Reasons to be Cheerful

What a strange weekend. After a troublesome day yesterday, today has been much better, thank goodness. Perhaps it's the heat? I don't think we deal very well with high temperatures in the UK, seeing as the moment the sun comes out we tend to dash outside and get burned to a cinder. Although I've been quite sensible the heat is definitely affecting my sleep at the moment and there's normally very little chance of anything doing that. That has also led to more bizarre dreams, although Sven has not made another appearance, thank goodness.

So, Wimbledon is over, the World Cup is concluded with penalties (it seems to have been penalties all the time in this World Cup, which rather makes a nonsense of the whole thing, in my opinion) and now I can return more of my attention to the garden.

The veggies are coming along with varying states of success. I think the weather has been a bit difficult for them too, notably for the peppers (the sweet ones are a bit of an outside experiment this year), although everything is heading in the right direction. My pak choi has done incredibly well in a very short space of time and I am looking forward to sampling some of the thinnings in the next couple of days. Courgettes and tomatoes are not far away too, I think. Yum!

Things are at the stage now where there is lots of feeding to do. My organic approach this year has so far consisted of seaweed meal, which you can just dress around everything (and has the added benefit of making your garden smell like you are at the beach!) and some bought in organic tomato feed. I have also started off my comfrey bin, which should provide me with nearly all the liquid feed I need in future. The first batch should be ready in two to three weeks (I should have started back in April really.

Basically, comfrey is amazing stuff. I posted a picture of one of my plants in flower in my garden post a few weeks back.

Once the plants are established - I planted mine last year, so they are just about ready now - you basically start (normally from April) to crop them back to within a couple of inches of the ground and use the leaves for a variety of purposes. The plants grow back in about a five weeks and then you crop them again, so you can get four or five goes out of them every year.

As I've said, my primary objective is feed. The plants decompose really quickly into a black sludge which is a fantastic feed when diluted down. There are a couple of ways of doing this, however I have gone for the 'comfrey tea' approach.

For this, you need one suitable bin type container:


I have drilled a hole in this and added a water butt tap as this was considerably cheaper than buying a proper water butt. It also has a nice tight fitting lid which is good, because this stuff is going to stink to high heaven once it's rotting down!

Because the comfrey gets sludgey, I made a simple filter from some wire, hopefully to stop the goo heading straight for the tap and bunging it up:


Finally, crop your comfrey and add the leaves to the bin (my five young plants still gave me a good half a bin full), then add water:


With this approach, the idea is to just keep adding the successive crops into the bin and topping up with water. This way I only need to clean it out once a year. It's been going a couple of weeks now and is already rotting nicely, so I'm expecting things to be ready - and seriously whiffy - by the end of the month.

Just to give you an idea of the scale I have gone for this year, I have over 35 tomato plants and over 30 pepper plants, let alone everything else - so I need lots of feed!