Novice Alert

[Hilly]

Hello All,

Am posting for the first time ever to anything. Has taken ages to find a genuinely useful forum, with a good dose of optimism and humour thrown in!

Started growing my own last October - started with easy salad leaves like rocket and those mixed leaf packs which has saved us a tonne of moolah and its sooooo good popping out to our tiny postage stamp greenhouse to pick rocket for the bacon muffins on Sunday mornings......

Getting a little more confident/deluded now and would love some advice on the whole bed rotation thing - have just chucked turnips I planted from one raised bed (don't ask - too embarrasing - lets just say it helps if you read the instructions on the seed packet!!) and would like to put PSB back in the same place - can I do this or am I asking for trouble?

I know I have so much to learn, any advice v. welcome.

Cheers

Hilly

[rustylady]

Welcome to the vine Hilly, don't worry we all make mistakes. What growing medium do you have - just the minute greenhouse, or do you have a garden or allotment? Not being nosy, just helps to know.

[carlseawolf]

HELLO AND WELCOME
growing isn't rocket science but it would be worth while getting at least on good gardening book on just veg and go from there.
p.s the more we know of the place you grow the more we can help, after all you have 1800 experts on here ( give or take a couple as i didn't have chance to read how many members there is ) .
and most of all have fun

[Alice]

Hello hilly, and welcome to the Vine. There's a lot on here about crop rotation. If you type it in the search box it should come up for you. I'm sorry I don't know what PSB is - is it a variety of turnip ? See you have raised beds so you should be able to grow a good variety of things. I'm just in the process of making mine and hope to have them up and running in time for this years planting season. Look forward to hearing how you are getting on. The experts will be along.

[sanman]

PSB = Purple Sprouting Broccoli?

[Mrs Dobby]

Hi Hilly and welcome to the madhouse! Hope you enjoy it as much as the rest of the inmate.... erm I mean grapes!

[pigletwillie]

Hello, welcome to the vine.

Enjoy the ride!!

[madderbat]

Hello Hilly (and Sanman)
Not all of us here are experts, some of us are just cadging the ride... and chipping in with what we hope is useful!
We have a few books, but you may find the Allotment Handbook by Caroline Foley pub New Holland, a good starting place.
We discovered that rotation is not something to get too worried about, just don't grow roots, beans, or brassicas in the same place each year.
Hope you feel at home here. See you around.

[roitelet]

Hello Hilly, welcome to the vine.

In answer to your question about turnips and PSB, I wouldn't plant the PSB straight after Turnips as they are the same family, Brassicas. If you follow one crop with another of the same family you can run the risk of building up disease problems in the soil. With Brassicas it is a disease called club root.

Best of luck with the growing.

[Hilly]

Hi again,

Thanks for the warm welcome.

Sorry about the mysterious abbreviation: PSB = purple sprouting broccolli- you were right sanman.

For Rustylady & Carlseawolf - I have a 6 by 8 greenhouse and two 6 by 4 raised beds, one has broad beans sown last November. Am bit worried about these as have had a couple of colonies of blackfly - I squished them and it seemed to keep them undercontrol but I have little black tips to what I think might be the flowers developing. Is blackfly normal in Jan?

I'm hoping I could try the following:

Greenhouse: Toms, cucumbers, aubergine, pepper. The greenhouse is unheated but we live in london and the back is against a house wall ( the garden is only 35 by 15 sq ft) so I am hoping I can get away without heating it if I grow the seeds on in the house first

With the beds I'd planned to divide them into two halfs to try a crop rotation. The broad beans are at one end of one of the beds, I have cabbage and caulis at the other (with a gap where the turnips were!) I was hoping to stay with brassicas in there until next year. With the beds being so small is there any point in bothering with a rotation system?

I do have some patio space and a couple of other empty beds that are supposed to be for flowers etc but am not sure if I'm going to get round to ornamentals 'cos I'm too excited about growing things to eat!

I've got a potatoe barrel to try to keep the space being used efficiently but I'm not sure how many pototoes to plant in it.

Thanks for the book tip Madderbat. You can't call our titchy plot an allotment buy maybe one day I'll graduate! I'll put that on my hints list for hubby. He did buy me Sarah Ravens Vegetable Plot and I've got HG Hessayan Veg Expert too - Sarah is a bit daunting/intimidating but inspirational.

Oh crumbs, so many questions......

[carlseawolf]

i've got the veg expert to and it explains most thing to do with veg growing.,
the only comment about the book is that all fertilizer used is growmore which i have not used but changed it to blood , fish and bone as i think its a better alternative .

[Hilly]

Thanks carl - is that because the growmore is chemical based? I'd like to keep it organic if poss. Is the blood/bonemeal mix easy to get hold of?

[carlseawolf]

yes the growmore is chemical and i want to keep as organic as possible .
growmore i beleve is band in the usa and there a theroy in organic circles that you should feed the soil not the plants , blood , fish and bone does this and is a slow release fertilizer ( blood first , bone last) and is good for carrots and parsnips where your not allowed to manure or compost before planting them .
blood , fish and bone is easy to get hold of in any garden centre or hardware shop if they do gardening supplys.
just follow the directions on the packet and wear gloves and replace where growmore is in the book , often you can only get bonemeal on it's own still as good but the effects are long term not a sudden fix.
going on holiday get some seaweed an all round fertilizer , strait in the ground or on the compost heap.

[madderbat]

Nothing wrong with well rotted horse poo either. I do wonder if we get too bogged down in 'modernity' sometimes.
(Try sh1t shifting for a sense of satisfaction, especially when it's free! - see other threads about that particular exercise)

[carlseawolf]

i agree there nothing like manure if you can get it