lid is necessary to keep out flies, but smell (in my experience, at least) is not a problem as long as the bin is emptied as soon as it is full.  You have three options with lining.

a.  No lining.  I've done it this way in the past.  You'll find the bottom of the bin can get a bit wet.  I just clean it out with a handful of newspaper and then compost the newspaper.

b.  Biodegradable lining.  I'm not keen on these personally.  They have a high carbon footprint to manufacture and you need to pay real money for them.  (and they don't rot as fast as newspaper)

c.  Newspaper.  Not decorative, but it uses up our free newspapers and helps soak up some of the moisture from the waste.  I use three or four pages at a time to line mine.  I overlap them a  bit and fold them over the edge to keep them in place.  I try and have multiple layers at the bottom of the bin.  The paper will soak up most of the moisture, though you'll probably need another page to clean out after you empty and before you make a new liner.

When your caddy is full, take it out and tip it into your compost bin.


3.  Compost Daleks don't take up much space.

They're called 'daleks' for obvious reasons, though most of them don't look like this:



but more like this:


There are other kinds of compost bin, but 'daleks' tend to be cheap and cheerful and often available at a discount from your local council.  They don't take up a lot of space and are easy to use.  (they can be a bit fiddly to remove the compost at the back, but if the worst comes to the worst, you can just lift the whole thing up, dig out the good compost and stick the rest back again)

At the end of the day, any kind of compost bin/heap will do. 

We have three daleks in our garden to fit into smaller spaces, down the allotment, we have two heaps surrounded by a crude wooden fence.

Tip everything into your dalek (or on your heap) - do NOT compress it (the air spaces are an important part of the process).  If you run out of space in the bin, start another one.

4.  There is a perfect mix, but you don't need to worry about it.

If you start reading up on compost, you'll find all sorts of fancy recipes.  Don't worry if they sound too complicated.

The basic rule is this: use a mixture of different stuff and it will all work out fine.  Don't let one ingredient dominate (apart from weeds, you can have as many of them as you like).  You can speed up the process by mixing up your heap with a fork, but it isn't essential.

If you have all grass clippings and no weeds or woody bits, then approach a neighbour.   They'll be only too glad either to give you an occasional bag of weeds/hedge clippings, or alternatively to take your grass clippings.  I get stuff from three of my neighbours now.


5.  If your compost bin has a lid, water it occasionally.

Heaps don't have lids -they get water from the rain.  They rot down fine.

Daleks have lids (which can help the heat build inside them on a sunny day and kill weed seeds).  Take the lid off now and then and if it looks really dry, chuck in a bucket of water.  This is not a fine art, and it won't be the end of the world if you forget.


6.  Real Compost is lumpy and has twigs in it.

Packets of compost from garden centres are full of fine-grained black stuff (and cost a lot of money).  That's because they have a lot of peat in them.  This fine if you want to grow seeds in trays or acid-loving plants, but for everything else, your home-made stuff will be better.  Peat is very low on nutrients.

How do you know when your compost is ready?  When you can't recognise the original ingredients any more.  (Don't worry about egg shells, just smash them and leave them in - they're good calcium).  The exception is twigs.  You have two options with twigs.  You either leave them in the mix  you're going to spread on your garden (which is what I do with the small ones), or chuck them back in the compost to go around a second time (which is what I do with the bigger ones).  Stuff bigger than twigs should not go into the compost in the first place.  (twigs, if you really want to know, add carbon and help create air space and structure in your compost bin and are a useful part of the process even if they don't rot completely the first time around)

7.  You can use compost almost anywhere.

When you have your compost, lumps, twigs and all, you can either dig it into the soil, if you're preparing a new area, or simply put a layer an inch or two thick on the surface around your plants.  Don't put it right up against the stems - plants know where they think the surface should be and you shouldn't argue with them.  You can spread it under trees, around fruit bushes, between rows of plants, inbetween perennials, anywhere where you think your plants are hungry.

Over the next year, your layer of compost will mysteriously vanish - ready for you to add some more the next year.  And your plants will be bigger, healthier, and crop better.

Anyone thinking of growing veg for the first time and looking for something easy to try could do a lot worse than grow rocket.



The first rule of growing veg is to grow something you like to eat.

I'm not a massive fan of rocket, but Richard really loves it and will eat it in preference to lettuce every time.  Rocket has a mild peppery flavour.  You can eat it as a salad vegetable or cook it like spinach or use it in pizza recipes.


The second rule is to grow something easy.

Rocket is on of these crops where you put in the seeds, stand back and wait for the plant to hit you.  Okay, maybe not quite that fast, but it is called rocket for a reason..  It germinates quickly, grows quickly, and you can do lots of small sowings for a succession of plants throughout the summer and autumn.  You could also grow it on your windowsill.


How to grow it.

1.  Get seeds (between £1.15 and £2 per pack.  This should be an easy plant to save seed from if you don't want to get new packets every year)

2.  Look at this page (I was going to give instructions, but they'd said almost exactly what I was going to and they have pictures to boot).

3.  Start picking leaves as soon as the plant gets more than six inches tall.  It'll be up to a foot in height before you can blink.  (Sow your second row once the first row has clearly visible tiny plants)

When you first start growing veg, the odds are that your soil will be pretty crap.  Don't worry, all soil can be improved - it takes a couple of years, but you can start with bad soil and know that your crop will get better as the soil improves.

How to improve it?

COMPOST

1.  Get a compost bin (or compost heap if you prefer). Some councils sell cheap compost bins made from recycled plastic - it's worth asking.  If they have them, they'll often be cheaper than from a garden centre.

2.  Into your compost bin chuck all kitchen waste.  Add grass clippings, weeds (except roots of bindweed), egg boxes (cardboard rots and the air pockets are very handy). You can add moderate amounts of newspaper as long as you tear it up and mix well in. If you add it in layers, it won't rot down.  You can add bits of small woody stuff (ie.  Cut up your brambles, hedge prunings etc)  The basic rule of thumb is that anything that was once alive will compost.

3.  Over six months to a year, the compost will rot down.  If you're really keen, you can accelerate the process by mixing it all up at intervals.  You need a good mixture of stuff.  If you have nothing but grass clippings, it won't rot.  Add cardboard to grass clippings and it will rot.  (and vice versa).  Kitchen waste rots fastest.

4.  When it's rotted down, take out any big woody bits and chuck them on the top of your new compost pile.  (You need two bins/piles so that one can be filling up while the other is rotting down - but you can wait until the first is full before getting a second)

5.  Do NOT squash down your compost.  The air spaces are important - that's why the woody bits and egg boxes/toilet roll middles are handy, they help give the pile structure.

When you finally have your compost, you can either dig it in, or apply it as a surface layer.  Both work.

MANURE

1.  If you have a riding stable anywhere near you, contact them and ask if they'd like you to remove some of their manure.  Most places will be delighted to see you take it away.

2.  Take as much as you possibly can.  There may be a thing such as too much manure, but I've yet to encounter it.  You can use a two inch layer all over your soil and do no harm at all.  A year or two after you've added this sort of amount, the soil texture dramatically improves.

3.  It does need to be ROTTED manure. Fresh manure would be bad for the plants.

4.  Ideally, dig the stuff in in the autumn so it's incorporated by spring.  Having said that, there's a number of plants (like fruit bushes) that are happy for you to apply a surface layer in spring.  And manure any time is better than no manure for improving soil.

5.  Do NOT use manure where you're going to plant seeds (the lumps will be too big).  That's where you need to have manured the year before.

6.  Brassicas (cabbages, brocolli, etc) do not like manure.  Everything else does.


DIGGING

1. When you first start off a bed, you'll need to dig it.  The soil will probably be compacted and will need the air.  Find instructions for double digging and follow them (because I can't do a diagram here).  Ideally, incorporate manure/compost into the lower spit.

2.  Get the weeds out.  Especially couch grass and bindweed.  (If you have a bindweed problem, use glyphosphate)

3.  Once you've got it properly dug, try and avoid walking on it (this compacts the soil, reduces the amount of air and impairs it's water-holding ability).  If you have an old plank, put that on the soil and walk along the plank when you need to reach things.

4. If you're applying compost or manure and aren't planting anything from seed at the time, then you can often apply them as a surface layer and let the worms do the hard work. Don't dig unless you have to:  a. Life is too short.  b.  Digging is not good for soil structure  c.  digging speeds up the loss of organic matter.

FERTILISER

1.  A layer of grass clippings is a surprisingly effective way of keeping down weeds and adding nitrogen and organic matter. Sprinkle a layer at least two inches thick around established plants (leaving a couple of inches of space around the stem).

2.  Dilute urine is fantastic and free.  Pee into a plastic milk bottle (or whatever else takes your fancy).  Fill a normal watering can a bit over 3/4 full, add 1 litre of urine and that should bring it to full.  Pour over anything that you want to fertilise/water.  Repeat as often as you fill up bottles.  My onions are looking great!  This treatment can be applied every 3 or 4 days and seems to have almost magical effects on plant growth and resistance to disease.  It also helps the plants fight off slugs (and going by my gooseberry bush it also seems to help the plant fight aphids).  Urine is sterile when it leaves the body, so don't worry on that score.

If you have any raspberries or blackcurrants, then this is the best time of year (just as the new leaf growth is starting) to feed them. About three inches of manure or compost all round them (go out at as far as the bush goes and maybe a little bit more). Don't let the compost/manure touch the stems - give a couple of inches space.

If you have gooseberries or redcurrants, they should already have had a couple of inches (goseberries come into growth a little earlier), but better late than never.

Remember, if you like soft fruit, you need to feed them. They can't give you the fruit unless you give them the nutrients to grow the fruit.

(strawberries are different - being very low growing, it isn't practical to use manure/compost, so you prepare a very nice bed indeed and create a new one every three years)

In the winter, when all the leaves have died, cut out at ground level (or an inch or two above if you can't reach easily) all canes that have borne fruit that year.  (in the case of autumn fruiting raspberries, that will usually be all of them.  In the case of summer fruiting raspberries, it will be around half of them)

Grass clippings make a good mulch for raspberries (and lots of other things too) and are a very effective way of suppressing weeds while adding organic matter and nitrogen to your soil. Cut your grass, and sprinkle the fresh clippings (and inch thick is fine) around your fruit bushes.

There are two species of plant with the common name Jersey Lily.  Amaryllis belldonna and Nerine bowdenii.  neither, it turns out are native to Jersey...  They both come from South Africa.

Trying to collect British native plants for the garden can be very difficult on occasion!

Taken a brief break from gardening as the baby great tits were getting very noisy.  I don't think the parents like approaching the nest when we're working.  So, the babies get a food break and we get a tea break.  (The parents were there with a beak full within seconds of us going indoors)

How do you get birds to nest in your garden?

1.  Nest boxes. Particularly loved by blue tits and great tits.  They work especially well for blue tits if there is an oak tree within a hundred metres.  Also, having a shrub somewhere close to the nest box may be an advantage - the parents often like somewhere to perch where they can take a quick look around to be sure it's safe to approach the nest.

2.  Ivy.  Thick ivy growing against a fence or wall.  We definitely have a pair of robins, and possibly a pair of dunnocks as well, nesting in our ivy this year.

3.  Hedges.  Prickly is best.  We have a pair of blackbirds nesting in the hedge this year.

4.  Pond.  A reliable supply of water for drinking, a shallow area for bathing, and lots of plants to support things like dragonfly larvae that make such a tasty snack for young birds when they emerge.

5.  Plants of every kind and no insecticides.  Baby birds need soft food - they can't eat seeds, nuts, etc until they are several days old.  They need insects, and that means plants.  British native plants are probably best from an overall wildlife perspective, but all plants are beneficial to some extent.

6.  Undergrowth and leaf litter.  Our dunnocks and blackbirds just love rummaging through old leaves and bits of compost that I've spread around the raspberries and under the hedge.  Yet more insect food for them (and excellent mulch for the plants)

You don't need a big garden (ours is fairly small), you just need to have lots of living things in it.  Hedges beat fences hollow - and they don't blow down in storms either.  Life attracts more life.

I've been wondering about this for many years, ever since visiting the Centre for Alternative Technology in Wales where they had collection bottles in the gent's loos.

I've just found a report of a study done in Finland that says it works every bit as well as conventional fertilizers and that urine is virtually sterile and thus there is no health risk.

This link also makes interesting reading (it appears to be about growing canabis, but the comments would apply to any plants).  It basically says that you can use urine directly to water plants, but it is best to dilute it by a factor of 10 or 20 to avoid scorching the roots.

I may well try this on the allotment.

And a post of mine from just over a year ago which refers to the fact that vegans who eat plants fertilised with human faeces do not suffer from vitamin B12 deficiency (gut bacteria produce it too far down the gut for us to absorb it when it's in the body).  I'm not sure I'll try that one right now, but maybe someday.

Spent a happy hour or so down the allotment this morning spreading compost around the spinach and beetroot.  The spinach was planted by the previous allotment holder, but it's been cropping pretty steadily all year and is still going strong even now.  So, I figured it was time I started actually feeding it!

The compost heap we started back in March has matured nicely now.  I'm spreading it all over the place - I'm removing the bigger twigs and tossing them into the new heap, but otherwise it's lovely and crumbly.  Mildly amusing to find a long piece of chain stitch thread.  Earlier in the year, I put an old cotton towel onto the heap - obviously the thread was nylon as that is all that is left now.  My old silk shirt and a cotton t-shirt have vanished without trace.

Any fabric will compost as long as it is made of natural fibres.  Don't put it on as a screwed up lump, spread it out like a blanket and pile the usual kitchen/garden waste on top of it.  We're also composting a fair quantity of cardboard.  Packaging material, egg boxes, toilet roll centres, cereal packets, etc.

Next time I go down, I must remember to take a load of newspaper.  Newspaper, preferably with grass clippings or compost on top to hold it down, makes an excellent mulch and I need to put a good layer around my blackcurrant bushes to keep the weeds down.

According to my library book, (and I'm just trying this myself) it's useful to compost grass clippings and newspaper together is.  Grass clippings are very heavy in nitrogen content, where as newspapers are mostly carbon.  Good compost requires a mixture of nitrogen and carbon, as will as some water.  The trick is to shred the newspaper and then pour water on it (damp, not sodden).  Cardboard is good too.  I've just started composting corrugated cardboard and egg boxes.

So, if you want to compost your grass clippings but find that they just turn into a slimy mess, try mixing them with shredded newspaper.  (and you really do need to mix it all up for decent results)

Let me know how it goes.  My compost is racing away; it may be the newspaper or it may be occasional feed of urine (which is also high in nitrogen)

Tea bags and coffee grounds compost well (one lady on the allotments swears by tea bags)

Here's a handy link on what will compost well from the kitchen and garden.

According to my library book, not only is composting newspaper easy to do, it also improves the overall mix of your compost and provides a good balance to things like grass clippings and weeds. (paper has more carbon, grass cuttings are higher in nitrogen) It should all rot down a little bit faster and better.

So, I'm giving it a go. I just fed the compost heaps their first newspaper today.

Still pondering the book's other suggestion... The best source of nitrogen is urine. Makes an excellent compost accelerator and comes with other free nutrients as well. (and reduces your sewage - it always did seem a bit daft to dump all that lovely fertiliser out at sea)

Should I go and find an old chamber pot?...