Out of pots

Went to the polytunnel garden to get some more pots to plant more seeds today and discovered I'd used them all. A couple of years ago when I was gardening in a couple of allotments in Manchester I discovered a wonderful resource. It seems that florists are often pleased to get rid of the plastic buckets that flowers come in but with a few holes drilled in the bottom they make very good plant pots. So it seems that one of my jobs for tomorrow is to locate all the local florists and see if they have any to get rid of.


The picture today is of the first few beds I made in the autumn last year. There are 4 beds of winter onions there, the rest are plants I brought with me to be propagated. 

I spent today doing house keeping. It takes quite a bit of physical work living off the grid. Water must be collected from the well, wood must be brought in and some of it gets chopped into kindling, rubbish must be taken to the dump (There's no conventional house here so we don't get rubbish collection) As I've only just started creating my gardens I'm still dependant on the supermarket. I'm astonished by the sheer bulk of plastic waste I produce in a couple of weeks. It'll be good when I need less from there. 

One of the tricks I've discovered about becoming self sufficient is not to try and do it all at once. You make yourself self sufficient in a few things gradually and then one day you realise that you haven't been to the shops for ages and you're nearly there. I'm not sure I could easily give up coffee though and the substitutes you can grow here like dandelion root or roasted acorns just don't do it for me. The process has begun though. The picture above is one of my garlic beds. It's looking a bit sorry for itself after all that snow but it'll pull through and it'll be ready by the end of summer so that's one more thing I won't have to buy at the shops.

The deer here are voracious and there are many of them. We don't have all the fences up yet so they're hammering my plants. They seem to particularly like strawberry leaves. I'm hoping that enough pull through to give us a crop this year. I have 2 beds of them so far but there's not a lot left of them at the moment. One of the main reasons for putting the nursery right by my bender is that they're less likely to attack my plants with my dog Star making the racket he does when they appear outside. Hopefully I'll have my camera with me when I next see them. If I get a picture I'll put it up.