Ciaran’s Omnipurpose Blog

We've been chomping on salad from the garden for the last few weeks. It was incredibly easy to grow the salad:

• Get a few growbags (£5)
• Get some seeds (£3 – actually I got a load of Rocket seeds for Christmas)
• Sprinkle the seeds onto the growbags
• Sprinkle water on the growbags.
• Forget about them for a while
• Harvest
• Eat!

My mum's neighbour, Collette, also gave me a packet of radish seeds. In French. I'm not a huge radish fan, but thought, "What the hell!" and threw them into a pot anyway. After 3-4 weeks they were huge!

Now THAT'S Extreme Gardening, for you! 

After my tomato crop was wiped out in the summer, I decided to plant some carrots and broccoli to grow during the autumn. The broccoli's almost ready to eat, and we've got the steamer on standby!

This stuff usually retails for quite a pretty penny, and it's usually best cooked fresh from the garden. We've also got rocket salad growing too, so with luck, we'll end up spending very little for tastless food at the supermarket this summer!

You may have read about the thrilling and gripping adventures I had in the garden last year here.

Well this year, I'm starting early. I had already prepared the frozen soil by digging it up in late February. Now, I've pulled together something that vaguely resembles a project plan for my garden.

Yesterday, I sauntered out of the house for my idea of retail therapy, the garden centre and bought:

• Sweetcorn
• Mint
• Dill
• Chives
• Coriander
• Jalapeno chilli peppers
• Mange tout
• Tomatoes
• French beef tomatoes (variety: Marmande)
• Olive-shaped cherry tomatoes (variety: Sweet Olive)
• Blight-resistant standard tomatoes (variety: Ferline F1)
• And sunflowers to brighten up the house!

Here's a snap of the seedtray system I'm using. It will allow me to grow a lot of individual plants that I can quickly prick out. I've got about 120 seeds sown in 3 trays. I'm also using 20 "peat pots", which are designed to rot over time in the ground. The idea of this is to minimise the disturbance to the roots of the seedlings when transplanting. I read somewhere that this was especially important for sweetcorn

140 plants is a lot! My garden doesn't really have a huge amount of room. Last year I had about 15 tomato plants on the go and the garden was like a jungle. So I think this year, I'll be looking to pick a good mixture of seedlings to grow on to full plants and give the rest away. I didn't have any trouble finding homes for the dozens of tomato plants I raised from seed last year, so this year should be no different, and it seems that sweetcorn isn't all that tricky to grow either, so these should prove unusual and popular gifts too!

I've got the seeds germinating in the loft at the moment under the window. With any luck, I should see some shoots in a week or so!

I've been growing tomatoes in my garden. Some from seedlings and some germinated from seed. I had about 10 large tomato plants in my garden and another colony at my parents (I couldn't fit all the seedlings in pots in my garden).

Within the past few days, I've lost almost all the plants in my garden to tomato blight, a fungal infestation possibly brought on by the bad run of cloudy, damp weather we've had. My once-proud 8ft plants have turned into a rotten mush.

I spent this afternoon collecting the dead and trying to save the remainder with anti-fungal spray. There was a depressingly large amount of dead stuff to throw out. My garden feels very empty now without the tomatoes in there, so I'm going to have to think of something else to start growing.

Thankfully, Rebecca managed to salvage some of the ripe and unripe fruit from the vines, so we'll see what can be made with them. Rosie also turned up to commiserate (above).

Apparently, this year has been particularly bad in the UK for tomato blight, and farmers are going mad with the sprayers. As if to confirm this, the colony at my parents' house has also died out.

So, in future, I'll be making sure to spray them with anti-fungal chemicals regularly and to look out for the first signs of the rot setting in.

Either that, or emigrate to somewhere with proper summers.

Sorry I've been off the radar a bit recently. Several factors have contributed to this:

• Work taking up more and more time than ever
• Hayfever making me drowsy and unmotivated
• The heat in my attic meaning that I can't stand being on the computer
• The sunshine keeping me outdoors and away from my computer
• Facebook eating up every spare moment I could be using for blogging
• Heroes
• Gardening

So it's the last point, gardening, that I'd like to tell you all about today. Check out these beauties!  

  I've become a bit of a greenfingers of late. Rebecca's had to put up with me pottering about in the garden instead of being slumped in the attic on the PC, or out at the gym, but she's also been helping out a lot with moving the plants from growbags into planters. Growbags are pretty good to start with, but don't give much support to the tomatoes when you need to stake them. That's where planters really come into their own (plus you can move the plants around easily). We've got a pretty small garden, but approximately 15 tomato plants, some rocket, some petit pois and a lonely aubergine. Because of where the sun falls, I have to crowd a few of the plants near the kitchen window. A leisurely reakfast on the weekend resembles the state of siege endured by the protagonists in The Day of the Triffids. So I've become a little bit gardening mad. I'm looking forward to the idyll of a place out of town, with a big garden and room for a greenhouse. Soon after that, I'm sure I'll be fretting about the condition of the lawn and start wearing a dressing gown that doesn't quite close properly, slippers and maybe even start smoking a pipe.