Harry, Pat or Keith?

We had a huge bit of excitement yesterday in the little garden! A bird of prey! Not quite sure what it was though, it all happened so fast. We do know that there's a pair of nesting Peregrines over at the 02 which is probably about a one minute fly for a Peregrine. Apparently there's also Kestrels and Sparrowhawks in Greenwich Park so we've got a choice of three.

BB scared it off as he walked out into the garden and it literally flew right past with something furry in it's talons. Maybe a little mousey?

The garden has been pretty quiet since, think he's worried a few of the little babies but it's gradually getting back to normal, just spotted a Greenfinch today.

So was it a Harry the Hawk, Pat the Peregrine or Keith the Kestrel? Who knows, maybe he'll make a return flight and we'll be able to get a proper ID. Who'd thought such excitement in little ol'SE10!

The first harvest of the season

Radishes. Our first taste of grow-your-own. We've been growing the French Breakfast variety and finally we got to taste some of the fruits of our labour. To be honest, they've been pretty easy to grow, a few problems at the beginning with the ever present greenfly but they seemed to cope pretty well with them.

The French Breakfast are not as hot as the standard globe variety and I think when we grow them again we'll go for the globe version, don't get me wrong they were lovely but they could've done with abit more poke, if you get my drift.

We made a Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall recipe

Radish and Goats Cheese Raita

• 200g of fresh radishes
  
• 300ml of natural yoghurt
• 100 g of fresh soft goat's cheese
• 2tsp of chopped fresh mint

You just finely slice the radishes and mix everything together, as simple as that. It was nice, bit too cheesy for me, think we'll reduce the amount of goats cheese we put in next time.

But lets not dwell on that, I'd like to celebrate the fact that we've grown radishes, actually grown them, from tiny little seeds. Well, they did all the hard work, all we did was provide them with somewhere to grow. Thanks radishes, we did enjoy you, and we look forward to many more to follow!

We're proud parents!

Woo hoo! We were right, we thought Gary the Goldfinch had been tending to a nest somewhere over the Greenwich skies and today we saw the product of all his hard work! Three of the little fellas. We're so proud :-)

You can tell their babies by their plumage, an adult Goldfinch has a red head whereas the youngsters are fawn all over and have the little stripes over their chest and back.

The RSPB has a great little gadget for bird identification if you ever see something and you're not sure what it is.

http://www.rspb.org.uk/wildlife/birdidentifier/form.asp

They've all been having lots of fun in the eucalyptus tree at the bottom of the garden. It gives them great cover from the cats and other predators, it's like a birdie playground at the moment, brilliant fun watching them all.

Are snails taking over the world?

Oh my god... I'm quite shocked. I've just done my daily evening garden check-up. I watered our seedlings that are doing nicely in our grow tent and noticed that a few of the radishes seemed to have been nibbled. We've had ants in the grow tent before that lopped of the leave of the basil, apparently that one of the only plants that ants eat, jolly good... Anyways, I take out all the trays one by one and check them all and there were bluddy snails in there!!! Can you believe the cheek of it! Two of them and between them they've managed to destroy six plants, so that's six meals they've wrecked for us, yes very good work Mr.Snail.

So I go grab my litter picker (see previous post, a god send for snail collecting) and I go on abit of a snail mission. One hiding under the lambs lettuce, got that little bugger.

Then I go to where they all seem to live, by the clematis. It's climbing up a wall with some trellis and they love it there. I've kinda left them alone for a few days thinking, you know, as long as they stay there then they're OK but today I decide to collect them all. I start off, slowly, one, two, three... keep going, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen... thirty one, thirty two, thirty three... I can't quite believe how many there are. A total of fourty-six! I mean, come on, that's just silly. We must have a snail nest or something? I've had a look on the interweb and it seems that they can procreate themselves, and you have mini-snails in about fourteen days. Fourty six though! And you all thought I was making a mountain out of a mole hill.

So this weekend I think the clematis is going to have to go. Sorry Mrs.Clematis but you harbour snails and this is what happens...

A naked Brad Pitt and chocolate—what more could a girl want?!

Heston Blumenthal may think they make a wonderful porridge and the French might love them slathered in garlic and butter but even if they were dipped in the finest Belgain chocolate and served to me by a naked Brad Pitt I wouldn't touch them with a 10ft pole.

What am I talking about? Well snails of course–the sworn enemy of all vegetable gardeners.

It's true to say that I've never exactly been on good terms with the slimey molluscs but now it truly is a war on an epic scale.

We'd been fairly snail free up until Easter bank holiday. We went away to the Peak District for a lovely long weekend. Upon our return we hurriedly checked the little garden to make sure everything was in order only to find that they'd had munched their way through an entire row of cos lettuce!

Now, I will admit this caused me a small problem, I might, just might, have a large and slightly irrational fear of the damn things... so what was I going to do? It got so bad on one rainy day there must have been about 30 all crawling and slurching their way across our garden wall. I couldn't touch them, couldn't even get close to the things.

What to do? I was well and truly stumped, after mulling it over for a night or two I had abit of a eureka moment—a litter picker,! It freed me from snail hell. Small, relatively inexpensive (think I paid a fiver for it) and the most wonderful gadget ever invented. Well the most wonderful gadget for a snail-a-phobic. I can now pick them up, lob 'em anywhere I please and I don't have to get closer than 4ft to the dirty things.

If you do one thing this weekend, buy a litter picker. You'll never regret it, I promise.

The cat that got the cream—and my beetroot!

It seems that if you decide to grow vegetables in your garden a large percentage of your time is dealing with things that try to eat them before you can. We've had ants that chomped our basil, snails devouring a whole row of baby cos, greenfly sucking the life out of our horseradish and now it seems we have a fury four legged foe who thought it would be fun to dig up our beetroot!

We've been nurturing them for about six weeks now and they were looking wonderfully healthy, so we finally put them into their bed on Sunday. I came home from work today and did my usual garden inspection when, shock, horror it seems that someone has had a good old dig and five whole plants had been buried under a mound of displaced soil.

I think I've managed to salvage them, I've repotted the poor little fellas, with soil right up to their first leaves so hopefully they'll grow some extra roots and I've netted over the remaining seedlings in the ground.

My dream of a home grown borscht soup is still alive and we'll be on the look out for that pesky cat. If anyone has a nice big hairy dog they'd like to lend us for the weekend please get in touch!

Aphid Wars: The Cavalry Arrive!

Just when we thought that we were on the losing side in our battle against the Green Army we've discovered that a new ally has arrived: The Parasitic Wasp Battalion!

These guys are dire enemies of aphids and actively seek them out. However, this isn't a buffet for the wasps but more a doggy bag for their unborn offspring. The wasps inject their eggs into the aphids and essentially use them as an incubator and creche. The egg grows inside the aphid, eats its way out, and then flies off to commit the same gruesome act on aphids of it's own choosing. Apparently each wasp is capable of parasitically impregnating up to 200.

Now we've also noticed as you may have seen from our last post on the Green Army that we had a good mixture of green and brown aphids. Well it now seems that the majority of our aphids are now brown and these seem to be the ones that have been impregnated by the wasps.

So if you see squadrons of small black wasps crawling and flying round your plants and looking rather interested in your aphid colonies then take heart for your allies have come to the call of battle.

The Little Garden

As the name of our blog suggests we have an incy, wincy, teeny, tiny, little terraced garden, in leafy Greenwich approx 5x4m. (click on the map for a larger view)

We really don't have many beds (the shaded area on the map), so we're making the most of the patio by growing lots of stuff in pots and containers.

With the help of Alan.T and a nice bottle of wine we decided one Friday evening on what we'd grow, so in no particular order we've got:

Potatoes — Maris Piper and Epicure, Carrots – Nantes 2 and Baby Ideal, Beetroot – Boltardy, Tomatoes – Tumbling Tom in Yellow and Red, Strawberries – Elsanta and Sarian, Horseradish, Radish – French Breakfast, Shallots – from sets, Garlic, Spring Onion – White Lisbon, Onions – from sets, Leeks – Mussleburgh, Lettuce – Little Gem and finally Beans – Dwarf Bean

And on the herb front we have:

Basil, Coriander, Chives, Sage, Borage and Parsley.

That's an awful lot to fit into our tiny space but as I said, much of it we're growing in pots. In the beds we're putting the Leeks, Onions, Potatoes, Carrots, Beetroot and Strawberries.

We're already quite a way through the process with a few things in the ground but still lots and lots of seedlings dotted around on what feels like every windowsill in the house!

At the moment indoors we have a second batch of radishes and spring onions, an obscene amount of lettuce and both types of carrots. These are ready for transplanting now so that's a job for the weekend.

We don't want to bore everyone with posts as long as our till receipts from B&Q so we'll update on everything else as we go along. Bryn is rather proud of his potatoes (it's a man thing) so I'm sure they'll be first on the list.

Attack of the Aphids!!?

Look at the little beasties! Ground control to Major Tom.

We have an invasion! The aphids are colonising most of our plant life. A common problem admittedly but how to fight it is the ever pertinent question.

Here at The Little Gardeners we're always trying to keep it organic so the obvious problem solver, of a crate of lethal chems, is somewhat out of the scope of our arsenal.

At first I thought they were flea beetles as they were dark and first appeared on our radish crop. Of course that led us on a fruitless journey to find some Derris but appparently it's now illegal or on the verge of becoming so in the UK. However, looking at the shot above these guys have got the same config as the green aphids no matter whether they're brown or green. So, maybe what we have got here is a mixture of greenfly and blackfly? When we grew some tomatoes indoors last year we had some aphid and spider mite issues to contend with but the aphids were all green, no brown ones. So if anyone can pass a positive ID on these veg munching criminals then we'd love to hear from you!

In the meantime we've ordered a mercenary army of Ladybird larvae to come and fight the battle so we'll let you know how the squadron fare once they've been assigned to duty.

BB

Introducing Gary the Goldfinch

Here in our little garden we're also trying to attract our flying friends. We've been pretty successful on the bird front with a few regular visitors, notably Gary the Goldfinch who we think is now supporting a small family as we haven't seen his Mrs for about 3 weeks.

Goldfinches love Nyjer Seed and the feeder we bought does the trick brilliantly, but we've also bought some Teasel seeds which I'm told is a bit of a Goldfinch delicacy. We planted them a couple of weeks ago but apparently they take 18 months to flower so hopefully Gary & Co will still be around.

We'll keep you posted on Gary's antics.

Welcome

The Little Gardeners is our way of documenting our first forray into vegetable gardening.

Thanks to a move of house we finally have a garden for the first time in five years and boy are we excited!

The only experience of vegetable growing we've had before was five tomato plants on our windowsill last year that yielded the grand total of about six fruit in varying shades of green. So we're hoping to do slightly better this year!

At the new house we've got a small back garden which is a mixture of patio and corner and side beds. A full plan of the space and what we have planted where and sun/shade maps will be coming in a future post. We're learning as we go along and we hope that by sharing our ups and downs you can learn with us (and help when it goes horribly wrong!)

We'll also be keeping you updated on the other small folk we share our space with such as a pair of Goldfinches, a little mousey and the war against snails!

Thanks for visiting.

Tracy & Bryn