A Christmas Carrot...

First off, sincere apologies for the lack of posts. What with the natural advancement of the winter season and increased work demands, giving due time and attention to the London Vegetable Garden blog has been a task harder than growing things in pots these bleak months!

There is not a lot happening on the London Vegetable Garden at the moment. I have had some spring onions sat in a pot for a few months now, but progress seems to be terribly slow, which I attribute to the lack of light and warmth. Similarly, I planted some more carrot seeds in September. I learnt from my carrot attempts of the spring / summer that I needed to plant these much more thinly, so proceeded to carefully sow a few in a large pot.

Well, I read recently that carrot leaves need plenty of sunlight and the past few weeks have been very sparse indeed. The carrot plants seem to have come to a stop, with some of them turning slightly yellow, which I would assume equates to a lack of sunlight. With this in mind (and attempting to yield one more flourish for the blog before we go into 2010) I pulled these up this morning.

As you can see, these dwarf carrots still remain very small (I have used my large hand for scale!), however the results are significantly improved. The carrots look a lot healthier than the previous batch and I am attributing this purely to the fact that they have had more room to grow and have not been overcrowded.


I have sampled them and the flavour is extremely intense! I believe that gardening is all about trial and error and building upon the knowledge you have gained. I propose that come spring, I plant carrot seeds thinly once more, but use a pot that is a lot deeper than the current ones. Hopefully this will encourage deeper root growth and swell the carrots more.

September Update: What's Going On?

My recent arrival back from a late summer holiday really has marked the end of the summer and the beginning of autumn. The London Vegetable Garden balcony has been very quiet in recent weeks, since I didn't want to grow seedlings and leave these for a week, and many of the summer crops have now gone. So, as I throw myself into my first proper autumn gardening period, what do I have on the go?

The picture above is pretty much it in terms of vegetables at the moment, although I do plan to peruse the garden centre for Chinese leaves and winter vegetables this afternoon. So, for a brief rundown, we have:

Top Left: Butternut Squash plant

This has seen plenty of flowers, but no fruits as yet. The bottom half of the plant is very withered and the leaves seem to have developed leaf mildew while I was on holiday. I'm not holding out much hope for this plant, but for the moment it's hanging in there – just!

Top Right: Spring Onions

Friends on the London Gardeners' Network have told me that spring onions are a great vegetable to grow and easily doable at this time of the year. My spring onion plants seem to be doing well and coming up nicely – I've sown them thinly (one of the biggest lessons I've learnt this year), so am hoping for some great, if only a few, vegetables.

Middle Left: Lollo Rossa and Rocket

One of the easiest and quickest of plants to grow, lettuce leaves have been part and parcel of the London Vegetable Garden since April. The best results have come from leaves planted in a window box, but I've also managed to grow good crops in these shallow trays, of which these are the latest crop.

Middle Right and Bottom Left: Beetroot

I'm not sure how these will turn out, especially now that the nights are getting colder and these beetroot plants are still relatively young. The ones on the middle right of the picture have been planted from seed in this pot; the ones in the bottom left have been transplanted from smaller flowerpots. The ones on the right look stronger, but I'm not holding out much hopes for these guys at the moment!

Bottom Right: Carrots

Now, for those of you that have been with me since the beginning, you'll remember my over-zealous enthusiasm led to a condensed carrot conundrum! I planted far too many seeds and in the end, this killed the carrot crop off. This time, I have literally sown about five dwarf carrot seeds in a pot and already, they seem to be growing much faster. If I can get a couple of good carrots from this experiment, I'll be happy!

So that's it at the moment! I'm planning on looking at winter seed planting this afternoon, so may possibly follow up with another new blog post this afternoon. In the meantime, if anyone has any tips for me and my current selection, please leave a comment on this blog post, or come and join the London Vegetable Garden community over at the London Gardeners Network!

Carrots - the end of the road...

My carrots were one of the very first things I planted when I started the London Vegetable Garden back at the beginning of April. The humble carrot is a perennial feature of the traditional English vegetable garden, so needless to say, my enthusiasm got the better of me and I planted these seeds with real relish.

Fast forward three and a half months to today, and although my enthusiasm for growing carrots hasn't dampened, reality has set in. One of the main things I've learnt about growing your own vegetables over the last few months (hindsight is a wonderful thing!), is that they key to successful planting in small spaces is planting thinly.

I planted a large number of carrot seeds into a pot back in April and since then, a mountain of green shoots have sprung up. Over the last month however, growth has come to a real standstill and today I took the decision to end the carrot-growing part of the London Vegetable Garden project. The carrot plants got to the stage where they were so tightly packed together, that they didn't have enough room to grow on. As you can see from the photo below, much of the shoots simply stopped growing at a certain stage:

Nevertheless, this attempt wasn't completely in vain! I did manage to pull out a few, albeit very small, carrots from the pot – as Darwin would argue, these do indeed indicate the 'survival of the fittest'. Whilst I'm the first to admit that this has overall been an unsuccessful attempt to grow carrots, the purpose of the London Vegetable Garden has always been to educate and to see just what is possible. Growing carrots is possible – but be prepared to sow thinly and ideally in a very large and deep pot.

Carrots are go!

Two weeks to the day and the London Vegetable Garden has its first glimpse of carrot! As you can see from the attached picture it really is just a glimpse, but 14 days down the line and all of the seeds have now sprouted. That’s the easy bit out of the way…

24 Carrot Gold...

As it’ll inevitably be a week or so before I can provide you with anything other than pictures of pots filled with compost, I’ll spend the next few days introducing the various vegetables that I’ve planted. Some have been started outside, whilst other more delicate varieties are staring off inside the flat in seed trays covered with cling film.

The first vegetable to introduce is the humble carrot. I purchased a variety of vegetables from Johnsons’ ‘Compact Gardens’ seed range ‘for small spaces’. Whether my balcony can get away with being classified as a ‘small space’ as opposed to an ‘absolutely minute space’ remains to be seen, but I thought this would start me off well on my quest for vegetable self-sufficiency.

These carrots are ‘Amsterdam Forcing 3-Sprint’ (Daucus Carota) and the packet they arrived in claims that they can even be grown in large pots. With no need to grow and transplant seedlings, I have sown these seeds straight into the aforementioned ‘large pots’ as recommended by the packet instructions.

I must admit, I remain sceptical as to whether my pots are deep enough; but these claim to be baby / finger carrots, so we’ll see how we get on and what starts to happen!