Geoff Hamilton – Master Gardening Broadcaster
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What a time it was. On a Friday evening the BBC’s Gardeners World presented by Geoff Hamilton was our family oasis away from all the troubles in the world.
You can get a taste here:The Geoff Hamilton BBC Collection (40th Anniversary Gardeners World DVD Box Set)
Geoff was a true organic gardener. He worked on the Gardener’s World team from 1979 until his sad death cycling for charity in 1996.
n 1979, he was given the job of working on BBC’s Gardeners’ World team, the popular gardening programme. Geoff soon endeared himself to the viewers. He had a wonderful way of engaging people and enthusing you with his very practical and down to earth approach to gardening.
Geoff was keen to show how gardening could be practicaly enjoyed even if you didn’t have much space or much money. His style was modest and often he would explain the things that went wrong.
He wasn’t a perfectionist but sought to make gardening enjoyable especially the aspect of growing things from seed and cutting.
Geoff Hamilton and Organic Gardening.
Geoff was an early pioneer of organice gardening, at a time when it was considered freakish and oddball. He showed how organic gardening could be practically implemented. In particular he sought to show the garden as a living organism. For example, he was known to encourage friendly predators such as hoverflies and butterflies, even going so far as to harden off his hoverflies.
His stance on organic gardening definitely made it more mainstream and encouraged others to take up his approach.
Geoff reminded me of how it was in the days of family self sufficiency and practical kitchen gardening when I was a young boy. His enthusiasm uplifted me and created a desire to get into the garden immediately the programmes had finished.
If you are living or visiting the UK,then you must visit his garden at Barnsdale. Many of the gardens he created for Gardeners World are at Barnsdale and you will see and experience for yourself the great mans work.
http://www.barnsdalegardens.co.uk/
John Seymour – Master of Self Suffiency
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All of the huge influences on my life in the garden have sadly passed away. My father and grandfather for sure helped me appreciate nature and the pleasure of gardening for the kitchen table.
After they had gone I searched for other help and influence similar to theirs. I found John Seymour, master of self sufficiency and a great advocate for everything organic and artisan.The Self-sufficiency Manual
John made the garden more than just a space for recreation. He created an enthusiasm in me to use every way I could to provide fruit and vegetables for my family.
John was lucky enough to have had small-holdings and lived a relatively self sufficient life with his family in Suffolk and then Wales for many years.
He developed a school in self sufficiency, sharing his vast knowledge with all that wished to follow his example. He was a master of self sufficiency and was always up to date in the subject – keen to promote it and passionate about his organic principles.
He has written many books with which he shared his passion and knowledge.
He was truly an amazing person, a great advocate for self sufficiency and he has created a great legacy of self sufficient gardeners, or those that do their bit in a small space to provide for their kitchen table.
Do your best to look into John’s life and see for yourself the satisfaction and joy their can be found from your home vegetable patch.
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Preparing the Soil
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Soil provides nutrients for plants and allows the roots to anchor the plant so that they can take up water and air – like humans, roots need oxygen too. “Good” soil is made up of 50 per cent soil, 25 per cent water and 25 per cent air – and it is not impossible to create.
There are two ways to improve the quality of your soil: the dig and the no-dig system. The dig system, as the name suggests, means digging manure or compost into the ground every autumn. The no-dig system means that you just put the organic matter (this means it’s made of material that has lived, so leaves that have rotted down, kitchen waste, grass clippings, chicken or cow manure) on top of the soil in autumn. Earthworms will drag it down into the soil and mix it up for you – so it’s great for people with back problems. As earthworms move about the soil they improve its structure by creating more air passages. As a result the soil particles don’t stick together as much and the roots find the soil easier to grow into.
There are advantages and disadvantages to the no-dig system:
- Advantages: Earthworms, fungi, bacteria, etc are not disturbed by your digging; weed seeds are not brought to the surface; moisture is not lost as you turn over the soil and cause evaporation; and, of course, it’s not such hard work and won’t take half as long as a full-scale dig.
- On the down side, pests may build up in the soil because you’re not disturbing them and if you don’t already have many earthworms, it will take ages for the organic matter to be taken down into the soil.
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What Vegetable Crops are Easiest to Grow?
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Here’s a list of veggies that are easiest to grow in a temporate climate.
Early potatoes: very easy to grow – they’ll do all the work for you – just remember to water them if you don’t have a drop of rain. I am looking forward to my first new potatoes this next week from my containers on my patio!
Broad beans: there are two benefits to this crop – not only can you pick the beans when they’re small and delicious, but once the plants reach their full height you can pinch off the tops (it helps to control the blackfly, which find them tasty) and gently heat them in butter. Depending on how many you have, they also make a wonderful soup.
Leeks: easy from seed or bought from your local nursery. They’re easy to transplant and taste excellent when young. You can always grow BIG leeks for show! It’s fun.
Radishes: a perfect fast-growing starter crop to encourage salad-lovers and children – the varieties available are amazing, all sorts of shapes and sizes. Radishes are always the first crop from your salad patch. It is very encouraging to eat your first veggie from the garden.
Runner and French beans: the flowers are pretty and the more you pick, the more you get. I love watching the runner beans climb the canes and bring their red flowers into bloom brightening up the garden.
Courgettes: need quite a bit of space. They become marrows if you forget to harvest them. Their flowers are delicious, too.
Herbs. You can buy a lot of herb plants from your garden centre and they are easily arranged in pots on your patio and some of them fit very well into your flower beds. I love to see chives in full bloom.
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Vegetable Gardening In Containers
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If you haven’t got a plot of land where you can grow vegetables then why not use some containers or pots to provide you wish some free vegetables for the table?
Quite a few vegetables are suitable for gardening in containers or pots. You can select bush or dwarf varieties. Almost any vegetable can be adapted to growing in a pot. Vegetables that take up little space, such as carrots, radishes and lettuce, or crops that bear fruits over a long period of time, such as tomatoes and peppers, are perfect for container vegetable gardens.
Containers and Pots for Vegetable Gardens
Selecting Containers: Containers for your vegetable gardens can be almost anything: flower pots, pails, buckets, wire baskets, bushel baskets, wooden boxes, nursery flats, window planters, washtubs, strawberry pots, plastic bags, large food cans, or any number of other things.
I have used old dustbins for potatoes and you can make use of a pile of tyres – filling up with soil a tyre at a time as the potato plants grow.
Drainage: No matter what kind of container you choose for your vegetable garden, it should have holes at the base or in the bottom to permit drainage of excess water.
Soil and Fertilizer
You can use soil in your container vegetable garden, but the synthetic mixes are much better. Peat-based mixes, containing peat and vermiculite, are excellent. They are relatively sterile and pH adjusted. They also allow the plants to get enough air and water. Mixing in one part compost to two parts planting mix will improve fertility.
Using a slow release or complete organic fertilizer at planting will keep your vegetables fed for the whole growing season.
Watering
Pots and containers always require more frequent watering than plants in the ground. As the season progresses and your plants mature, their root system will expand and require even more water. Don’t wait until you see the plants wilting. Check your containers daily to judge the need for water.
Have fun with your garden and you will soon enjoy the fruits of your labour.
Deep Bed Vegetable Gardening
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Rather than plant your vegetables traditionally in long single rows, why not use the deep bed method.
You will get a greater yield in less space, and your garden will require less maintenance.
The advantages of using Deep Beds for your vegetable garden are:
More space in your garden to grow your plants. You will see an increased production per square foot. If you are gardening in limited space this method allows you to get much more production per square foot than many other methods.
You save time because you have fewer weeds and properly monitored, less watering is necessary. You only need to mulch heavily between the rows. The shade provided by the growing plants eliminates the need for heavy mulching in the rows.
Harvesting is much easier, you will be able to pick more produce from a single location. You can control the height of your beds making picking much easier on your back.
Companion planting is much easier. By inter planting root crops such as carrots, beets and radishes with other plants, you cultivate and aerate the remaining plants as you harvest the root crops.
Your plants stay cleaner and healthier. Heavy rain is less likely to splash mud on your growing vegetables.
Creating Deep Beds:
3 foot wide rows work best if you need to reach the middle of the row from either side. But I often have wider rows with and tend them from a board over the beds which is raised on wooden blocks so as not to touch the bed.
The main work is in the preparation. Dig the soil to a depth of around 12 inchesand mix in lots of compost and well rotted manure.
After mixing your soil then rake it all level to ensure there are not hollows that will collect water. By mounding the planting area you will find the soil dries out and warms up sooner and crops reach maturity at an earlier date.
As always it is good to plan the layout of your vegetable garden on paper before you start planting.
A great advocate of deep bed gardening was John Sutcliffe of Self Sufficient Gardener fame. An amazing man who has inspired many to take up self sufficiency and organic gardening.
I have always tried to adopt this approach. Sometimes using boards around the beds for support but it is not necessary if wood is not available to you.
Chickens in the Backyard
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I love fresh eggs! So why not have chickens in your backyard to provide some? I have a small back yard at home and I cannot keep animals on the land I use to grow my main crop vegetables so I just bought an ark for three chickens: Florence, Gladys and Doris. The Red Ice Hens.
…..and the results are (usually) two or three fresh eggs each day! The white one is a dummy.
All the help you need to keep chickens in your back yard is here:
Click to Download Chickens in Your Backyard
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Laura’s Instant Kitchen Garden
The motive behind this blog is to provide lots of help to motivate and enable people to enjoy producing fruit and vegetables from their home garden or back yard. One family at a time!
Well, my daughter, Laura has been inspired. She and her husband Louis planted a vegetable garden a little while ago and she asked me to go and help her this last week.
You can see from this picture it hadn’t gone too well!
Lots of the good work they had done, seeds and plants, had been strangled by bind weed.
So I decided to dig a deep bed alongside the bed they alread had and to transplant what I could rescue into the new bed before I tackled the weed in the vegetable bed they had already created.
Setting to work I dug the bed in a couple of hours. Not easy work in a hot british summer I can tell you!
I then rescued the Broccoli (purple Sprouting) out of Laura’s vegetable patch and replanted them in the deep bed.
I also put in some dwarf and climbing french beans and a lonely pepper plant. An experiment for me was to put in a patio potato plant I managed to find at the garden centre. We will see how that gets along!
I put in a bean pole wigwam and sowed some runner bean seeds and planted a few french salad and beetroot seedlings (these may or not be successful).
Then I got down to work (hands and knees for this one) and, using a trowel, took out all the bind weed and dandelions that had strangled the life out of Laura’s seeds and onion sets in her little vegetable patch.
Her onion sets, although a little sad from a very shallow planting, are left…..along with two parsnip seedlings and a few carrots.
I thought I would give some peas a chance and placed a drill of peas.
and from this:
to this:
The pea cane arrangement is a bit artisan as I only had access to some canes and string…so I was a bit inventive….but it will work providing they get watered and weeded occasionally!
Laura has promised some pictures as the weeks go by so you can see how we did.
Hope you enjoyed the post. Look forward to your comments!
Tomatoes On Your Windowsill
Some of us live in temperate climates and this means that most of the time we need to find an indoor space for our Tomatoes, Cucumbers and such. For those of you who have not got a greenhouse, why not provide a space in your windowsill for a tomato plant or two? Bringing our vegetable garden into the home.
I planted up three plants just about 4 weeks ago. Already they are bearing fruit and outgrowing the space provided! So I had to top them. I don’t k now about you but I love the smell of tomato plants.
Just a few weeks after planting they are already showing signs up a good harvest!
So there is not reason you cannot grow something for your kitchen table. The Kitchen Garden in your kitchen!
Let me know what you think. Put a comment on the blog. Optin to the newsletter and get some great free stuff!
Have a great day in the garden!
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Growing Potatoes In A Container
Well, it is no use having a vegetable garden without potatoes is there? For some of us it is part of our main staple diet…so important to find some space to do this. I grow potatoes away from the home but to demonstrate that you don’t need a great space to do this I got two containers and planted some new potatoes in them. I have done this before with tyres – placing a new tyre on top and filling with soil as the plants grow! Its cool!
Putting about six inches of mixed soil and compost at the base I planted about 4 seed potatoes in each container. Covered them with a couple of inches of the same soil and compost and then watched them grow. As the plants grow you just add soil so that you get a greater yield from your container.
It won’t be long until you too can enjoy the fruits of your Kitchen Garden.
Remember, lots of help and information on growing your own here:
Vegetable Gardening For Beginners
Would appreciate your comments….
Have a good day in the garden!
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