BS: How does your garden grow?

Subject: RE: BS: How does your garden grow?
From: Thompson
Date: 21 Sep 24 - 10:58 PM

I harvested the spuds last week - shamefully small but delicious; small because I haven't been watering. I'll know again.
In one of the potato bags I was using, I came across a couple of irises, at least I think they were iris roots - the kind that look like knobbly fingers with hairs growing on the bottom - and some scorzonera I'd forgotten I'd planted.
I hastily replanted them - the putative irises in a pot, the scorzonera in a raised bed made from pallet collars as the Scandinavians do it.
The garden is slowly being reclaimed from some years of neglect, but, heavens, it's a big job!

Subject: RE: BS: How does your garden grow?
From: Tattie Bogle
Date: 22 Sep 24 - 07:15 PM

Beans, beans and more beans! Runners, that is. Still got one box of last year’s left in the freezer, but rapidly adding more as well as eating plenty of them!

Subject: RE: BS: How does your garden grow?
From: Thompson
Date: 10 Oct 24 - 04:38 AM

It's coming up to the time of year to collect seeds from crab apples if you'd like to grow trees.
Find your favoured tree - I have my eye on a friend's, which has bright red apples from around August, and those apples are absitively delicious.
Open some apples till you find nice-looking seeds, fat and brown. Take out the seeds (with clean hands) and put them on a clean damp tissue sprinkled with powdered cinnamon. Mould hates cinnamon.
Fold the tissue over and put it in a clean plastic sandwich bag, and put it in the fridge for a few weeks. Maybe put it in a jar so it doesn't get jars and things put on top of it by mistake by Certain Parties who also use that fridge.
Last year I forgot about the seeds till spring, when they had nice long sprouts. I put these in a sandy compost mix (about 2/3 compost and 1/3 horticultural sand - don't use builder's sand, it's salty and kills plants) and three of the 15 or so sprouting seeds I had grew on into little trees, which are now around 40cm tall. With luck they'll produce crab apples four years from now.
There's something so life-affirming about growing a tree from seed.