Category: vegeable plots
Dobies Vegetable Garden Planner
November 9, 2016
Dobies Vegetable Garden Planner is the best way to plan your vegetable garden or allotment.
Those wet days when you know it’s best to keep off the garden are the perfect time to start planning. Planning what veg to grow, how many and where, during the year ahead. Sure, you can do this in a notebook, carefully drawing your plot to scale and rubbing out as you change your mind. However, there is a simpler and better way.
Sweet Potatoes Available Now
March 16, 2016
I remember a time when we here at Dobies didn’t sell sweet potatoes but we then started to receive requests from customers and so, after some research, we listened and added them to our range. Back then we supplied sweet potatoes as slips and although this worked fine for some customers others reported less satisfactory results. So, after more research, we started to supply them as super plugs and the results have been very much better.
Progress in our ‘Dobies’ garden plots
November 30, 2012
Cabbages just showing to the left, perennial herbs and polyanthus right.
We’ve gone from four inches of rain in two days to nights of heavy frost and freezing temperatures. But on the good days in between I was actually able to start on the much-needed reclamation of the pottager. Everything has suffered from my inattention this Summer, but a determined effort, and tackling the job little by little and three of the raised beds are productive again. Cabbages packed close in one bed (protected from the birds with netting) and a change of plan for the other three. Another has been planted with unusual perennial herbs (the rocket self-seeded and has germinated already), and a transplanted feverfew, because it looked so pretty. All the beds have been edged with a rather special primrose – yellow, tinged blue-green, and a joyous mix of polyanthus.
June Miscellany: pest control, begonias and vegetables
June 10, 2011
Our village held a fun ‘look alike’ scarecrow competition for the village fete – I dare not show the photo of me holding my ‘creation’; you might not know which was the scarecrow!
Scarecrows, begonias and an update on our allotment and new potager all feature in this first June posting. As the days lengthen towards mid-summer, there still does not seem to be time enough for us to accomplish all we seek to do out-of-doors.
Scarecrows always make me smile, but they serve a useful purpose in the garden – so long as you keep moving them around! Once a customary sight in farm fields (where clothing past human wearing could be recycled), traditional scarecrows as bird-deterrents are now less common. Farmers – and gardeners – employ all manner of objects to protect their crops: foil discs and strips; plastic fertiliser and compost bags hung from poles; bottles on sticks; humming lines; fake birds of prey; spinning mini-windmills; flags, kites and balloons; guns and other exploding devices; cat-shaped standalones with flashing eyes; fleece, netting, cages … one’s garden or allotment could begin to take on the appearance of a shanty town!
Vegetables in Small Spaces
April 14, 2011
an area of my garden, laid down to metre-wide beds, mostly two metres in length and packed with produce
Gardening by the “square metre” is a simple, easy-to-follow concept that allows you to squeeze more produce into small spaces. Basically, you sow crops closer together – a higher density in any give area. Vegetables, salads, herbs and other edibles – whether annual or perennial – are planted in beds no more than a metre (39 inches) wide. Beds can be square, but need not be; raised or at ground level. It’s not the length that is important, but the WIDTH. ‘Square-Metre Gardening’ is also a no-dig technique, once it’s set up, unless you neglect the beds! You can tend and reach produce from either side of any metre-wide bed; as plants are grown closer together, weeding is reduced and because you do not ever step on the growing area, soil is not compacted. Fertility is built up by the annual addition of compost. It’s a technique you can use in garden or allotment, and one I have followed for many years.