Growing and Gathering - Page 21 of 27 - 1/4 Acre Edible Heaven

Getting Rid Of Black Sooty Mould

I was recently asked to take a look at a friends dwarf Lemon tree, planted in pride of place right outside their lovely double glass doors in their dinning area.

There stood a small, sad looking tree that was pretty hard to spot as being a Lemon tree, because it was absolutely covered in a thick, black, sticky coating on all of it’s leaves.

Not being gardeners of any variety my friends were planning on pulling their Lemon tree out so they could replace it with something that didn’t look so sick, until I offered to help them figure out what was wrong with it.

As soon as I laid eyes on their poor little tree it was clear that it had fallen victim to a severe case of black sooty mould.

I’m Growing A Passionfruit!

I’m growing a Passionfruit! One lonely little Passionfruit : ( Every Summer I get all excited when I see these.And then I get all disappointed when absolutely nothing comes of it. No crinkled, deep purple fruit to cut into. Nothing. …

This pile might not look like much, but I have big plans for it.

With the size of our garden, it gets a bit hard to plant out every space and avoid leaving gaps for the weeds to flourish.

I HATE weeding.

I love the end result when it’s done, but it’s not my favourite job at all.

So the more I can stifle the weeds, the better. We don’t use any sprays what so ever so it comes down to competition and natural means of weed control in our garden, and sufficient ground cover seems like a good strategy to leave little room for weeds to make themselves at home.

Ground cover plants are easy to find, but given that we’re trying to make our garden as edible as possible I wanted to plant some kind of cropping plant as ground cover.

I’ve done the herb thing and it wasn’t really a winner for me. We planted various creeping Thymes and Oregano but they tend to get quite scruffy after a while and there’s only so much Thyme you can use in your cooking. They also didn’t crowd out the weeds as well as I hoped. The really determined ones just grew up in between the edibles and it wasn’t easy weeding once that happened.

So most of it came out along the way and the earth was left bare once again.

Pumpkins have to be one of my most satisfying crops to grow. You plant a small seed (in the scheme of things) and, all going well, end up with a crop of big round, meaty pumpkins. And they’re reasonably easy …

We’ve got Raspberries coming out our ears. It’s divine!

All our care and pruning paid off and we have been rewarded with a glut of fat, red fruit.

When you’ve got this much fruit it can actually be a challenge to deal with it all before it spoils so we eat it fresh, we freeze it, we give some away and then, when there is still more left over, we turn it into jam.

After all, it would be wrong NOT to make fresh jam when you have the fruit to do so. Home made jam is so much better than the store bought stuff. And it’s so simple to make, especially Raspberry jam.

New comers to home made jam often come to the task thinking jam is difficult to get right.

There’s seems to be a common fear of the jam not setting and then having a great sticky batch of boiled up fruit to deal with, as well as the concern over hygiene and making sure you’re not preserving the nasties in your jars for consumption later, along with your jam.

But honestly, jam can be really easy and once you’ve got past the hurdle of trying it, you won’t ever look back.

Seedless Raspberry Jam

I decided to make our jam seedless this year since my step son tends to turn his nose up at the Raspberry Jam, just because of the seeds. He likes the flavour but, like most kids, he doesn’t cope with the texture.

Years ago I was given a Rhubarb plant from a work colleague.

I’ve talked before about the journey of this poor neglected plant into my garden. The short of it is that it was left to dry out, forgotten in a garage, then eventually sent my way where it got (accidentally this time) left for another day to dry out, then finally planted in the garden to flourish.

As I said in that post, Rhubarb plants are tough. They are extremely resilient and while I wouldn’t recommend treating them badly like my first plant was, they can tolerate a fair bit of unkindness.

It’s been at least 18 months since my Rhubarb plants found their current home, and at that time they were split off from the original plant to create 5 new plants.

Dividing Rhubarb up is not only useful for propagating more plants, it’s also important for keeping the original plant healthy. The bigger it gets, the thinner and fewer the stems tend to be, and the whole plant can get a little out of control.

Which is where our Rhubarb patch had got to.

Getting Rid Of Black Sooty Mould

Read more

I’m Growing A Passionfruit!

Edible Ground Cover

How To Prune Your Pumpkin Patch

Seedless Raspberry Jam

Seedless Raspberry Jam

Dividing (Splitting) Up Rhubarb

Read more

Seedless Raspberry Jam

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