Tag Archives: Joe Maiden

Found and lost

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This morning we wandered around the garden with the watering can and spotted these carrot flowers from plants that were sown in a large pot (found down the road with a “please take me” note on it) up near the house. They’ve got strange old graphic type flowers. Architectual flowers for a Lldl budget?

We then found a sprig of lemon thyme growing out of a strawberry terracotta planter (also found on a wall to be thrown out). We did have a bigger plant in one of the beds but it just didn’t make it through the winter this year but this spindly thing did! Lemon thyme works well on roast chicken and we’ll be feeding this plant with comfrey liquid) to see if we can make it grow more as we have culinary plans for it.

And while watering the wild bit at the bottom of the garden, we found the old slow cooker container that is now a micro-wild pond and also an overflow for plants that have been thinned out from the big pond. There’s some water mint, hornwart and even a water lilly and the actual container isn’t even that big.

Enjoy this great weather and as the late great Joe Maiden used to say, it’s better to water early in the morning then the evening. Watering in the evening only invites the slugs and snails and you don’t want that.

Any pictures of your garden you’d like to share? Send us your pics to: one deck pete (at) g mail (dot) com.

It’s a bit early doors but…

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We bought some seed potatoes a couple of months ago and they’ve been happily sprouting (AKA chitting) in the back room by the window. As we mention every year, the late great Joe Maiden used to say that Good Friday was traditionally the day to put your seed potatoes in. What with Easter falling early some years it may be better hanging on a couple of weeks when the risk of frost has disappeared but as usual we’re contradicting ourselves.

We’ve grown spuds for a few years but we’re so fed up of scratching about under the surface of the plant looking for early potatoes, leaving a few in when we’ve harvested it and having a few “volunteer” plants grow the next season combined with general impatience we decided we may change the way we grow spuds. We also saw Monty Don on the telly the other week chatting about growing spuds in buckets and tubs so a “lightbulb” moment occured.

This morning we simply stuck a seed potato in a small bucket which was half full with some general purpose peat free compost freshly aquired from Lewisham Lidl. We buried the spud about an inch deep and stuck an old plastic mini cloche over the top. As soon as the shoots come to the surface we’ll put an inch worth of compost over the top and will repeat the process until we’ve filled the bucket. This way at the end of the growing season we will just knock the whole plant out of the bucket with all of the spuds intact. No fuss, no bother. If only life was that simple.

Wild Style

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It’s been an action packed week out in the back with a good bit of watering in the morning and sometimes the evening. The late great Joe Maiden used to say the later hours weren’t the best time to water as it attracted slugs and snails but what can you do when the ground is parched and we do enjoy a stroll up and down the garden path with a watering can. It’s a bit of moving meditation innit?

The wild part of the garden (above top) where we put in some seed bombs plus additional borage, poppies (above) and nasturtiums is now looking a bit wild but not in the organised wildness of the great Horniman’s Gardens locally (pic below). As some gardening mates have told us, it takes time and a lot of care to make a wild garden look good. That’s a paradox is there ever was one.

That reminds us, years ago we stayed in an Airbnb in Ireland where the owners were very much into nature (not the stripping off in your back garden type nature but the bird watching type nature) and since they moved in (they’d been there 25 years) they just left their garden to its own devices to attract as much nature as possible (again not the stripping off in your back garden type nature but the bird watching type nature).

The space looked mad and a little unkempt to say the least but each to their own. What was funny though they did say “We do try and make a point of taking care of the lawn though. We have a farmer’s horse come in for a feed once every few months”. Oh that’s alright then!

John Wayne won’t be big leggy

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We don’t know if it was the great Joe Maiden or someone on the council who told us this great “pinching out” tip that makes sweet peas that little bit bushier but whoever it was, it works.

We’re also not sure if we should have waited a little longer (when there were more sets of leaves) but the other week we just went for it and nipped the growing end out (just above the leaves) and you can see now some new growth from out of the lower leaf nodes. The whole idea is to stop the plants becoming tall and “leggy”, encouraging more side shoots which in turn will bring more flowers. We haven’t done too well over the last couple of years with sweet peas so let’s see if that changes this year.

This is a pepper

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We filled some of those raised beds a bit tight at the beginning of lockdown and it’s starting to look a bit like a jungle in some of them now. Perhaps it wasn’t the correct way of using them what with all the plants fighting for space, soil and water. In the raised bed (below) we’ve two tomato plants and a load of peas at the back, a lettuce and two cabbages in the middle row and in the front row either two chilli peppers or more than likely two peppers PLUS some spuds. Can we put anything else in there? Talk about square metre gardening!

With raised beds they do tend to dry out easily so we’re forever giving them a water during the morning. The great Joe Maiden would say never water at night as the slugs and snails would be attracted to the moisture and suggested always early in the day is best for watering and we’ve also started giving the raised beds a comfrey feed once a week too.

The peppers or chillies or whatever they are, are flowering (top and bottom pics) and there’s some mini-fruits too! We love those raised beds!

Spud U like?

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As it isn’t too long to Good Friday – traditionally the time to be sowing your potatoes (according to the late great Joe Maiden) – thought went out to the seed spuds chitting away merrily on the windowsill at Weeds HQ.

While on the internet researching about the variety we have chitting here ‘Rocket”, we found out a couple of interesting things about it on Gardenfocussed.co.uk. It turns out it’s easy to grow and one of the first early spud to mature. The other was that it was:

“A rather bland tasting potato. They can be perked up flavour-wise by adding slightly more salt than normal, a knob of butter and preferably a good sprinkling with fresh mint. But there’s no getting away from it, if you want a tasty spud, look elsewhere.”
https://www.gardenfocused.co.uk/vegetable/potatoes/variety-rocket.php

And we thought we were doing so well! So this weekend it’s back to the drawing-board and down the garden centre to get some Maris-Pipers or something tasty. The moral of this spud related tale is do your research!

And unconnected to anything potato based here’s a lovely tune as heard on On The Wire the other week: Rhythm & Sound’s History Version. Tune!

What a carry on!

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I popped into Shannon’s this morning whilst the sun was out and on the way round deciding what to treat myself with, I noticed this delightfully named passion flower.

silly cow

While we were there, we bought a bag of coarse grit for my daughter’s cactus collection. On the way out we noticed a few people doing a double take at the bag my daughter was carrying. And this is why…

Coarse gritIn the background while writing this, we’re listening to this week’s fitting tribute to the late Joe Maiden “the godfather of soil,” by Tim Crowther and friends on BBC Radio Leeds. It’s a mixture of happy and sad and a show worth listening to on play again here. R.I.P Joe Maiden.

Southern Freeez

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There’s been another frost warning tonight so the big cover up continues here in SE23. Listening to the last episode of Gardening with Tim & Joe on BBC Radio Leeds this afternoon, Joe mentioned using something as simple as old newspapers as frost protection which, being cheap and cheerful, is well up our street!

bubble and squeekMe, I’m using a combination of some old bubble-wrap (from an e-bay purchase) over my tomato plants, some fleece over my early potatoes and jam jars and a top off a seed propagator over some sunflower seedlings, all various ways of doing the same job. Jack Frost please be kind to us tonight!

Fleece and jar and lid

Undercover Lover

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Fleece on the bed _2014

There were a couple of frosts last week which got me wondering on Thursday morning about the spuds I sowed a few weeks back after listening to Joe Maiden on BBC Radio Leeds. He said at the time it’s worth putting a row in as you never know what the future weather will bring.

Spuds pop up their heads_2014

I put some fleece over the area Thursday night as there was supposedly going to be more frost but then in the morning thought that it might have been a case of “shutting the stable door after the horse had bolted.”

Today I lifted it up the fleece and saw that the spuds have sprouted, how good is that, that Joe Maiden talks a load of sense! Do listen to the BBC Leeds’ Gardening with Tim & Joe show as there’s some great advice on it.

Veg Bed March 2014

I stuck in some Carrots in the veg bed today and noticed there’s some Parsnips and Cabbages peeping through the soil after sowing them a month ago. The morale of this tale is, it’s well worth taking a risk with seeds, what have you got to lose?