Pegs and Paper Pot Peas

There’s no denying that summer is over. Coming home in the dark after work is probably the most frustrating part of the winter, although the weather comes a very close second (particularly this week). Despite a busy few weeks work-wise, we’ve been determined to ride the wave of enthusiasm associated with our upgraded house, and have tried to make the most of what little “outdoor” time we could find.




The pegs in context
(with stool)

Coat Pegs - simple and effective
(well, they haven't fallen down yet!)

As we were thinking about being more self-sufficient at the same time as thinking about all our wood (see previous post), we thought it would be a “Good Idea” to try and make more wooden stuff that we could use. We did – the lovely “Not-Quite-Shaker-Style” pegs for the new front-door cloakroom. Beautifully simple and free to make, yet completely functional and, as they’re for hanging coats on, completely obscured by the coats so unappreciated by anyone. At least WE know they’re there.

 



November Greenhouse
(Broad Beans, Peas and Onion sets)



Newspaper Pot Peas

Continuing on the increased self-sufficiency theme, we also decided to try some newspaper pots for some of our late autumn sowings. In truth, two other rather more fundamental things happened that contributed to this decision. Firstly, we found the newspaper pot maker in a pile of other stuff. This was an unused Christmas present from … a while ago? It is one of those things that sounds wonderful, but when you actually see it you think “that’ll never work” and consign it, unused, so some pile of stuff somewhere. The second factor was that normally we’d sow peas in guttering in spring. Given that we’re being all enthusiastic at the moment, we decided to sow lots of peas and only have one gutter cover (actually, an old office strip-light cover, but never mind) so needed somewhere else to sow them We didn’t have enough toilet roll tubes and the small pots were all being kept for onion sets, so newspaper pots it is! Having made 116 of them over the weekend, they seem surprisingly strong, and we’re regretting discovering this present so late (although its still possible that they’ll disintegrate over the next few days, consigning the newspaper pot maker back to the “pile”).





Garlic "Cristo" growing well under fleece



Apart from sowing the Peas (58 each of “Meteor” and “Douce Provence” in the newspaper pots and 32 Mangetout “Winterkefe” sown in the guttering) the Garlic “Cristo” cloves potted up last month grew very well, and have now been planted out under a fleece. Perhaps surprisingly (well, we were) we’ve never grown garlic before, probably because we’ve never been organised enough to get the cloves planted in time in autumn, so looking forward to seeing how these perform. We also managed to pot up 132 Onion “Radar” sets and all four varieties of Broad Beans sown last month have germinated. Finally, and a bit late, but hopefully better late than never, we sowed a few Broccoli “Green Magic F1” , Cauliflower “All The Year Round”, Spinach “Giant Winter”, Cabbage “Pixie” and Lamb’s Lettuce “Elan” onto the windowsill propagator.