Rocket Gardens Constant Garden - update on the plants and harvesting!

The weather here over the weekend was mostly ok, sunny and rainy on Saturday, Sunday was dull but dry so I spent a lot of the weekend planting up raised beds, re- potting plants into larger pots and generally doing lots of garden related jobs outside. When it rained I ducked inside the polytunnel to pot on plants - have I said how much I love my polytunnel? I think I have, a few times. 

A lot of the veg plants I planted out, or potted on, were the remains of my second and third delivery from my Rocket Gardens Constant Gardens selection of veg plants - I put them as small plug plants into pots where they have grown well but it is now time to put them outside in their final places in the ground. Today into the raised bed I planted out various brassicas, some celery, leeks, onions, chard and spinach, some french beans, beetroot and more salads. Several weeks ago I planted out onions and leeks (in another raised bed) and last week I put in the runner bean, pea, pumpkins and courgette plants.

All these plants are growing strongly and for several weeks now we have been eating salad and spinach or chard from the plants which were already in the garden or in the polytunnel (on my salad bar). I picked the first peas last night :-)/

As I said in my last post, I had to come up with some way to protect the raised bed I am planting them in and I am still very pleased with the results :-) It is easy to unpeg one side to plant more plants or to harvest some.

After all this activity I still had quite a few salad plants left over, so I came up with a way of using some "alternative" containers for planting them in. I know lots of people don't have the space to plant veg in the ground that we do here, so I thought it would be good to show how well plants grow in all sorts of containers, and not just plant pots!

I have a friend who gives me lots of these plastic mushroom trays which get used here for all sorts of things. They are quite shallow so I decided to grow some salad plants in them, which don't need a huge depth of soil.

 I lined the tray with newspaper, so the growing medium stays inside the tray.

I added the growing medium (a mix of Fertile Fibre coir based  and Moorland Gold reclaimed peat certified organic, but any good peat free potting or general purpose mix would do)

Looking down from above to show how I spaced the salads plants out. I was aiming for a "pleasing to the eye" pattern, which also gave all the plants space to grow.

As always I had feathery company around me. Sweetie the Speckledy jumped up to see what I was up to

 Naughty Sweetie! She tried to eat the herb plants I had just potted on! Gerroff!

Finished planter :-)

Lots of lovely cut and come again salad leaves, to add to the salad bar in the polytunnel..

I planted  up an unwanted wicker basket three weeks ago with celery plug plants from my Rocket Gardens delivery #3. I lined the basket with an old compost bag and punched some holes in it for drainage.

 

The celery is doing well and putting on lots of growth, and tastes delicious ( I sneaked a stem yesterday)

The Strawberries which came with the Small Fruit Garden are so wonderful! Juicy and plump and huge :-)

The fruit bushes from my Small Fruit Garden are all growing well, still in big pots as I have not yet decided where to site my new fruit garden. Need to think about that, so as to protect it from the chickens.

I am so impressed with the plants I have recieved from Rocket Gardens, they are all growing well and are tasty varieties which we enjoy eating :-) I am also very impressed with their customer service, as when I told them about a couple of plants which were a bit sad in delivery #3  I was sent replacements by next post and they thanked me for telling them, so they could do something about it :-) Which was nice :-)

I am expecting delivery # 4 of my Constant Garden in the next week or so, so I had better get back out into the garden and plant out the rest of the last one, and think where I want to plant out the next lot ;-)

I am enjoying being a Rocketeer!