Scenes from the garden in Autum

Pictures from the garden and surrounding fields in late summer and autumn

Raised vegetable beds

The beds are now sown and duly rotated. Here's a new photo. Since I took this, I have strimmed around the beds and added some slug barrier pellets which claim to deter the feckers. The netting is to keep the white butterflies off the cabbages.

Shallots in modules

Good old Monty Don (BBC TV Gardener's World) shared a good tip for preparing shallots for their summer beds. Place the 'sets' sitting in modules filled with compost (any old stuff will do). After a week or so they will have developed huge roots. I tried this and it worked a treat. In fact I had to cut them out of the modules. They are now growing like mad under nets to stop birds uprooting them.

Polytunnel

At long last I've got my polytunnel up and running.
It was supplied by a new company in Carlow:
www.JM Polytunnels.com


At 16ft by 10ft it is huge inside and the vertical wall design makes the most of the floor and vertical space. See their website for a YouTube movie of it being built (by yours truly).


Update: April 2011. Full production going on at the polytunnel. Seeds are sown in modules, toilet roll inners etc and, once big enough, make their way to the coldframe. Once they have acclimatised to outdoor life, they go into the raised beds. Thanks to my mate Mim Scala, these beds have plentiful, well-rotted horse manure dug in (except where plants don't need it). The polytunnel is great for almost certain success in sowing seeds. Even hard-to-germinate Dwarf Green Beans have uncoiled from their toilet rolls. Some plants will be staying indoors - strawberries, peppers, chillis, courgette (just one of them). I also bought some beefsteak tomato seeds and germinated them early in my Lidl heated propagator as they were expensive. (We had them in Turkey and they are fabulous but too thin-skinned to export and probably contravene some Fourth Reich EU regulation). There is a lovely sweet smell in the tunnel from strawberry blossom. Might have to pollinate them by hand as the few bees to enter the tunnel spend all their time batting themselves senseless against the plastic. Am now supplying friends with small veg plants as I sowed too many of everything and realised I wouldn't have enough beds to put them in. Am now looking forward to Nature's bounty.

click for youtube video - building a polytunnel in Ireland