Frugal Bytes - Garlic and Baby Beetroot

In the Frugaldom Winter Garden

With all the rain and wind we've had over the past couple of months, I'm amazed that anything is surviving in the garden but, as nature would have it, there's always something to see.

 

 

 

Last year's beetroot seed sowings are still surviving, so I'm going to thin these out and pickle the baby beets. I love beetroot, so I'm hoping that I might just about be able to stretch this lot throughout the year, if they don't mind being pickled in malt vinegar. I have two large tubs' worth of them.

 

 

 

My first lot of garlic cloves were planted a few weeks ago and these have been growing quite quickly, I hope not too quickly! They are from whole garlic meant for cooking - no need to buy specific cultivating varieties when you have your own in the kitchen.

 

 

 

I split mine up - half were planted outdoors into the small raised bed and the other half popped into a sealed polythene bag and kept in the fridge. (Garlic likes the cold to start it off, for some reason.) The above are the ones from the fridge, now about ready to be planted out into containers on the patio. If you cook with garlic, growing your own is great fun and very frugal (assuming you have a garden, trough or bucket in which to grow your own. One single garlic bulb can split into about 8 cloves and each of these cloves can produce a new bulb.

 

I'll update again after I've thinned out the beetroot. Looking forward to having a few leafy greens at mealtimes - don't forget the leaves are edible! I'm sure Septimus and Octavius, the new Frugaldom bunnies, will enjoy their share of this crop, too. Meanwhile, the wormery has been topped up with some peelings, brown cardboard and egg shells so the hundreds of baby worms have sufficient food to turn into lovely worm-juice as liquid fertiliser for this year's crops.

 

NYK, Frugaldom

Back on the Trail of the Frugal Microholding (Part 3)

Making Decisions Affecting the Creation of our Microholding

Part 3 of 3

FILLING IN THE GAPS! This is the concluding part of my 3-part blog for the weekend, bringing you up to date with progress (or lack of) and arriving at a decision that wouldn't have been made but for the events over the past few days. I'll start with our patio area, as I was hoping to make it very productive by way of the fact that it gets plenty of sunshine and is particularly well sheltered on three sides.

On the left, you can see the vacant gap in the top half of our developing garden. It is fairly flat, stony and has very little soil. It also sits in line with the pipework for the septic tank, so any digging and backfilling would need to accommodate that.


Looking from my kitchen window, I can see all of what we refer to as the patio. It's basically a concreted area where the old outbuildings once stood, along with what we were told was some sort of lean to greenhouse or old-style tomato house. The main outbuilding has been renovated - this will, one day, become the eco arts studio - and the big hole in the centre filled in to create another garden feature. The colourful flexi-trugs along the wall contain a variety of plants, from fuchsias to beetroot, cabbage and courgettes. So far, the slugs have left these alone!

On the opposite side of this concrete square, I have a row of all my
plastic tubs that have been accrued over the years, each planted up with seeds of one description or another. Next to these are the strawberry tubs that haven't really produced as well as they could have.

They need thinning out and feeding up to ensure they continue to crop in years to come. It is from these tubs that all the runners get potted, so I do tend to have strawberry plants popping up all over the place and am constantly trying to think of where best they can go to ensure they grow, get sunshine and don't get attacked by birds or beasties.

This year, I am clearing out the raised bed where I planted all my Saffron crocus bulbs - the bulbs are still looking OK and the plants do grow, but I have never had a single flower from them. This leads me to believe that they don't like where they are at all! The raised bed can just be seen at right hand side of this photo.

This is how the hole in the concrete 'patio' area is looking now. Last year I
scraped it all out and made a mini-pond, lining it with bubble wrap and feed sacks, surrounding it with rocks and planting it up with cuttings taken from the bottom of the garden by the edge of the stream. I call it the critter garden, as it seems to attract visitors of all description, from toads to lizards and frogs. This is who was in it yesterday.

I added the bird table at the narrowest part and then turned the other half of the crumbling mess into a circular bed, where I planted many of the strawberry runners and then surrounded them with spinach beet to use for feeding the rabbit. Sadly, the rabbit is no more.

Beyond this, off the end of the concreted area, is where I made my blueberry bed for the three little bushes I got last year. This was constructed from the logs cut from a neighbour's conifer and I employed a little bit of eco-artistic licence to the final piece, which I call my log man bird table.

Blueberries like an ericaceous or acidic environment, as do heathers, so I add whatever tea leaves, pine needles and bark chippings I have to help these along. So far, so good - the only thing the slugs and snails have got are the sunflowers, which grew from falling bird seed that must have been there from winter. Behind this lies two old fish crates covered with my half price sun-tunnels. Each crate contains two cucumber plants.

So what is all this really about? We are doing our best to cultivate the wild garden, making the most of whatever can be salvaged and recycled, trying to grow plants from other plants and fighting what often feels like a losing battle against the elements, the insects, the slugs and the snails. What more can we do?

ANSWER - SPOT A BARGAIN AND JUST GO FOR IT!
This is my fantastic bargain that I have been spurred into buying now rather than putting off any longer. It is approximately 15' long (4.5m) and just over 6' with and high (2m), comes complete with a fixing kit and delivery is FREE. Yes, folks, I have finally taken the plunge and bought myself the long awaited frugal poly tunnel! The vacant space in the middle of the garden is ABOUT 8' x 18' once fully cleared and this is what is going to fill that space. Now I know that some folks who may happen to read this post will wonder what the great excitement is all about but, for those of you who know me, you know how much I try to prioritise my spends while living in the middle of a renovation project but this purchase, which was on offer with £100 OFF the price, is something that I will put to great use during my battle with the elements and the critturs that foil my growing plans at every opportunity.

In memory of Jayjay - this will become the hub of my future growing enterprise of microholding and fundraising.

Frugaldom.

Some Summer Updates from Frugaldom

Life in Frugaldom

There has been so much happening in the garden that work indoors has ended up on the backburner again! End result is, we still don't have a kitchen but we have a whole host of critturs, beasties and birds visiting the wildlife garden and, in return, not an awful lot by way of homegrown vegetables.

The strawberries did incredibly well and we're now onto blackcurrants and raspberries. I think I've picked a sufficient quantity of blackcurrants to make enough jam to last us until next year, but have had to freeze the berries pending further work on what will, eventually, be reinstated as my kitchen.

Last week, I picked the first cabbage, but there are few surviving the constant slug attacks. The slugs are out of control at the moment, so I really need better defences and a clear division made between the vegetable plots and the rest of the garden. This permaculture lark is all fine and good, communing with nature and encouraging wildlife, but it's very time consuming and slow to cultivate.

The herb spiral, on the other hand, has come on in leaps and bounds, producing a profusion of herbs, strawberries and water cress in the tiny 'pondlet' at the bottom of it. Since building this one, I have now completed a second, circular bed adjacent to it, which has been planted with more herbs and flowers. The herb spiral is a garden feature that I can highly recommend, I'm really impressed by how well everything grows in it.


My next project was 'the logman'.

Late last year, a neighbour had a conifer felled and gave us all the wood, so it had been stacked at the bottom of the garden for some time. To be honest, it isn't the best type of wood for burning on an open fire, so this led me to thinking up a novel idea of what to do with the logs - I built a raised bed shaped roughly like a boat and have planted blueberry bushes and heather in it. At the 'helm', I used the final log to make a bird table and named him 'the logman'. He's very popular with the birds, I have to admit, and his lantern can be lit on summer nights, so he's become quite a feature in the Frugaldom garden. His face is made from bottle tops and a twig, with some more twigs secured around the edge of the slice of log that serves as the bird table. Again, I am really pleased at how this turned out and even more impressed by the number and variety of birds that frequent 'him' on a daily basis.

The good weather continued here despite tales of flash floods and high tides elsewhere, so it seemed like a good idea to make a start on creating the long awaited 'bug hotel'. Some readers may remember I was able to get a wrought iron hanging rail from someone on Freecycle a few years back and this was originally converted into a vegetable growing rack. This year, however, it became the basis for the new bug hotel. I was inspired to begin this project after reading about 'Bugingham Palace', so set about creating my own, frugal version.

The Frugaldom bug hotel was completed last week and even includes a homemade bee house, which was made using the hollow stems pruned from the Himalayan Honeysuckle at the bottom of the garden. Again, I am quite proud of the end result, finishing it all off with a butterfly house that I found for half price in Aldi. £3.49 seemed like a small price to pay when everything else used was free. I have now made a start on the bottle garden, but it's only in the early stages, so nothing much worth discussing just yet.

 But what about the whole homeworking/microholding/self-sustainability 'thing'?, I hear you ask. Well, while the weather has been good, we have taken the opportunity to invest some of the savings into renovating the old outbuilding, which will then provide us with safe, dry storage space and work-space by way of a garden room, otherwise known as our eco-arts studio.

This is what the building looked like when we first bought the property. It was a derelict disaster zone, to say the least. It took us months to clear away all the rubbish that completely filled it and surrounded it, then there were all those broken windows to sort out before they fell on anyone.

The serious work began on this project about three weeks ago, but it has proven to be a far bigger job than first anticipated. For a start, the roof and two full walls - those not shown in the photos - have had to be removed and replaced to make the building safe. In order to do this, we had to disconnect the electrics, (I could hardly believe there were live wires in there in the first place!)which will need to be fully replaced at some point.

We are now at the stage of needing to find a door and new windows to replace the old ones, so I've been busy scouring the area for anything that might fit. Hopefully, one of the glazing companies from the nearest town may have some old ones available at a cheap enough price to warrant moving them and making them fit the gaps. In the meantime, the old concrete blocks have had a coat of whitewash to brighten them up a bit and there's someone out there right now sorting out the floor and replacing all the wood. Exciting times ahead and everyones' fingers are crossed that the sunshine will return soon so we can complete the renovation. Only then will we tackle the completion of the kitchen.

For anyone interested in life in and around our area, I have set up a Facebook page that is now home to all the photographs of the surrounding area, along with progress photos taken of the wildlife garden, so please feel free to visit and 'like' the page, that way you can be kept bang up to date with garden progress in our tiny corner of southwest Scotland.

The Frugaldom forums are also still fairly busy for anyone who would like to take part in any of the frugal living challenges.

Hoping not to leave if for so long next time and looking forward to making the most of this summer's staycation. There's so much to see and do when you're trying not to spend, so wildlife, nature and the 'make do and mend' activities are all being well served, as are free events being attended.

www.frugaldom.com

Solving the problem of holes in concrete

A FRUGAL PATIO GARDEN

The area we have designated as our patio had one glaring problem - a massive, hideous gap in the concrete that flooded during heavy rain. Solving the flooding problem was a must, but digging up the concrete to install a new drain of some description wasn't an option I was prepared to even consider incorporating into the frugal budget, so here's what I did.


The day we moved into the cottage



This is what I refer to, very loosely, as our patio. It's a concreted area outside the back door that stretches for about 10 metres. It's ideal for parking planters, junk, log store, bins and coal bunkers, but it had the problem of a huge gap in the middle, which I quickly filled with gravel in an effort to make it less hideous.

It didn't take too long to clear out all the junk, most of which was recycleable in some way, shape or form, so we have had the use of this patio area for sitting out during dry weather. On numerous occasions, we've eaten breakfast, lunch and dinner out there, as it's often warmer outside than in, especially during the sunny winter and spring days. It's an absolute suntrap, so all the tubs and fishboxes got moved along the south facing wall and used for sowing seeds. But the problem remained - a muckle great hole that was both unsightly and a bit of a 'tripping-up' point when carrying stuff about the place.

This is the ghastly 'hole' filled with gravel raked from elsewhere to prevent anyone falling into it. At its widest and longest points, it's about a metre wide and about 3 metres long.

Last month, I began raking out the stones in the hope of finding concrete beneath it but, instead, found rocky soil! Instant appeal, as I'd just found myself another little patch of potentially productive growing space! Cue hand tools - a spade was useless as it was too rocky.

The soil I found underneath wasn't too bad, it certainly wasn't worth ignoring or covering in concrete - we can't eat concrete and no comments, please, about my rock buns! :)

Raking about in the ever-increasing heap of junk that was being piled high in the garden, I found a length of plastic, possibly off an old waterpipe. That fitted nicely around the far end of the 'hole' and gave me a template from which to work. I'd to wedge it with rocks to stop it springing back out but it eventually stayed in place and allowed me to follow the line with my incessant digging.

There were some pretty big rocks got dug out from here, I can tell you. Some were more like boulders, fit to be built into the dry stone wall that borders our garden.

It took a full day of raking and digging to empty concrete canyon, but I saved the best of the soil for later use.

Next stage was a simple progression, as I couldn't see any of the bird tables from the kitchen window. I movedone and placed in the middle ofthis new 'patio garden, separating my hole in the ground into two holes in the ground.

Among all the rubbish that was here, we had salvaged several lengths of drain pipe, so a piece of that was incorporated along the edge in the hope that surplus surface water would be channeled off further from the seating area. The other reason, of course, was to provide some sheltered hiding place for the lizards, toads and frogs that frequent the back garden - this might tempt them out of the woodpile, for a start!

We got plenty of rain for the next few days, so the pipe theory of sending the water away proved to be very effective. Keeping everything in place was a simple matter of strategically positioning the rocks that had been dug out of there.

Next was what to plant. I had been reading about herb spirals on some of the permaculture newsletters and these sounded very interesting, although completely impractical, being 2 metres across when I had only a 1 metre near-circle, but I couldn't see any reason why I couldn't adapt the design to use up more of the rocks. So, my first spiral, or circulal, garden was born.

I built it up in the middle by making a smaller circle with log slices, filled it with the recently removed soil then began transplanting some of last year's strawberry cuttings, along with some thyme and some lupins that needed splitting. I even treated the new garden to a sprinkling of compost! This is at the far end of the patio, so any surplus rain water shouldn't lie, it should, hopefully, keep these strawberries watered.

Now for what to do with the other side, which flooded. It seemed simple to me... dig out a mini-pond! It would need to be ultra-frugal, as I had no pond liner and only what was lying about the place as materials, so more digging got done. I then laid some old fleece (previously used as curtain linings) along the bottom, taking the rough edges off the remaining rocks and stones.

On top of the fleece, I laid several feed bags, from the poultry grain. Over the top of that, I laid a layer of bubblewrap (we NEVER through out bubblewrap) and then a large polythene bag that had been saved from the sheepwool insulation... this seemed to do the trick and looked water tight, so now it was time to try filling it up with water.

I laid the drainpipe right to the edge of the mini-pond, so the rain water that pooled in that area could easily overflow the pond and run down into the circle garden. It took a variety of materials to hold down the plastic and I had the straight edge stepped up a little using a length of discarded wood. The ledge would hopefully help any critturs to safety if they inadvertently landed in the water.

The little patio garden was coming along nicely, multi-tasking as a wildlife 'playpark', bird feeding station and some extra growing space.

I kept adding bits and pieces that I found around the garden, surrounding it all in rocks, which we have plenty of here. I even transplanted several weeds from the side of the stream and sat the pots into the water on rocks. A square of plastic mesh got placed along the shallow end, allowing anything that climbs in the ability to climb back out again. Finally, a length of log, a baton of wood and two old steel hoops, possibly from a long forgotten cloche, were secured in place to hold the makeshift pondliner.

The final result looks very effective, considering it had cost absolutely nothing to construct. However, the first time Floppity rabbit saw it, she spent most of her time munching on the strawberry plants, so a remedy had to be found for that!

A quick search for 'companion planting' brought me to the conclusion that I needed something leafy, hardy and bunny friendly, so I have sown perpetual spinach around the outer edge of my circle.

The area is currently out of bounds to rabbits until the spinach grows big enough to distract her from the strawberries! I hope it works!

Since building this, I have now spent a hefty £8.29 on a solar fountain and we have been lucky enough to have had plenty of sun to keep it flowing.

Within the space of a couple of weeks, the strawberries are flowering and the spinach has begun to sprout. There are now also radish seeds sown and I raked up some old pine needles and moss to mulch the plants to try to protect them from the frosts we are still getting.

NYK Media

Frugaldom

Container Gardening While Facing East

What Could I Grow in the Front 'Garden'?

This is what has been uncovered, so far, in our front 'garden'. It's a small space with big potential, in my opinion, despite its easterly aspect and it's ancient cobbles.

As this is the first thing you see when you arrive at our house, it's only natural that I want it to look presentable, but it also has to be in keeping with the rest of the street. Many of the houses here, including ours, have Listed Building status, so the cobbles are of historic interest.

I was delighted to discover that the original cobbles lay preserved beneath their layer of concrete, but cobbles don't make for the best growing medium. Container gardening has to be the way forward here, as it's going to be a bit like cultivating a patio.

A little bit of research shows that there are many colourful and interesting plants that could do well facing east, so long as we look after them properly. Climbing roses, clematis, honeysuckle, fuschias, pansies, nasturtiums, geraniums... the list goes on and on, including most bulbs, so there's no shortage of variety for spring & summer flowers. It's where to start that's my problem.

At the point of moving into the house, I sat my existing window boxes out, along with a pair of juniper bushes. These have done OK so far, although the begonias didn't like their new home at all. The nasturtium seeds grew without a problem and the marigolds seem to be doing well, but it's not much to look at, at the moment.

Having now uncovered the first half of the cobbles, I've left a concrete border along the edge and plan on leaving the path to the front door. What I would like to do is plan a container garden that will sit well within this space, making the cobbles the main feature while still creating a productive garden. The name of the game, afterall, is microholding, so even this cobbled area needs to produce something alongside any flowers I may plant.

Planning hasn't really begun for this project yet, but I am open to any suggestions regarding what could be grown here without it looking like a mish mash of pots. I'd like year round colour, or at least foliage, everything needs to stay in containers and it needs to be able to stand up to only a few hours of early sunshine during the latter part of the year, when temperatures will also plummet. A tall order, perhaps, but it's a challenge that I think I'll enjoy tackling, especially if it can be kept as low maintenance and low budget as possible.

If anyone has any thoughts or ideas for how I might proceed, please let me know. And lest anyone forgets, this all has to be done within a very frugal budget, as it isn't exactly a top priority in a renovation project. Oh, and I don't have any bulbs or flower seeds, so it's very much a case of starting at the beginning.

I do intend planting up some tubs with an assortment of daffodils, tulips, crocuses, snowdrops etc, but that's all dependent on what friends and family have available at the end of their gardening year. I'm also hoping that we'll have space cleared in the back garden to build the greenhouse within the next month or two, so that could provide over-wintering for whatever needs extra shelter during the coldest months and also a place for starting off any seeds and/or cuttings.

Your suggestions and comments would be much appreciated to help me with yet another challenge. Documenting the progress is par for the course and I hope that others will be able to learn by any mistakes I may make along the way. You know there have to be a few calamities or gardening disasters, there always are. :)