The Cottage Smallholder February gardening competition
Posted by Fiona Nevile in Gardening | 24 comments
Photo: Snow in the garden
It’s competition time again at Cottage Smallholder. I really enjoy running these competitions as I’m picking up so many tips from around the world. I’ve been looking for sponsors and have two lined up already – this is great as they will help with the judging and of course the prizes are much more deluxe than the rather humble prizes that we’ve offered before.
As I mentioned yesterday, Erika from Lunar Organics is sponsoring this competition. The prize is a beautiful moon gardening calendar and explanatory booklet plus three packets of biodynamic seeds that the winner can choose from the Lunar Organics online catalogue.
And what to you have to do to win this prize? Erika came up with these suggestions. The first is how to re-use /recycle things to get ready for the new growing season. For example Erika makes labels using old pieces of wood for big labels or cuts up white plastic containers for seedlings, instead of buying new. The second theme is how to protect plants from birds, rabbits, mice, squirrels, rats or any pest in your neck of the woods. Erika mentioned that rags soaked in vinegar would deter rabbits as they hate the smell of it.
Anyone can enter as many times as they like. You can post entries for just one theme or both. The competition will close on Sunday 7th February at midnight. If you have won a Cottage Smallholder competition in the past six months you can enter but you won’t be eligible to win – this gives everyone a fairer chance.
Best of luck everyone. I’m really looking forward to reading the entries!
Leave a reply
Thanks Tamar- I’ll try the ‘recycling beer’ tactic on Steve- maybe I can guilt him into it.
I can’t compete with these suggestions! I particularly like the ones that involve pee (an excellent way to re-use beer).
The only even moderately innovative thing we’ve done is scavenge a discarded glass door (the sliding kind) as a lid for our cold frame. You just wait until a door comes your way, and build the frame to fit. Works like a dream — it even has a handle ready-made.
Re-use – recycle…….
2 litre ‘pop’ bottles are cut down to make mini cloches, ideal when room is running out in the greenhouse
plastic food trays i.e. mushrooms/ready meals , all washed and stored ready for seed trays especially handy when growing small amounts for swopping
free dvds/cds are strung up across the raised beds to catch the sunlight and annoy the birds especially when planting brassicas etc
plastic ties out of boxes are kept for using to secure wayward plants and tomato canes etc
chicken poo is composted and used when rotted down
spent compost from growbags and potato bags is dug into raised beds to enrich the soil
seed/plant swopping on freecycle ensures no waste aand is a cost effective way of recycling as there is always someone out there that can make use of what you no longer need
Jane
In regard to the lady wanting to deter cats….. I have 3 cats and our neighbour wasn’t very pleased when one of them decided to pop over theirs for their daily digging session.
I had read up on various ways of stopping cats like orange and lemon peel( they hate citrus) those ‘silent’ cat scarers and even motion sensor water jets that squirt anything that goes past with water. But in the end I have found the only thing that works is lion poo…seeing as I don’t have my own lion ….yet…. you can buy their poo in pellet form from various gardening places. Cats are basically frightened of bigger scarier cats and choose to not visit. I bring my neighbour a box every year and £8.99 keeps me and my neighbour on speaking terms his borders free from recycled piles of whiskas and my cats busy filling up my garden with their waste which I don’t mind as I chose to have them so poop scooping a couple of times a week is no hardship.
So invest in some bigger and better cat poo to keep wimpy cats away from those pots.
Also I believe the lion poo comes from lions kept in wildlife parks and the profits go to help endangered animals and those in captivity due to illness or rescue.
Re-use/Recycle theme
I recycle sheep poo into a lovely liquid fertilizer. It’s such a lovely complete system – poo to fertilizer for helping the veggies to grow that we eat with our lamb.
Rosie x
petskystone- my ex-sister-law used to send my brother out in the dark to pee on the fence posts- it did a great job keeping stray cats out of her yard. I can’t get my husband to comply, so I’ll be the look out here for other ideas.
Fiona- I’ve kept several of those large plastic bins that organic field lettuces come in, which I will use on my seedling tray for a green house top. I reused a shop light in the garage for my grow light, and I’m going to reuse an old shower curtain stapled up at the corners for a drain tray. I have a load of plastic deck clips that I’ll put the seed tray on so that it’s not sitting in water.
I’m also going to use the plastic decking that I tore off my deck this week (it was twice as big as it needed to be) for planter boxes, which will keep a lot of plastic out of the landfill.
I’ve a huge stack of cardboard boxes in my kitchen- once I’m done getting half the deck out of the way, they are going all over the lawn for mulch over which I’ll sheet compost.
I’m collecting all the wood ash out of my wood stove and sifting it- the ash is being saved to use as insulation for the two rocket stoves I want to put in my summer kitchen out doors, and the charcoal will be inoculated with either urine (mine) or compost tea and used for biochar fertilizer for the garden.
I’m using toilet paper tubes for some seedling trays as well, only they are sitting in the lids from take-away dinners. Those lids are made of compostable potato-ware, so we’ll see how well they do.
Speaking of composting, I’ve taken to rinsing one of those plastic packing peanuts every time we get a shipment of something. If they don’t melt in the water, they go into a large bag of same in the garage to be taken to the recycling center. If they do melt, the whole lot gets chucked into my compost pile.
I have a loose-ish large piece of burlap that a rug was wrapped in. I saved that and used it for a shade cloth last summer, and I’ll use it again this summer as it’s still in good shape.
For pest control- I purchased hardware cloth to nail into the bottoms of my planter boxes- we are plagued with voles. They should also wish to leave once I get rid of all my grass, as they like to drag grass back to their dens.
I had wanted to do away with all the crows that we get here, but have since read that they are actually good to have around for getting rid of bugs, and I’ve noticed that they do seem to peck a lot of something out of the ground. So this summer I’ll just cover all my corn cobs with a paper bag so they can’t see them and they’ll leave them alone.
For the apples, once they get to be the size of a small walnut, I’ll sacrifice four in the cluster, leaving the king apple to ripen. The four green apples will be cooked into jelly for the pectin (unripe apples have a lot) which I’ll use later in the summer for low-pectin fruits. The king apple will get enclosed in a ped (those are those stocking things with which ladies try on shoes) and rubberbanded at the stem. This keeps coddling moths off the fruit. As the apples get larger, the ped stretches thinner and thinner so that the sun can get at the fruit and ripen it, and the threat of coddling moth larvae is long gone.
To keep the squirrels out of my nut trees, I’m planting them well away from buildings and fences, and will affix metal cones up their trunks to keep the little beggars from running up the trunks. The metal cones will be fashioned out of 3 litre olive oil cans, which I’ve been saving in the garage.
I think that’s it. If I think of anything else, I’ll let you know.
while not entering this contest, i am certainly looking forward to the entries as i am having a container veg/flower garden in a new front yard, complete with half dozen stray cats looking for diggable litter boxes!
When I’m walking in the woods nearby I pick up long thin sticks to use as pea sticks. Much better than imported bamboo canes!
Also you can’t beat egg-boxes for chitting potatoes in.
Our veg garden is in the middle of a sheep field so we are plagued with rabbits, our solution was to fence our plot with chicken wire and dig it 3 feet undergroud as well but I’ll be watching this thread for other tips!
I’ve been saving the tubes from toliet paper to make into seed pots. I used them last year but ran out quickly ’cause I hadn’t started saving them early enough.
Reuse/Recycle theme
I use old netting, the type that your oranges come in, to tie around veg that are trailing and becoming heavy.. the netting is then tied back to something solid be it a stake or your fence. The weight of the fruit/veg is then supported and as the net is stretchy, further growth is not impeded. (I did this with trailing pumpkins last year..)