Never ever ever impulse buy plants

I have bought a lot of plants in my time. Any trip to a garden centre starts with a beeline to the sales corner; it appeals to both the thrift and the rescuer in me. I have bought all sorts of things, simply because they were there. A Sambuca niger. Astilbes (astilbes don’t grow in my sun-drenched soil). More whitecurrants than I care to share with you.

They don’t die because I don’t know how to care for plants; I do. They die because I don’t know where to put them. I can’t commit. They don’t have an obvious (or even a subtle) place and so they languish in their garden centre black plastic pot, drying out, starving, having to be urgently resuscitated but sitting in bucket of water and then drying out again.

Do not go to a nursery or a garden centre without a plan. Do not buy a plant that you don’t know what you are going to do with.

Grow from seed

A tray of cosmos is £5.25 in my local farm shop. For six. I have far too many because I grow using my own seed packets (I invented them to be joyful and I don’t see why I should miss out simply because I picked and packed them myself. Six is, to most sensible people, absolutely enough. But £5.25 could buy a lot of seed. Don’t misunderstand me, we’ve all missed the critical window for something time sensitive and had to swallow our pride and buy in plugs, but if you are going for bang for your buck, seeds are the only way to go.

My mother says on a frequent basis that she will never grow from seed again. Too much faff. She doesn’t mean it. She’s away this weekend and I am feeding her cat and watering the seedlings on her kitchen windowsill. However, I do have a suggestion on the faff front.

Direct sowing

There is no better way to get a bit of colour around the place than throwing a few annual seeds around the place. If you are going to do any early sowing under cover, then you need time, space, compost, pots, trays, labels, all sorts of things. Sowing seeds in seed trays is what makes my life worth living so I am not going to give this up entirely in a hurry, but for maximum sustainability, for minimum outlay, there is nothing wrong with mimicking Mother Nature, and just clearing some soil, scattering some seed, and waiting for rain. (Water if rain isn’t forecast, obviously.)

And now is the absolute peak time for direct sowing. Contrary to common beliefs, there is plenty of time for seeds to sprout, to grow and to flower in this summer season. I’ll be doing it all this week.

To make the most of a seed packet, get into the habit of successional sowing.

You get a lot of seeds in a packet. Even if it doesn’t look like it, the chances are you get a lot more seeds than you might need plants. This is especially the case with cut and come again salads, but also the ‘one hit wonder’ flowers. If you sow all your bupleurum at once, it will all flower at once. You cut it, and that’s it.

Sow a bit, put the packet back in the cool and dry, and then sow a bit more next month. You don’t get feast and famine in terms of your harvests, and you don’t have to keep re-buying the same packets of seeds.

Grow special

If you are supplementing your kitchen from the garden, focus on growing things that you either can’t buy, or that are expensive to buy. When I first said that I was going to grow flowers to sell, and I might put some vegetables in as well, my neighbour asked me to grow carrots for him. Absolutely not, I said. They are slow to grow, take up lots of space and they are cheap as chips to buy, even organic ones. Ditto onions. Potatoes are more controversial because a freshly dug potato is a different level, but you get the gist.

I grow asparagus because it is expensive in the shops, especially in the quantities in which I eat it.

I grow pea tops because I like them more than bagged salad and you can fit them in any old pot.

All of this applies to flowers too. If you adore peonies on the table in May, they are a great thing to grow in a cutting garden because they are expensive to buy. I shouldn’t bother with autumn sowing ammi because it comes out at the same time as cow parsley and if where you are is anywhere like here, I am surrounded by the stuff.

 

If you possibly can, make your own compost.

They do say that when something is too cheap, someone somewhere is paying the price, and cheap compost will be cheap for a reason. The ones paying the price are generally the peat bogs. As I have moved towards starting the organic certification process, compost has got dearer.  Also, For my Viridor (green waste) compost, it was never the compost itself that was expensive, it was the lorry that brought it here. In the end, I made my husband take a lorry driving test just so we could rent a vehicle and go and collect it but they changed the rules at the depot and stopped you being able to do this. This was therefore not an economical solution at any level.

If you have any space at all to make compost, it will be worth your while to do so. I will quite often mix home made compost, a bit of leaf mold, and the bought compost as a way to make it all go further. Home made compost is a bit rich for seed sowing, but it does help bulk out the expensive stuff. Just check it got hot in the making process, or you might find yourself lovingly tending some fat hen seeds. We’ve all done it.

If you are filling raised beds or top dressing for no dig, there are lots of tips about going to stables and collecting your own manure but generally, it won’t be ready to use on the garden and so you need to store it whilst it rots down and you just never quite know what is in it. Plus fresh manure is very heavy.

There are ways of bringing compost prices down. Dalefoot and Fertile Fibre composts are cheaper the more you buy so if you can, bulk buy and share with neighbours or, if you have the space, buy all that you need at the beginning of the season and store it, rather than buying it bag by bag.

Make your own plant feeds

If you don’t have any nettles at all on your patch, I am coming round to garden at your house. I don’t believe that many people are that far away from a patch of nettles. (If you have access to comfrey, all the better, but in my experience, there are more nettles than there is comfrey around and about.) And if you have anything growing in containers at all, it is going to need some sort of feed. I fear this is why my pear tree produced one single fruit last year. I am promising to do better.

Nettle tea recipe

• Collect the nettles in a bucket. I use one of the tall brewing buckets and loosely fill it. Wear gloves.

• In the bucket, chop the nettle into smaller pieces. Finer pieces equals more surface area for fermentation and the release of nutrients. 

• Add enough water to cover the nettle in the bucket. It should be able to stir freely and not be overly thick. 

• Set the lid on top of the bucket, but don’t seal it. You don’t want it to explode.

• Stir the brewing nettle tea once per day if possible. Bubbles should appear as you stir it.

• After one to two weeks, the nettle tea is finished brewing. A good signal that your fertilizer is ready is when it stops visibly bubbling after stirring. That means the nettle is no longer actively fermenting.

• Strain the nettle solids from the tea liquid. We do this by pouring the solution through an old colander into another bucket. Compost the leftover strained solids.

• Store the finished concentrated stinging nettle tea in a bucket with a lid. Nettle tea fertilizer must be diluted before it is applied to the garden! Read instructions below.

Use brewed nettle tea fertilizer within about 6 months.

Nettle tea is very potent, and therefore needs to be watered down before using it to feed other plants in your garden. To dilute it into a usable fertilizer, mix 1 part brewed nettle tea to 10 parts water. For example, one pint of nettle tea to 10 pints of water. We find it easiest to dilute and mix a small portion of nettle fertilizer in a separate container as-needed (immediately before use), rather than diluting a huge batch and storing it all. 

As well as feeding the soil and roots, you can also spray diluted nettle tea onto a plant’s leaves which apparently works as a strong insect repellent. The active compounds in stinging nettles are reported to deter aphids and thrips. Plants readily absorb nutrients through the leaves, entering their vascular systems even more quickly than those taken up by their roots.

If you are going to use it with a sprayer, you will have to double strain your nettle tea otherwise it will clog up the nozzle. Folded cheesecloth is fine for this, although label carefully what you use for the kitchen and which for the potting shed. Dilute 1 part nettle tea to 20 parts water and add it to your sprayer of choice. It is best practice to apply any type of foliar sprays in the evening hours once the plant is out of direct sun. This reduces the risk of sunburn to wet leaves, and is the time when beneficial insects are least active. Spray the leaves until they’re thoroughly coated and dripping.

 Fermented Plant Juice (FPJ).

If you can make nettle tea, you can make an FPJ. Collect plant material based on what stage your plants are going through. If it is spring and everything is in full growth, nettle tips are perfect. If the season is late and you want to support fruiting, windfall apples. A dry day is best, and do not wash anything you are going to use, the fermentation will need the wild yeasts and bacteria on the plants.

Mix the chopped plant material with organic brown sugar, equal weight of plant material to sugar. Cover lightly and leave for between seven and fourteen days. It should smell a bit vinegary-sweet, a bit like a sourdough starter.

Strain the liquid off and bottle. Compost the plant material for good measure. Keep the FPJ in the fridge if you can. It is used by spraying on the leaves, diluted down with 1 part FPJ to 1000 parts water. You will notice this is a much more dilute solution than the nettle tea and so you can do it in much smaller quantities. Rather than a massive bucket in the courtyard, this is more likely to be in a jar on the side in my kitchen.