Selfsufficientish.com

As a young married, I lived on a houseboat for 18 months. Loved most of it - renovating the butty, peaceful warm evenings chugging down dreamy canals, the camaraderie of the boating community, flowers on the roof, painting castles and roses, the crack of ice shifting as you got up on a winter's morn...

Ginger tea, with fresh ginger root. With or without honey!

Like spuds, the cauliflower are greedy feeders - are they getting enough? You might just have had an unlucky batch - try sowing cauli 'all year round' every two to three weeks, just a few, so that you get a succession of caulis and if you get one bad batch it's not so critical. Brassica and spuds do...

The jury's out on chitting - according to Alan Roman :shock: Don't chit maincrops, Monty Don found reduced yield when he did, and farmers don't. I chit my earlies/second earlies in a cool, light place for stumpy green chits - only because it feels like Spring with a box chitting away in the spare be...

Anyone wanting to use native wood in the veg patch, a useful website linking to the Allotment Forestry Initiative, a community project working with gardeners to increase the use of local woodland products in the garden and allotment. http://www.allotmentforestry.com/ Sources for willow, hazel, charc...

That Garden Action one is great, I use it lots, also this:
http://www.thegardenersalmanac.co.uk/Indexes/index.htm

It's well worth sowing e.g. a handful of baby carrot and beet from Jan to late August, every ten days or so, to ensure you have fresh baby veg throughout the year.

This wildlife tower is from a project in Cheshire manxminx. I'd love to get round to making one! http://i40.photobucket.com/albums/e220/supersprout/Wildlifetower.jpg All ingredients are scroungable. I think it's important to leave 'managed' wild bits on the plot - mine is the other side of a footpat...

Good one 9ball!

So how long should pumpkins/squashes store for once cut off of the plant? Several months, depending on variety (butternut shorter, Australian Blue types longer), if kept cool and dry. We ate the last of the 2005 crop in June 2006. I'd keep them somewhere you can see them often and whisk away any th...

I'm sure you'll get recipes red, this is a confession - I buy J Arthur Bowers with John Levington's (Which? Best Buy), and take it up three flights of stairs to my flat. Do all my potting sat at the kitchen table with the radio on

Corking garlic Jack, not many of them to the pound

hedgewizard wrote:Yep, I can see why you'd be annoyed.

Let us know if they dry off OK

Indoors: sowed banana shallot, early carrot and beet, and turnip rooted parsley seed yesterday.
On the plot: too wet to do much except harvest: leeks, jerusalem artichokes, couve tronchuda, parsnips, and some autumn sown onions as Spring onions.
At desk: seed swaps!

Hello Annpan, sounds like a good move :roll: If you move in April, you've still got bags of time ahead of you to sow and/or plant for crops in 2007. Last frost date here is 1 June (although most of us try to sneak things outdoors in the last week of May). When I took on my allotment in May two years...

lol@jack :shock: If you want to grow giant pumpkin for exhibition, good advice at http://www.merebrow.com/home/mbgp/how_to_grow.html If you're interested in winter squash - for flavour and storage - good advice here! I'd add: Mulch heavily - 8" isn't too much - and you won't need to water as mu...

If you save cooked pumpkin puree in the freezer, you can use it later - oh, pumpkin ravioli, pumpkin gnocchi, soups, bread, cakes ... danged useful stuff to have handy :roll: Round here (Fens) they grow tons of pumpkins for the supermarkets. Once they're harvested, they stay in the fields to rot. A ...