Experiment 2

To save money we are only using the fire in the house and no heating. That would be great if there was a fire in all the rooms but there is only one and that's not even in the main room, so i have many layers on , i look like a little bear. Back to the point my father hired a chainsaw and we have cut up all the stored wood and fallen wood we could get our hands on there is allot of wood in the picture but that's just a quarter of it, i promise, because it was I who had to put all the logs away. However we got left with a tone of sawdust, so using my initiative i scattered it onto my plot for another experiment maybe it will do something mulch down or it could act like a poison and i have just basically killed my soil we shall soon see.

Bird Housing Market

I have been redecorating the bird houses we have. Those lucky birds have been getting some new straw to keep there little beaks warm, because they probably can't afford heating this year with the credit crunch and one of the coldest winters.

Also to chear them up i have decorated one of the trees .

Experiment 1

Gardening can be an expensive hobby and so i am going to become more experimental with my gardening in order to a) save money b)use the facilities i have c) invent new ways of gardening and become the Einstein of the vegetable gardening world. The last one would be cool if it became true. On a serious note and non related veg subject i have been growing these Edelweiss seeds for months now and so far i have these tiny little seedlings which is great but they grow so slowly and my mother wants them off her window sill. So i have a wine crate and covered the base with straw to keep some warmth in. Hopefully because they are quite well established seedlings they will survive and you are meant to simulate the temperatures of the Swiss Alpes, i am praying they will be OK and not die on me. If anybody knows anything about Edelweiss at this stage in their life because i can't find any information on what to do with them as seedlings i just keep finding lyrics for the Sound of Music.

Disaster

The wind came and blew down my kiwi plant, from the sound of the bang i thought it was a burglar. As you can see the wind pulled it right over but luckily the root ball didn't come out, but all the leaves have been pulled off and it was touch and go for a few days but i have propped it back up and jammed it into a corner. I think i will feed it something to give a little boost, because it is looking very sorry for itself.

Feed the Birds

Nothing much has been going on in my garden because i didn't want to plant any overwintering vegetables because i wanted to give my soil a really good period of time to get more nutrients. So i planted a tone of green manure, but i planted it to late and none of the three packets i had sown grew. I was really irrated because i had spent two days breaking up the soil taking out enough rocks to build a house with and then racking it all over ready for the seeds. Then thank heavens above only a depressing three weeks later little green shoots appeared so i must have done something right.
Now the frost has kicked in they have stopped dead in there tracks, but at least the frost is breaking up my soil.

I have also emptied the entire contense of my composter and dumped it on my old veg patch coverd it with newspaper and cardboard and some old bit of fencing and fleece to hold it all down. The idea of this is to a bulk up the soil there and get the soil to get some more nutrients in there. I did a similar thing to another bed where i had grown some beans and it worked a treat until the rabbits bit off the stems.

Lastly don't forget to feed the birds!

Nearly to the finish line now

I tidied up my sliver of a plot raked it over and dug in some compost to benefit the soil. Since then i have put some straw round the brussels and fleeced them to protect them from the frost. It doesn't look like i will be getting brussels for Christmas they are still really small.
I have also tided up the old apple tree for years we haven't been able to get apples off them they always were rotten. So i have pruned off all the interlocking branches to provided better air circulation, put a gum band round and when my next batch of compost is ready i will be putting that round the base to and hopefully that will help.
Back to the plot which is now all dug up and now just needs raking over, because we have put a rotovator through the soil to break it up because it was so compacted. Then i started to fork it to keep the gaps and to pick out the stones, because there is millions of stones. I got to a section and got stuck so i moved on a little bit think i might find the end of this huge stone. Forty minutes later i have uncovered what looks like  9ft of solid stone. 
I thought who would put this in here and why. So i started to dig up and make my own little exervation site and i have dug up 11 breeze blocks. Why were they in there i don't know will there be anymore who knows, my back hurts and i have had to take time off from the plot. However the lack of breeze blocks have left me with huge holes and i will now have to invest in some top soil.

Feed the Birds

I made some coconut bird feeders using some old coconuts which i drilled through. Cracking them open took a little longer that used a few more tools, a hammer chisel and saw. The insides were done with bird seeds (obviously) and melted lard which you mix together. Big tip here feed your string through first with a twig on the end so it doesn't fall out, and make sure you fill up the hole before you but in the mixture i learned this the hard way, my lard went everywhere!

I left them in the fridge over night and they turned out really well, unfortunately no birds got them because the squirrel got them and the insides fell out and the dogs got them. So bad news for birds.

I painted a piggy bank and plan to use it as an honesty pot to put out with my gluts of vegetables which i will be getting. Yes i know i am overly hopeful.

The mystery squash revealed, this is the squash i grew from and unknown plant i got at a market and actually it is lovely i am going to be bold enough and say its nicer then butternut squash,it was that good. So i have saved some seeds ready to plant next year. I still don't know the name.