Advice for a hopeless gardener

[jennyjj01]

Have you done anything to protect your tomatoes? I feel it is still way too early for them to survive outdoors let alone do well. Temperatures here in the south have only just reached double figures and we still have a good month or 6 weeks to go before mine will go outside during which time we may get another cold snap. The ones for the unheated greenhouse will not go in there before mid-April
My rule of thumb for tomatoes is as follows:
16C is the minimum to get any gernimation - so sow them indoors.
12C is the minimum temperature for flowers to set fruit but they really need 15C or more. Keep warm if you want fruit.
5-6C Cold tolerant varieties will survive but not grow. If you try to keep seedlings this cold they will proably die. Fully grown plants may ripen existing fruit but will not set anything new and the diseases take hold very easily.

Good info. Thanks
I protected mine by holding back on sowing them and I keep reading of folks who jumped the gun, like I usually do. if they survive to about 4 inches they will go to the clear plastic cube that Mr JJ is under orders to get built . That might end up there forevér home. Unless they outgrow it.

[jennyjj01]

Some Spring Onion observations and, I guess a question.

Feb 2022 I sowed a sprinkling of White Lisbon Spring onions in my raised bed. They didn't do much, but in summer of LAST YEAR, I harvested half a dozen nice fat onions. Those onions went into a bag and have languished in the back of the fridge till today.... i'll come back to that in a moment. Time from sow to harvest is said to be 12 weeks.

Anyhow, I was just weeding and preparing that raised bed and darn me if there weren't about 10 spring onions living there, a bit choked by weeds. These onions look very immature and about 5-6mm diameter. I don't understand how they are there? Have they really over wintered and survived from not being harvested or have last years crop somehow self seeded? I suspect it's the former, but if so why are they so skinny?

Next question.... Do I leave them in the hope they get a spurt of fattening, or do I make a cheese butty?

Now, back to the ones loitering for A WHOLE YEAR in my fridge. Just as an observation: These were quite fat up to 20mm diameter and blow me down if they have barely deteriorated at all. A couple started to sprout and most had a papery skin layer, but peeling and eating one, it was VERY well preserved. Flavour was mild and you would think they were harvested yesterday!

[steptoe]

Well the ones that are bulbs in the fridge just whack thewm in the ground in the raised bed worst they don't grow best you egt some nice onions , i had a bag of seed onions lol in the back of the fridge i missed them last year well some had rotted but most still good they have gone in and most are showing above ground now .

I would just eat the spring onions in a nice omellette as seasoning hehehe , same with spuds i found a bag of small 20 - 30 mm small ones in the garage in a braon sack some with big shoots most small they get throw in pots and what grows i get , same with the compost bin if you have spuds that go over throw them in the vcompost bin we always get around 10 to 20 lb of spuds from there each year and some years they have been far better than the pots or the ground grown .

I will let you know how the spuds in the large planters go this year as to work and harvest , the pots are large black pots that i got cheap years ago i am going to fill and pot spuds in when weather is better they will get pushed down in the rotovated soil down the gardne where i usually grow spuds in the ground but this way well it is just turn the buckets in to the barrow to harvest , i do some like that most year but never on the soil but the guy showed how the spuds he got rooted out the bottom of the bags to get to the water in the soil and never dried out , got to try it this year , as i said before we did one year grown spuds under plastic t the lotty and well most got munched by slugs and snails even after treating before planting so never again .

[jennyjj01]

Now here's a new question...

Propagation of onions by splitting.....

I found a red onion in the garage in my veg box. It was shop bought but long forgotten and was once as big as a fist. It has sprouted with FIVE distinct shoots each about two inches long.

Thinking waste not want not, what's the likely outcome if I can split off those 5 ?cloves? of onion and plant them out maybe 6 inches apart? They share several outer layers. Should I just plant it as is or split it. Or am I being silly?

Might the bulbs get fat and form 5 new full sized onions? Or are they likely to die or bolt?

IMG_20230209_172302.jpg

Report...... I busted that onion into 5, pretty rough and ready with some cutting the outer layers. Into a window box planter and out onto the patio. All 5 sisters look to be doing really well. Maybe bolting, maybe fattening, but far from dying.

[jennyjj01]

Rhubarb:
There's some on my allotment. Had ZERO care and attention. It seems to be having a growth spurt.
Apart from giving it some mature muck, what the devil do I do with it?
What/When and How do I harvest some?

[jansman]

Rhubarb:
There's some on my allotment. Had ZERO care and attention. It seems to be having a growth spurt.
Apart from giving it some mature muck, what the devil do I do with it?
What/When and How do I harvest some?

My own rhubarb is pushing through. Yes ,it has zero attention! That’s perennials! Just crop it by no more than 50% at a time ,and let it grow again.Take stems at about 18” long. To crop it: just hold stem near the bottom and pull. It comes away cleanly. Simple.

[GillyBee]

Rhubarb: You cant eat the leaves but they re fine on the compost heap regardless of what some pundits say.
Onions are naturally a biennial. That means they grow the first year, sit as an onion bulb all winter and then pop up the next year ready to flower. So planting a bulb from last year is more likely to give you a flower than a bigger onion.
"Seed" onions or sets are specially heat treated to destroy the embryo flower, letting them continue to grow a nice fat bulb in year 2.
Garlic and shallots are multiplier onions so one bulb/clove/set will split and make several each year and you can replant. Some spring onions are this type - usually labelled as "Japanese" Spring onions. White Lisbon is not one of this type though as it is a traditional variety..

[jennyjj01]

A question on Scale, when sowing veg.....

Last year, I cropped stupid amounts of courgettes and beetroot, about a kilo of tomatoes and two portions of little spuds. Hmmmmf!

Scale was all over the place. And so i anticipate it will be with this years allotment sowing. So I seek guidance.

Supplementing diet for two adults, hoping for a late summer harvest that takes veg shopping off the list for a few months, but which does not leave food rotting in the ground..... What and how much? Which crops can i store by leaving them in the ground?

Onions, we use maybe a couple of kilo per month
Spuds, maybe 7.5 kilo per month
Tomatoes, maybe 6 per week
Carrots, maybe 2 kilo per month
Parsnips, a couple per year
Courgettes and beetroots..... Don't ask, we had massive glut from a square metre.
Lettuce, brassicas, etc, we just generally don't eat them, pulses, mostly a handful of peas.

So far, I've sown a couple of sq m of onions. About 75 if they survive. That feels plentiful.
Spuds, I had no idea, but have sown 40 seeds across two early varieties. I anticipate about 20 main crop a bit later on. My plan is for maybe a sq m of 50 or more carrots and just a very few parsnips.
Tomatoes, I haven't a clue? I'd like a plentiful harvest, but have only sown about a dozen across two varieties. Planning on trying to take cuttings to double up. I see some growers literally filling hundreds of seed pods with cucumbers or whatever and i wonder if it's me or them getting it wrong? We eat one cucumber per year. I see my fellow allotment holders filling huge swathes of their plots with squashes, lettuce, or goodness knows what and I wonder who the heck eats it all. I also see from the tail end of last year, that some plots had crops left to rot.

Any tips, short of telling me to do the maths?

Is there any guidance out there on what ground area or seed count to allocate to each veg type?

I have 75 sq m to use, with about 10 sq m already growing soft fruit and rhubarb which is just taking care of itself.

My sowing of onions and spuds, so far is about 10 sq m

[Vitamin c]

Sorry a bit of topic.
Iv grown what I believe to be a yew tree from a growth coming through my patio.
It's now several inches tall in a large pot.
Is it OK to put outside now as it's sunny but pretty cold and frosty at night.

[jansman]

Sorry a bit of topic.
Iv grown what I believe to be a yew tree from a growth coming through my patio.
It's now several inches tall in a large pot.
Is it OK to put outside now as it's sunny but pretty cold and frosty at night.

Yes. Fine to put out.