Blogs

This is where you will find short blogs on my favourite themes, or even some random thoughts that pop into my head. Might get political here too!

Designed to complement my Next Stage Instagram account

Gardening Nigel Wilkie Gardening Nigel Wilkie

Self sufficiency

You have all probably gotten used to my travel and music related posts and indeed I am right now in Atlanta, Georgia on a 10 day trip to see a few Stones shows!

But in between all those fun activities you will generally find me in the garden. Indeed, I have been working on the garden a lot in May. 

Tending to the vegetable patch - mainly rhubarb and berries (red, black and blue) plus planting runner beans for the summer.

In the greenhouse it is getting wild with tomatoes, peppers and piment (chilli). This year we have, for the first time, managed to grow seedlings from tomato seeds we recuperated and dried from a particular species we ate and liked last year.  It seems to be working well.

Elsewhere we have strawberries, grapes and figs, cherries and plums  all starting to come to life. A retirement goal was to become more self sufficient and it certainly seems to be on track.

Another side project I have started is to make an inventory of all the trees and plants we have in the garden.  I am using Google lens to identify them and it’s proving to be quite accurate. I am a man that likes a list, so that will be a future post!

That’s it for now. Will be back with more updates soon!

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Gardening Nigel Wilkie Gardening Nigel Wilkie

Composting

Home made composting is rewarding!

At last Spring is approaching! Instead of looking out at the garden from the inside of the house during the long winter months, we can now finally get out there and get going!

First job, to spread our homemade food waste compost on the vegetable patch, which is mainly rhubarb (that comes back better every year) and berries (red, black and blue currants). It’s taken a while to perfect the art of collecting all our food scraps and turning it into compost. However, with a bit of help by adding leaves and grass cuttings, we have finally got a decent amount to spread this year.

“Where's there's muck there's brass”. Well, we wont be making any money out of this mucky effort but hopefully the vegetables will appreciate our endeavors and respond in kind!

One tip: no citrus fruits, meat, poultry or fish in the compost, which you should be eating and not throwing away anyway! Also watch out for plants that are toxic to other plants, like rhubarb leaves, which is somewhat ironic in our case, as we have loads of those!

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