Gardening in England

joshpeckney wrote:Greetings, I am fresh and green in the forum. So glad to see so many fellow countrymen. Hope we can share a tip or two since I am still a novice in gardening.

 Welcome, Josh.
As llama momma says, get the book first and read it through often. Come here for almost instant answers, encouragement and support. I love following the progress of newbies.
I particularly like the search feature here, there is so much information stored there.
What part of England do you hail from? I live in Canada but come from London, Surrey, Herfordshire and Bedfordshire and still have a sister and brother in Yorkshire.

Kelejan wrote:

joshpeckney wrote:Greetings, I am fresh and green in the forum. So glad to see so many fellow countrymen. Hope we can share a tip or two since I am still a novice in gardening.

 Welcome, Josh.
As llama momma says, get the book first and read it through often. Come here for almost instant answers, encouragement and support. I love following the progress of newbies.
I particularly like the search feature here, there is so much information stored there.
What part of England do you hail from? I live in Canada but come from London, Surrey, Herfordshire and Bedfordshire and still have a sister and brother in Yorkshire.

I live and work in Bristol. It's my home town as well. Thanks for the tips, I may get the book and check it out.

Josh, I don't know how I missed your greeting. So, may I take this opportunity to Welcome you to the Forum!

Welcome Josh

I have to also encourage you to get a copy of the book.  It is the starting place.  It is available from Amazon and also as a Kindle book.

I loved England when I spent almost 3 years living in Croughton in Northants.

Kay

Hello Josh ,
Welcome to the site.
We share rain clouds most days .
 I'm 86 miles to the left of you at the West end of the M4 near Penygroes( whoever heard of a Yorkshire man living in South Wales? ).


 I've been doing square foot gardening since 1997 in the manner of the original book thatMel wrote  & have been gardening for may years previous to that.

If you look at my join date that's when I became aware of Mel's revised " All New Square Foot Gardening "( ANSFG)  and not long afterwards decided to move over to it entirely as I was in the throes of a major garden /landscaping exercise.

 The ANSFG has been an outstanding success for me , though you do have to man up and bin lots of old ideas that you may have once to held to get the best out of it all .

ANSFG is eminently suitable for the UK climate , in fact I'd go as far to say it's perhaps best done here above all other places ........but that's our little secret.



 If your ever going to be around this area to the left of Swansea ( SA18 *BZ ) drop me a PM or email & perhaps we can sort something out a visit to look at & talk about what we have , what we have done /found out if you like.

Dave aka Plantoid

Hi Josh, from Atlanta, GA (SE US).  Somehow I missed your arrival as well...  But Welcome!

plantoid wrote:
ANSFG is eminently suitable for the UK climate , in fact I'd go as far to say it's perhaps best done here above all other places ........but that's our little secret.

You've certainly got my curiosity up. Why do you think ANSFG is even better in England/Wales than other places?

Marc Iverson wrote:

plantoid wrote:
ANSFG is eminently suitable for the UK climate , in fact I'd go as far to say it's perhaps best done here above all other places ........but that's our little secret.

You've certainly got my curiosity up.  Why do you think ANSFG is even better in England/Wales than other places?

 It's down to the results I get by doing ANSFG it's far better than playing in mother earth's stuff. , look in the Gallery at the top of the page then go into the big stuff.

We have a long growing season for lots of things , the temps , rain and general weather lend to steadily & consistently growing all manner of things especially if you can back it up with cloches & a glasshouse. So long as you sow and plant out at the right time for your area .

 Here in South Wales we get the odd fall of snow & sleet but by day four it's usually gone due to the temperate moist air predominantly coming in off the Atlantic deflected by Southern Ireland & into the Bristol channel . It's a real blue moon event to have three or more days of frost at minus 10 oC in the second week of February .

 Agreed ... I can't grow some of the hotter climate crops like pineapple and oranges but I do have some black grape vines which this fifth year have produce about 20 bunches of the sweetest of grape I've ever had. I have dwarf stock 2 x apple and 2 x pear .
 My water melons were really planted too late because the landscaping & bed construction was not finished in time  for a crop but the butternut squashes have done well .
 The toms have done well despite getting hit with blight on about 50 % of the outdoor crop , the green house crop went crazy in the end.

 My red chilli long finger peppers have gone bonkers ..I never expected so many per plant .
There's so much more that's done really well , I'd be here typing for a couple of hours or so to get it all down.

So you mean because of your long growing season, ANSFG leads to an especially productive garden where you live as opposed to where others do?

I can see looking at it that way. One thing that contrarily comes to mind, though, is how much water-retentive growth medium like MM helps out people with hot summers. For those climates, the relative difference in productivity is also great ... sometimes the difference between a plant being stunted or not, or even living and dying, can be a single brutally hot afternoon or a single missed day watering. And we can get months on end of 100 degree temps with no rain.

By the same token, we get rainy autumns, and people whose plants are sitting in the heavy clay soil around here can be in trouble. MM, and especially MM in raised beds, can help that too, by absorbing water but not holding onto it forever and a day.

So there's the extra productivity you get because your conditions are mild, and the extra productivity others might get because their conditions are not. Both can be dramatic differences. In the absolute sense, you might get more crops; on the other hand, people with worse conditions might get few or none at all without the help of MM and ANSFG's other principles. That difference can be, and feel, pretty dramatic too. I'm sure others in more difficult climates are just as happy with the difference between something and nothing, or moderate productivity versus good productivity, as you are with the difference between good productivity and great productivity.

Over here, hardly anyone grows in the decomposed granite that comprises most of the native soil here. It would be a waste of time. Thank goodness that ANSFG is so widely and easily applicable.

The mother earth around here is a mix of acidic sulphurous blue coalmine clays or cold heavy glacial silts that flowed down from the local glacial lake over to this side of the hill when the glaciers were here in the ice age.  There is not a lot of decent land locally to grow crops around here , I think it's said that most of the local farms are less than 100 acres .  That's why the vast majority of local farmers are subsistence sheep farmers .  Every year there's getting less & less of them as they give uo trying to make a decent living as the land is not fertile enough for enough sheep to graze quality grass all year round.  Once they start having to buy in feed for the sheep the profits plummet to almost zero by market time.

It seems no matter how hard or for how long it tips it down with rain my MM filled high raised beds stay at roughly the same consistent moisture levels. So the plants thrive on that event alone . I think the average rainfall is 41  inches or so per year . in 2005 it was almost the record beaker of over  50 inches .

 We do occasionally get a few days when the temps are creeping to 100 oF ( 33 oC) but they are few and far between . The first few months of this year were our wryest on record , so I used time clocked water sprinklers to come on at 04.00 hrs each morning for 15 min so as to allow the water to have time to soak down into the bed well below the drying effect of the sun and wind. 

I don't water in the early evenings as the longer darker cooler periods encourage slugs & snails to breed , plus by the end of the working day all I want to do these days is throw the towel in and lay flat for an hour or so because of my disability problems kicking off  ..... again.

Would one of you please explain how the allotment works?  Wife and I spent a couple of weeks in Bristol 3 years ago and heard talk about allotment but didn't really get an explanation.  I'm just curious.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allotment_%28gardening%29

During the WWII years my dad had an allotment that was about a mile away from home where he grew extra vegetables for the family.  The allotment was one of a number next to our church.

He used to put me on a little saddle on his crossbar and we would spent several hours there working while I played in the dirt.  Each allotment had its little shed, built by the holders where they stored their tools.

That was where I planted my first potato and produced enough taters for one family Sunday dinner, and was also responsible for me taking up gardening late in life.

I would say it was like a community garden but on a slightly larger scale as the plots were quite large.  I don't remember how many plots there were but I would say dozens if not scores.  It was part of Dig for Victory.  Looking at a PBS programme called The War Time Farm it was part of the effort to keep us from starving. Of course I never knew that at the time, I was about four years old.

Cuthbert wrote:Would one of you please explain how the allotment works?  Wife and I spent a couple of weeks in Bristol 3 years ago and heard talk about allotment but didn't really get an explanation.  I'm just curious.

" An allotment " is an allotment of land usually owned by the local authorities or a church and they allot it  for folk to rent annually or some times for free to folk who want to garden but who don't normally have a garden at their place of residence .

 Allotments are the source of many many pests and weeds as a lot of folk who take them on give up in dismay within four years of starting them .

 Most are cultivated like row gardens very occasionally you find 6 or 12 " high raised beds .

Some of the land owners stipulate that only certain sorts of usage , sheds & crops can be had on the allotments.

 IE .
No pigs, no cattle , No bamboo ,blackberries or rheus ,all sheds must be of an approved set standard non flammable materials such as preformed concrete panels . Sometimes there are also restrictions as to which shrub or tree you may grow. There are usually rules about fences and cut grass pathways as well .
 At other allotment sites  there are very few rules or should I say very few people seem to adhere to them and the places look like a rubbish tip or bombsite under cultivation .

 The average size of an allotment was supposed to be able to provide the renter with enough food for a year for a family of two adults and three children .
 Where I had two allotments ( an escape route in a bad marriage for both of us ....me there she at home watching soaps etc. ) each allotments was the standard 2 nd world war time size
of 30 yards long by 6 yards wide .

Legally I was not allowed to sell any of the produce off my allotments , but boy oh boy was the bartering angle a success or what . ?   As there were a lot of former Italian POW's & Polish allies in the local area who made their own vodka ,vino's & salami etc .. trade to the older ones was brisk indeed some weekends .

To get that production for the family the allotment was usually divided into four or five sections that grew well , with section one being heavily manured in the first year ) POTATOES.


Year two would see that section not manured and growing brassica .

 Year three would see it growing salads and other stuff.

Year four would see it left un manured and un -dug .. this is called , " leaving the ground fallow".

 This is leaving fallow is done to exhaust the ground of food for pests and to allow you to have a good deep de weeding and at the end of the season double dig it down two spades depths , forking into the bottom of the trench one barrow of four or five year old well rotted animal dung  & bedding for each yard of run , you'd also liberally sprinkle another couple of barrow loads  over the ground as you go when back filling the trenches . Thus ensuring that the soil is really well manured with well rotted organic materials .


This double digging & deep manuring does what is called " Building the soil " , so that you always have four or so different stages of decomposing manure in the bed , which gives a long slow quality release of nutrients & trace elements throughout the year .

 Many folk realised that a three or four bed system of crop rotation could be better improved if they had a seven year cycle in place , As this allows all your crops to be more effectively grouped into Potatoes , brassica = crucifers  & brassica = roots , roots , legumes  and salad stuff .

 The upshot of the seven year cycle ( or other different  cycle systems )  is that you don't grow the same crop in the same bed for two years running  nor do you grow it in any bed out of it's cyclic period .. this helps stop any pest or plant disease development in the soils.

 One consequence of the heavy manuring is that it can turn the soil a wee bit too acidic especially if the manure is steer or stallion dung and its  bedding's.
 Then you'd have to do things like taking soil tests and trying to adjust the acidness of the soil with lime or chalk powder etc.

Mel's all new square foot gardening  methods & formula for his initial charge of MM  virtually negates any of this sort of stuff and you don't have to bust your guts & back digging , " To the centre of the earth " , whilst doing it .

Thanks to all for the information and wonderful anecdotes.  I was told by a friend of a friend that the government strictly controlled allotments.  That only certain crops and only so much of each could be planted.  Obviously, the information is severely flawed.  I appreciate the clarification.

plantoid wrote:  The average size of an allotment was supposed to be able to provide the renter with enough food for a year for a family of two adults and three children.  Where I had two allotments each allotments was the standard 2nd world war time size of 30 yards long by 6 yards wide .

Mel's all new square foot gardening  methods & formula for his initial charge of MM  virtually negates any of this sort of stuff and you don't have to bust your guts & back digging , " To the centre of the earth " , whilst doing it .

Plantoid,  It boggles my mind at all the back breaking work you had to do in order to garden the old row and fallow method.  Exhausted just reading it.  Hurray for ANSFG!  I'm actually startled when I see a weed in one of my beds.

I was only speaking from the perspective of a four-year-old, but thanks plantoid for all the extra information.

30yards x 6 yards does sound to me the size of Dad's allotment.  And I remember that they had to be neat and tidy or the renter lost it and it was given to another. I remember being given some clippers and having to but the grass edging of the paths.
Also  other men being there with their children.

Now, I should imagine it was to get them out of the way so mom could get on with the housework, laundrey and getting dinner ready.  Mom had a cement? boiler in the corner of the kitchen that a fire had to be lit to boil the sheets etc.  Still remember that smell of laundry. The  sheets etc had to be wrung through a mangle and we had to be sure not to get out fingers caught in it. Oh, we did live dangerously.

Speaking of a mangle to wring out the water from the laundry ... I remember them from when I was a child in England. My mum told me a true story about the house next door. It was during World War II. A bomb was dropped in the town where she lived (I was not born yet) and a piece of shrapnel from that bomb went into the neighbours house and cut the mangle in half. Luckily everyone remained safe while hiding in the Anderson air raid shelter located at the bottom of the garden.

Cuthbert wrote:Thanks to all for the information and wonderful anecdotes.  I was told by a friend of a friend that the government strictly controlled allotments.  That only certain crops and only so much of each could be planted.  Obviously, the information is severely flawed.  I appreciate the clarification.

 I had an Italian friend ( he's been long  dead these days ) who grew two allotments of decent garlic giving about 2.5 tons of it at harvest time.  This was in the early 1980's when garlic was a strange herb only used by clever chefs etc.  Very few British gardeners grew it or even knew of it .

To the local authorities he swore on a stack of bibles that he only ever swapped his garlic with other allotment growers for some of their excess crops and laughed all the way to his bank under the mattress as he swore the oath.

The premier Italian London restaurants paid him a premium for his high quality garlic sales which his grandson usually took to London on his big BMW motorcycle ... panniers & top box full with a rucksack on his back as well.

I've often smiled at the thought of him stopping at traffic lights in London and all the local restraunt owners coming out to find out who was selling garlic .

Cuthbert wrote:Thanks to all for the information and wonderful anecdotes.  I was told by a friend of a friend that the government strictly controlled allotments.  That only certain crops and only so much of each could be planted.  Obviously, the information is severely flawed.  I appreciate the clarification.

 In the first & second world war years  the government of the day  did indeed have a big say at what crops you could grow in the victory garden allotments around the cities & town for they had to try and calculate what effort went where out on the farms . As the agricultural farm produce was mainly for the fighting forces inner town & city folk hospitals and for further processing .

Bee keeping was encouraged on some allotments & in many other situations . For this beekeeping you could claim extra sugar ration coupons in early autumn for each registered hive you owned so you could feed the bees for over wintering . National bee inspectors had arrived on the scene to check the health of the hive and stop anyone cheating .
 
In those days you could keep a pig  on the allotment so long as you abided by the feed stuff rules ( this specified what you could feed your livestock and had a government issued licence that authorised the slaughter of the animal .. you being able to have so much meat as they allowed , the rest went to the government for which they paid you . This meat went to fed the armed forces an put through shops for the residents who couldn't grow their own stuff.
 
Backyard rabbit keeping became a big event , so did poaching on other peoples farms and country estates .
All domestically owned shotguns & firearms had be registered , later on they had to be licenced to an individual .
That's all changed now , as the regulations have got tighter and tighter along with less land being available or allowed to be shot over etc.

 Were it not for Pearl Harbour happening Great Britain would have starved to death in a couple of years for our agricultural production & victory gardening did not provide enough produce despite the introduction of artificial fertilizers to replace the natural ones that we lost because we ate the livestock that should have produced manures etc.

 I think that the artificial fertilizers gave a crop boost of over 53 % compared to the standard agricultural manuring practices of the time .

I remember one incident when three huge pigs were being sent to slaughter and the young men and boys were trying to load them onto a truck and the pigs all escaped. 

Naturally as a four-year-old I had great entertainment watching from my bedroom window, all these people yelling and shouting and running around  trying to herd them onto the transport.

We eventually had a share of them, a leg and some rashers of bacon, as our family contributed vegetable peelings etc. on a regular basis. I did not know that some of the meat was sent to the military. Thank you for that tid-bit, Plantoid.

Hi all...

Just joined this forum and as my name suggests I am new to gardening too, so thought this system sounded perfect for me

I live in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey.  

I've just purchased Mel's book (UK version) which should be arriving from lovely Amazon tomorrow. 

I look forward to getting to know you all.

Have a good bank holiday weekend.

Paula

Hi Paula , copy & paste you post into the newbie section ..go to the home page it's one of the headings close to the top of th threads list.  Most folk will see the thread in there and drop you a few lines in reply .


May I say welcome ,
The square foot gardening is to my mind a far superior way of gardening long term,  it can also give you far less of a weed problem than most gardens so long as you refrain from using horse muck & stable cleanings .. ( they are full of weed & grass seeds ) unless you start them off in a hot composting method such as the 18 day Berkley hot composting method .  This Berkley method allows the compost heaps /bins to develop a lot of heat up to about 180 oF ( 82 oC ) which will kill & sterilize nearly all weed seeds and root nodes .

 Whilst your waiting for your book to arrive .. you could well do worse than getting  stuck into the composting threads  to develop an awareness of some of the better ways we have found to do out composting.

 I use seven of the cone shaped Daleks to provide a three year cycle of quality compost for my 24 or so beds ( 220 sq feet or more )

 I feel you'll really enjoy being a site member for there is no such thing as a stupid question  ,  nor is there any of the usual back biting so often found on the internet site.

 Dave aka Plantoid .

newbiegardener wrote:Hi all...

Just joined this forum and as my name suggests I am new to gardening too, so thought this system sounded perfect for me

I live in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey.  

I've just purchased Mel's book (UK version) which should be arriving from lovely Amazon tomorrow. 

I look forward to getting to know you all.

Have a good bank holiday weekend.

Paula

Paula (newbiegardener)
from Kelejan living in British Columbia.
I used to live in Surrey, England.  Chertsey and New Haw, worked in Addlestone.

Hi Paula. Welcome from Atlanta, GA (SE USA). Glad you're here.

Plantoid is a wonderful source of info. I know he'll be very helpful! (Don't you love how I just volunteered you, Dave? LOL)

And, of course, all of us will be eager to help as well!