Advice for a hopeless gardener

[jansman]

I thought my crops this year were doing well. Sadly my broccoli has not and cant work out if there is a disease or something lacking in the soil. The heads that I did salvage and rinsed before cooking led to lots of brown beetles crawling into the pan lid ewwww! so perhaps pests. Fruit has done well as have courgettes, tomatoes have fruited well but are not ripening, onions are small but bursting out of the soil, leeks are doing pants and my peppers just do not seem to be fruiting as well as normal in the greenhouse. The baby cucumbers are not babies at all and are huge, one day they seem too small and the next are huge but taste really good. The cabbages and swedes are riddled with holes and I have sprayed them with soapy water and a chemical spray which I hated using even though they are protected by mesh. Beetroot have done ok too and just need harvesting now. Carrots have done ok too. Feeling a bit meh about growing stuff this year to be honest although hopefully I will be back to my usual excitement in spring.

I'm gutted for you. critters and pests and disease are a real upset. I see my neighbouring lot holders with their nets and bird scarers etc and i wish i'd done likewise. I also see what a rubbish job i did of hoeing. But it's all part of the learning curve.
Likewise, my first adventure in scaling up has been disappointing. Tomatoes have yet to ripen and what few I see look to be rotting or splitting. No luck with peppers, aubergines or okra. Peas came to nothing and got eaten by critters and swamped by weeds. Carrots coming to nothing, poor germination and swamped by weeds. I have a row of beetroot doing well, but I sowed less than last year. Onions have been my best success with 40 or so big plump ones and maybe 30 small ones. Spuds came out at about 7.5 kg with a few still growing amazingly well in my composters. Strawberries, just a bowlful, Beans about a kilo and as yet very few raspberries, It might sound ok, but this is an allotment worth versus a few planters and a cloche. Happy as I am with my modest crop, it's been far less than I should have managed. Apart from a fiver worth of horse muck, I've bought no compost and let the soil give it's magic.
In my case the worst enemy as been my shameful neglect.
Apart from harvesting what remains bit by bit, I'm likely to spend the rest of the year preparing ALL the ground for next season.

My 1/4 plot is in 5 beds each of which has a ropey, half arsed rotten wooden raised bed timber frame. Into autumn, I'm getting rid of all the timber frames that add very little value, and I'll be going nuclear on the weeds. I've seen the despair of marestail and bindweed and when I weed next time, I'll be FAR more thorough.

All weed roots are going offsite. Only very selected topgrowth will ever get composted, because the composter is maybe my biggest achievement this year. Zero compost bought so far for the lotment. Buying a lot of coir in the sales, 'cos I like it. In 2024, I plan to go big on container growing at the lotment while I tackle the weeds below: Something like I saw a guy on youtube growing spuds in rows and rows of rubble bags.

I'm not giving up on me. I just need to get into rhythm with nature: germinate at the right time, sow at the right time, weed at the right time and generally pull my finger out at the right time.

I'm going to read up and study the type of big crop cultivation used by cannabis growers. They seem to have mastered hydroponics and lighting and compost feeding almost on an industrial scale, If I could grow tomatoes so prolifically as some dodgy weed farmer, I'd be made up. I've already got a flair for growing bl006y weeds!

Time for the obligatory question..... I have 8 bags of fresh horse muck. Should I leave it in bags and progressively mix it in my heap as I get other ingredients, or should I open the bags now and add it all at once. I'm thinking the latter as it will give me more volume now and volume seems key to getting it to heat up. Then each week I'll be adding green waste and mixing it up a bit. Or I could just make a dedicated poo pile to get it fermenting on its own. Ideally I want my compost to be almost ready to use next year. Too ambitious?

Tip your horse muck and mix into compost and leave it until next year. Give it a mix once halfway through. That’ll work .

[jennyjj01]

Today's harvest,
6.5kg of Centurion onions planted 2 April.
Big handful of beans and a few beetroots.

I'm pleased with them but I realise I just made a basic error: The bent bases of the shoots on those onions were sopping wet and I feared them rotting so I chopped them off. I SHOULD have cured the onions with the dead leaves and shoots still on. Oh hum. I've laid them on card to dry out on the drive and I will repeat on every warm day till they are dry enough.

Incidentally that card they are sat on is one of the very many that I blag from ALDI from between the layers of bottled water. I grab em on every visit and use them as weed barrier, using them like collars around my strawberries, spuds, tomatoes and beetroot. It's easier than hoeing, which I find a chore.

When I get around to my autumn dig over, I will have almost enough to cover half of my plot. . FREE I'm too tight to buy weed membrane. At about a square yard of corrugated card, they are also handy for making no-dig beds.

[jennyjj01]

duplicate please delete

[jennyjj01]

A whole new question.....

To sow 'Green Manure' crops or to just weed the plot and keep it covered? I'm torn.

Pros and cons of each, especially for a lazy beggar who cant even keep on top of marestail. How much digging in is involved with green manure crops. What happens if that gets neglected and it sets seeds? Does the green manure crop then act like a weed?

[jansman]

A whole new question.....

To sow 'Green Manure' crops or to just weed the plot and keep it covered? I'm torn.

Pros and cons of each, especially for a lazy beggar who cant even keep on top of marestail. How much digging in is involved with green manure crops. What happens if that gets neglected and it sets seeds? Does the green manure crop then act like a weed?

If you have that intensity of weeds,then don’t bother with green manure. I’d dig it and extract weeds. Then over the Winter- I’d fork it over again,remove more weeds. At that point add compost or manure. Then a little later,fork again and remove more weeds. Your compost will have been dragged in by worms and you assist them.

[Yorkshire Andy]

I dug it over twice and picked out what I could then raked it removing more remains

Run the tiller over again then green manure ,(beans) and raked over lightly to cover them

Now the race is on will the field beans (soaked over night before planting) win the weeds once they get growing they create a dense cover crowding out other plants / weeds

[Arzosah]

Incidentally that card they are sat on is one of the very many that I blag from ALDI from between the layers of bottled water. I grab em on every visit and use them as weed barrier, using them like collars around my strawberries, spuds, tomatoes and beetroot. It's easier than hoeing, which I find a chore.

When I get around to my autumn dig over, I will have almost enough to cover half of my plot. . FREE I'm too tight to buy weed membrane. At about a square yard of corrugated card, they are also handy for making no-dig beds.

That's great! I do occasionally make a supermarket visit these days, as opposed to a delivery, I'll have a lookout.

[jennyjj01]

A whole new question.....

To sow 'Green Manure' crops or to just weed the plot and keep it covered? I'm torn.

If you have that intensity of weeds,then don’t bother with green manure. I’d dig it and extract weeds. Then over the Winter- I’d fork it over again,remove more weeds. At that point add compost or manure. Then a little later,fork again and remove more weeds. Your compost will have been dragged in by worms and you assist them.

I dug it over twice and picked out what I could then raked it removing more remains

Run the tiller over again then green manure ,(beans) and raked over lightly to cover them

Now the race is on will the field beans (soaked over night before planting) win the weeds once they get growing they create a dense cover crowding out other plants / weeds

Two sides of the argument from two of the guys I trust. Thank's guys.
The bad news from both sides is that I need to dig the hell out of it, twice, even before I cover or plant green manure. That's what I expected, but not what i was hoping for
Yesterday I pulled, literally without digging, a bulk bag full of tall loose weeds. That barely scratched the surface. I've got to shift that lot off site somehow because too many perenial weeds to compost

[Yorkshire Andy]

A whole new question.....

To sow 'Green Manure' crops or to just weed the plot and keep it covered? I'm torn.

If you have that intensity of weeds,then don’t bother with green manure. I’d dig it and extract weeds. Then over the Winter- I’d fork it over again,remove more weeds. At that point add compost or manure. Then a little later,fork again and remove more weeds. Your compost will have been dragged in by worms and you assist them.

I dug it over twice and picked out what I could then raked it removing more remains

Run the tiller over again then green manure ,(beans) and raked over lightly to cover them

Now the race is on will the field beans (soaked over night before planting) win the weeds once they get growing they create a dense cover crowding out other plants / weeds

Two sides of the argument from two of the guys I trust. Thank's guys.
The bad news from both sides is that I need to dig the hell out of it, twice, even before I cover or plant green manure. That's what I expected, but not what i was hoping for
Yesterday I pulled, literally without digging, a bulk bag full of tall loose weeds. That barely scratched the surface. I've got to shift that lot off site somehow because too many perenial weeds to compost

I've got a petrol strimmer that makes light work of hacking back

I'll be honest I nuked the patch with weed killer too belts and braces before I did the second rotorvate again a rotorvator I got a very old Wolsey merry tiller cheap but I've the engineering skills to repair it I rebuilt the chain drive just after I got it as it was very worn it goes usually on the second pull every time I can't complain although the HSE would have a fit if it was used in a workplace 1970's technology didn't have guards .....

[jennyjj01]

Spuds gone bad.

I'm upset..... It's just about two weeks since I harvested all the spuds on my allotment and I have a storage problem.
I lifted them gently, popped them in a box just knocking off a bit of the dirt, gently. And i left them in the warm garage, whicj has the door open most of the daytime. So it had air circulating.
But a proportion of them have gone gnarly on the outside and rotten inside. Oddly, the red desiree have stayed fine. But look at these beggars:-
Not chitting, just rotting! I thought they would be fine for at least a month but so.
Did I need to dry them more vigourously, or wash them? What might I have done so wrong? How the heck should I have dried them in the absence of nice weather?