If you are looking at this blog because you love your garden and want to create some food for yourself and are wondering if you can do it, you have come to the right place – that’s how I feel.

I am friends with the owners of Access Garden Products and help to show their frames and raised beds at the RHS Flower shows throughout the year.

I am a novice vegetable gardener and they have asked me to grow veg in their raised beds and frame update my blog with my successes and failures.  I am using a book called ‘Square Foot Gardening’ by Mel Bartholomew to guide me.  He likes to keep things nice and simple – my kind of man!

I love to cook and make cakes and talk!  And this seems to be the perfect place to share my gardening experiences – good and bad along with recipes that I know and love and thoughts I’m having be they random, blonde or plain sensible!

I love to hear from you and read and reply to comments when you want to share your thoughts back.

Happy gardening

Anne.

I haven’t had the best success with some of the things I’ve grown this year, but all is not lost.  With the central heating switched off and an urge to make my own proper brown bread, I turned to my Mini Greenhouse to provide the perfect climate for my bread to prove.

Here is the recipe if you fancy growing some bread too!

Wholewheat Loaf with Oats and Seeds.

200g wholewheat flour

75g plain flour

75g mixture of sesame, poppy and sunflower

50g oats

25g bran

1 tsp salt

350-400 ml warm water

1 tbsp honey

15g fresh yeast or 1 sachet dried yeast

1 tbsp sunflower oil

Preheat oven to 200 c (400f) Gas mark 6 line or grease a 2lb loaf tin.

In a large bowl, mix the flours, seeds (except those reserved for scattering), oats, bran and salt.  Place 100ml of the water in a measuring jug, stir in the honey, then sprinkle in the yeast.  Leave for about 5 minutes until frothy (fresh yeast will be more frothy than dried yeast).  Add all the remaining water except for 60ml and sunflower oil and mix/knead for ages until it’s stretchy and elastic.

Pour into the dry ingredients and mix well.  I like the mixture to have a bit of bulk to it and not be too sloppy, if you know what I mean.

Put the bowl into your greenhouse and cover with a tea towel.  You can drizzle a little olive oil over if you want to.

Leave it until it has doubled in size.  Take out and bash it down to size again.  Re-shape and place into a lined loaf tin.  I buy those ready done liners from Lakeland.  Place back into mini greenhouse until its doubled in size and bake for about 45 mins.  Keep an eye on it.  It should sound hollow when you knock on its bottom!

Cool and serve with butter.  Yummy!

You go to all the trouble of buying seeds, sowing them in the right compost at the right temperature and give them your love and attention for months and then…..

 Something starts nibbling the leaves.  You can’t see it, but it’s plainly there! 

And sometimes, it’s too late and your beautiful baby plants has been scoffed!

 I have been having this frustration in my large ‘mini greenhouse’! Leaves are going missing and I couldn’t find the culprit.

 Until today!!  There is was a large as life without a care in the world.

 A huge snail, which quickly became a snack for my chickens, Ginger and the 2 Daves.  Along with a few  of its snail friends I found underneath plants pots in the garden.

 The raised beds are fine because I weed and dig using my copper garden tools, which really do keep the slugs and snails away.

 I have heard about putting something copper into the watering can so that the water gets a bit of copper in it and puts the snails off.  I’ll try that and see if it helps.

 As my Mum used to say ‘it’s a jungle out there!’

The rain has slowed down and we now have gusty winds with a chill attached to them.

I visited a garden centre yesterday and was horrified to see their chilli plants at least 12” high!  Mine are struggling to get to 4”.  I think it must be because mine are cold and have stopped thinking of growing.

Today, I have moved them from the frame on the patio by my house into the small 4’ x 4’ frame on the lawn which contains all my salads.  It was much warmer in there when a stuck my arm in to re-site the chillies. Only because it gets more sun but I’m thinking we all need more sun at the moment!

I’m just hoping that a bit more sun might be all they need to get a spurt on and get growing.

My little seedlings are still alive!

 Always a good sign, when gardening. There is little hope once they are died.

I have been given two pieces of advice when sowing and potting on seedlings.

1. The roots compete for the space so place them individually or else you could lose the lot.

 2. The stronger plant will always get what it wants, in a kind of survival of the fittest kind of way.

So I have carefully separated some of the seedlings and re-potted them into the squiggy compost pots. And with others, I have potted them in a ‘clump formation’ to see if they curl up and die or compete for the space.

Time will tell and I’ll let you know. If you have any advice for me, ofcourse, please let me know.

Happy gardening.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvFvbBPyQmI

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