Hi,

has anyone got any particular recommendations for vegetables to grow, and specific ones that do well in Sheffield type conditions.

And also what I can plant at about this time of year.

Anything that's resillient to slugs :gag: :mad:

I too would be interested in knowing about this.

I usually grow cherry tomatoes outdoors, but this year I was too busy to nurture the seedlings at the right time so I've misssed out on that :rolleyes:

I do know somebody with an empty green house though....? :suspect: :)

Originally posted by Strix
Anything that's resillient to slugs :gag: :mad:

I too would be interested in knowing about this.

I usually grow cherry tomatoes outdoors, but this year I was too busy to nurture the seedlings at the right time so I've misssed out on that :rolleyes:

I do know somebody with an empty green house though....? :suspect: :)

I have a whole empty garden to start filling.

I don't think you can go wrong with potatoes and carrotts but beyond that I'm not really sure!

I can see myself becoming a gardener's question time addict, and I never thought I'd say that!

I tried carrots, but the slugs got them :(

Spuds are great for conditioning the soil, but are an absolute devil to erradicate if you change the use of that bit of ground in subsequent years :suspect:

My blackcurrant bush is doing famously, and my lettuce fared better than the carrots, but I think I remembered to fill my jars with beer whilst growing those :thumbsup:

I have hardly seen a slug in my garden. I guess maybe they are there, but I'm not sure, I have weeded it so much I would have thought I'd have seen them.

Think I'm going to do some spuds, have a go at corrotts and lettuce and maybe some runner beans too.

Then possibly some herbs too - parsley, thyme, mint, the usual sort of things.....

The rosemary has gone nuts, and I seem to get a lot of use out of my chives. The parsley got greenfly and gave up the ghost :(

I need to investigate this 'complimentary planting' technique


The best way to find out if you have any slugs is to put a shallow dish of beer in your garden beds and see what drowns in it overnight :gag: damp (rather than wet) days work best :thumbsup:

Yeah I'd say that rosemary growing nuts is a bad sign!!
(or did I read that wrong??)

Anyway, I'm all for an excuse to crack open some beer on a dull damp day (even if I have to share some of it with the slugs!)

Do you know what time of year is best for these veg? and are tomatoes good, or is it too cold and wet for them outdoors in Sheffield?

Originally posted by Yodameister
Do you know what time of year is best for these veg? and are tomatoes good, or is it too cold and wet for them outdoors in Sheffield?

my dad bought the 'vegetable expert' book from the 'expert' range that all the garden centres and diy shops have. that seemed pretty comprehensive :thumbsup:
(no, I don't know about these veg)

If you buy small tomato plants rather than starting from seed this year, you should be able to grow outside, so long as you choose a variety that is suitable. harden them off by only placing them outside during the day, but bringing them in of a night until the weather settles down.



Where are all the other forum gardeners?
We'll get told to move to PM land if this carries on :rolleyes:

Any body else got anything growing?

My inlaws grow all sorts in Ecclesall...they are almost like the Good Lifes!!

But they don't really do the root veg they do peas, green runner beans, rhubarb, courgettes and in the Greenhouse they do peppers, tomatoes and even GRAPES!!

:clap:

Around the garden is loads of fruit trees too!!

Originally posted by Shiesh
Around the garden is loads of fruit trees too!!
We have a blackbird who relieves us of our crop of cherries before they ripen :(

I can thoroughly recommend growing purple sprouting brocolli. It is absolutely fab and seemed to grow really well in my garden. It wasn't particularly troubled by slugs (and I have loads in my garden), although the caterpillars absolutely love it so you have to pick them off during the summer months.

It does take a long time - you have to plant it in about June I think and it isn't ready until the following March/April/May but it is definitely worth the wait - it tastes fantastic. I'm still eating mine, although it is just about finishing now.

I have also grown beetroot, and salad stuff like lettuce, and radishes, but have so far totally failed with carrots.

If you have the space and can be bothered to wait - try the PSB - you won't be disappointed!

Veggies in Sheffield?? Well.......I have grown the purple sprouting broccolli and it is the best veg ever. I haven't sown any seed this year though! I have grown sprouts but I think our soil might be a bit too rich because they tend to "blow". Tried cauli but got such miniscule heads that I didn't bother again! Potatoes.........hum haa......better kept in a large bucket.......unless you have loads of room for them. As for the runner beans.......now you are talking. I plant about 40 plants a year and pick humungus amounts of loverly beans off them. I grow sweetcorn with medium results. My onions keep us going throughout the winter months.........as do my leeks. I also grow beetroot.......and all the salad stuffs. Tomato's do well in the greenhouse.......but also outside in a sheltered spot that catches plenty of sun. I have about three or four varieties on the go this year..........and it is NOT too late to sow some seed. They grow like weeds. Get them on a warm sunny windowsill and they will shoot away. As for the fruit side of things............we have rhubarb....strawberries......raspberries...viccy plums.......Bramley cooking apples.........an eating apple (not sure which)........blackberries, and new this year a redcurrant. Oh........I forgot the gooseberry.
My advice is if you like eating it..........then have a go at growing it. Gardening is like living............you learn through experience.
Enjoy it.

There are some ants, slugs, snails and aphids that will be having an 'experience' round these parts soon :suspect:

Ants.......slugs.......aphids.........and snails? Yum yum..........at least they are edible.......chemicals aren't. lol. Seriously.......if you don't mind using pellets, you can help to keep the slug population down. The good news is that nowadays the pellets are pet friendly.......which includes the birds. One word of advice though........only use them very sparingly. A couple of pellets laid down over quite a few yards of ground will suffice. I don't actually bother too much with repellents.....probably because I am too lazy to do it..............I just hope and pray that the birds will like my garden and do the job for me. We also have a couple of ponds which have a large population of frogs.............which I hope will help.....but they never seem to do! Ah well.............that is nature........go with the flow....plant some for you......some for the wildlife and some for Mother Nature and the elements. There are also other ways around it. If you want to plant some cabbages for instance.............surround them with a collar of plastic cut from an empty pop bottle. I also put a narrow strip of double sided sticky tape around the top of the collar...........and also any pots of plants. I defy any slug or snail to climb over that! As a double measure I also smear salt on the sticky bit. Well.......there's a few ideas.............but don't ever believe that you have beaten the little blighters!

I had a 'beer drowning' programme for the blighters two years ago and had a relatively slug-free year last year. All the ones about now are tiny, so I need to get the jars out again.

Problem is - Brude drinks the beer, slugs and all :gag:

i find this a good site for gardening, www.vegetable-gardening-club.com/forum/

Slightly off subject, but should be useful for gardeners.

Compost thread (http://www.sheffieldforum.co.uk/showthread.php?s=&postid=393429&highlight=compost#post393429)

I grow cherry tomatoes, a trailing variety, in hanging baskets.
I grow herbs, spring onions, lettuce, chillies and peppers in pots on the deck (easy to keep slugs out of pots).
I sometimes grow marrows/courgettes on the compost heap, but they do tend to get slugged.

Since I put the pond in, and the frogs moved in in force I dont' realy have a slug problem now, even my hosters are slug free.

i grew corgettes, sprouts and beans in pots last year, doing the same this year, they did quite well in the yard.

Originally posted by Strix
I had a 'beer drowning' programme for the blighters two years ago and had a relatively slug-free year last year. All the ones about now are tiny, so I need to get the jars out again.

Problem is - Brude drinks the beer, slugs and all :gag:

I tried nematodes this year to try and de-slug my garden but they don't seem to have done much, and they don't work on snails. I'm back to the beer drowning method too and have never dared grow vegetables because I have so many of the leaf-munching brutes. They seem to devour everything including my sage and mint. My lupins have failed to materialise this year - I think they must have eaten the new shoots before they got a chance to grow.

P.S. Brude is disgusting - but I do know another dog with similar taste :)

I am growing cherry tomatoes, peppers, chilli's, herbs but these are mostly to go in pots, as my current garden is not suitable for growing veg, however in the past I have grown loads of stuff.

Always found Courgettes easy to grow, its best to grow unusual stuff IMHO.

I once grew gourds (in the garden, not on me) they are very easy and interesting to grow, but not edible :(

Originally posted by Longshanks
P.S. Brude is disgusting - but I do know another dog with similar taste :)
Hmmm, aren't they darlings :D :gag:

I think I'll have to give the veg growing a miss for this season :(
I have too much house stuff to keep me occupied, and too many weeds to tackle after last year's disaster :(

It'll give me a chance to do something about protecting the fruit trees from that blackbird though :D

PS - that looks like a useful site roughy :thumbsup:

Originally posted by Strix
Problem is - Brude drinks the beer, slugs and all :gag:

Does he tend to drink them when he feels 'sluggish' strix? :hihi:

I totally agree with the people who said purple sprouting broccoli. I have tried growing loads of veg in Sheffield over the years in various places.
Leeks are fantastic too, but again you have to wait until next year for them. I had great success last year withclimbing sugar snap peas, but they aren't doing graet now.
Don't bother with carrots .Carrot fly usually gets them.
If you can nurture your courgette plants past the tiny stage, so slug damage doesn't make a lot of difference, then they are a hit.
I have also done good with perpetual spinach which the slugs don't seem to like much.

Originally posted by Draggletail
Does he tend to drink them when he feels 'sluggish' strix? :hihi:
:roll: :hihi:

I had great success with cut-and-come lettuce on the kitchen windowledge. I buy bags of lettuce but usually wind up throwing lots out, so being able to just pick it in the kitchen when you need it is the best solution :thumbsup:

No slugs there either :gag: :thumbsup:

A lot depends on how high up you are.

I grow veg in two gardens, mine and my mother in laws. The mother in law lives about 300 ft lower than I do and the potatoes I put in her garden first started showing about three weeks ago, the first of mine have only today poked up above the soil.

I've got some great peas growing along with onions and garlic, the snails have had all my runner bean plants in my mini greenhouse but I'm going to plant some more direct in the soil and keep my fingers crossed

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:thumbsup: :clap:

anything onion based seems to be left alone by the slugs, my lettuce did really well, I think the trick is to plant loads of it, so the the slugs can't possibly eat all of it.

best bet for slugs - is to bury a open topped container in the ground to the lip at ground level and fill with cheap supermarket beer - slugs love it and will leave your leaf veg alone. Ok the slugs drown but they go out with one hell of a hangover ;)

I moved house 2 years ago and after the first year of hacking back the jungle, last year had success with strawberries, green beans, French beans, peas, lettuce & broccoli, with a variety of tomatoes chilies & peppers in the greenhouse.

Over the autumn I dug up a lawned area and made it into 2 more raised beds and now I'm eagerly awaiting the spring to begin sowing & planting. I have added raspberries, potatoes, sprouts, carrots, radish, sweet corn & leeks this year.

I'm addicted to gardening now, and am lucky enough to have a pond which has a large frog population so the slugs are not too hard to manage.

My family laugh at my enthusiasm and my husband thought I was mad this morning when I spent 2 hours turning my 2 compost bins & spreading manure!

however I bet they eat the produce don't they :)

patiently waiting for his new greenhouse to arrive (well you've got to do something in the day)

:D

Originally posted by Debk
I moved house 2 years ago and after the first year of hacking back the jungle, last year had success with strawberries, green beans, French beans, peas, lettuce & broccoli, with a variety of tomatoes chilies & peppers in the greenhouse.




Did you find the beans produce out of control once you start cropping them - a couple of years ago we grew some beans (only a couple of wigwams worth) and ended u with the freezer full of them - we're probably still eating them even after driving relatives barmy with packages of them from the garden. With the mild autumn they kept going right to almost November - it was a farce in the end as we ended up throwing a lot of them away.

Yes they do like the produce, allthough I did over do it with the green beans & we still have the freezer full of them!

I fed half of our street this year with the green beans.....good way to get to know the neighboughs though!

I'll plant half as many this year.

wouldn't have thought half my neighbours would know a fresh vegetable if it hit them on the head.

What do you plan to grow in the new green house Internetowl?

Just thought I'd drag this up from the depths and see if there are any keen gardeners out there who could help me out ;) A few weeks ago I planted a load of veggies in my shiny new little vegetable patch - carrots, potatoes, lettuce and various herbs. The mast majority have appeared and on the whole, all looks good. However I've noticed that the mint and some of the bigger lettuce seedlings all have little nibbles out of them :mad: I can't see any slugs and there are no obvious insect pests on the leaves either (I've checked them all over) :( I'm really keen not to resort to an insecticide because that kind of defeats why I wanted to start growing my own veg, but if I can't see what's causing the damage, is that my only choice? :help:

Any advice please?

I'm just starting out myself so can't help with the mystery nibbler!

(took me weeks to realise the disappearing leaves on my bay tree were due to a fat green catepillar and not the cold weather like I was lazily presuming!)

We've just cleared the 13mx13m garden at my boyfriends new house, which was a jungle of bracken and brambles taller than me this time last year.

We've planted 14 rows of organic spuds to completely fill the garden... my gran reliably informs me that it will clean the garden and this time next year I can start growing a full range of veg without too much fear of brambles popping up left right and centre!.

I've managed to sneak in some fruit bushes tho - some raspberries and 2 loganberry bushes (tho the thought of putting another briar fruit in was a bit scary considering the fact we'd just been struggling for weeks to dig out all the brambles!).

I think the signs are good tho - not seen a single slug when clearing the garden... the soil seems really good too.

We'll be dishing out free spuds to everyone we know for months! I'm addicted already tho - nothing like pottering in the garden in the sun :D

Just thought I'd drag this up from the depths and see if there are any keen gardeners out there who could help me out ;) A few weeks ago I planted a load of veggies in my shiny new little vegetable patch - carrots, potatoes, lettuce and various herbs. The mast majority have appeared and on the whole, all looks good. However I've noticed that the mint and some of the bigger lettuce seedlings all have little nibbles out of them :mad: I can't see any slugs and there are no obvious insect pests on the leaves either (I've checked them all over) :( I'm really keen not to resort to an insecticide because that kind of defeats why I wanted to start growing my own veg, but if I can't see what's causing the damage, is that my only choice? :help:

Any advice please?

It might still be slugs even though u haven't spotted them, so u could try the beer drowning technique mentioned earlier, I think slugs come out at night a lot - that was certainly the case in my friends kitchen (student digs - yuk!), in the morning the only evidence was trails all over the counters and the casualties if she put salt round the edge of the floor :gag: other than that they disappeared again by daybreak.

My grandma had a cute little snail house which you put the pot of beer in and they went in but didn't make it out again :D it made the whole mass-murder process much more discreet but unfortunately she didn't have the heart to put beer in so she used lemonade instead bless her! Needless to say it didn't have quite the same effect!

My grandma had a cute little snail house which you put the pot of beer in and they went in but didn't make it out again :D it made the whole mass-murder process much more discreet but unfortunately she didn't have the heart to put beer in so she used lemonade instead bless her! Needless to say it didn't have quite the same effect!

That is soooo cool! I am going to have to build myself one of those! :hihi:

Ooo, good advice - thanks sidewinder :D I've heard about that beer trick before so I shall give that a go tonight and let you know what happens! If I find some very lashed up slugs in the morning at least I'll know who has been nibbling my lettuces :P

Anne23 - it's fab isn't it? I've really enjoying pottering about weeding and watching for the first seedlings to appear :clap: Hopefully next year I'll have cleared the beds down the side so I can get some raspberries in too :thumbsup:

Also, leave an old mat or something on an area of damp ground.
Turn it over regularly & drop the slugs that hid under it into a jar of salted water. :thumbsup:

Get a cheap urn & block any drainage holes. Fill it with water n scrounge some frog spawn off someone.
The frogs will eat your slugs & come back year after year :thumbsup:

Get a cheap urn & block any drainage holes. Fill it with water n scrounge some frog spawn off someone.
The frogs will eat your slugs & come back year after year :thumbsup:

That is good news... We already have a pond filled with little taddys and a couple of massive frogs :D

I've been down into the cellar this morning and found a couple of cans of Carling :gag: Those crazy slugs are in for a good time tonight :banana:

This is our first full year of allotmenting and we are both fairly new to growing stuff, so we've kind of thrown as much as we can in the soil and hope we get something out (we have put more thought into than that and have tried to complimentary plant).

In the greenhouse so far we have gerkins, courgettes, aubergines, tomatoes, celeriac, celery, peppers and cape gooseberries coming through. The herbs in the yard are doing well. Not seen much signs of anything up at the allotment yet but think its been a bit cold.

The garlic and onions we planted in the autumn are going great guns and our newly planted rhubarb is going well.:thumbsup:

Luckily there are loads of frogs and toads up at the allotment so hoping this will keep the slugs down.....nothing attacked the garlic and onions but that could have been the smell.

Last year in the greenhouse we had a huge crop of tomatoes and a mountain of chillis.

Our problem at the moment is being fairly new to all this we don't whats a shoot and whats a weed......:help:

Our problem at the moment is being fairly new to all this we don't whats a shoot and whats a weed......:help:

I know exactly what you mean... the patch I took over has a problem with (what I think is) wild parsley - as soon as I dig a load of the damn stuff up, it reappears in abundance again :( I thought spied some appearing on the far side of the plot last week so set I about it with gusto, only to discover that some of it had a potato hanging off the end... :P :blush:

We have a massive dandelion problem in one part of the garden, and I know it's my fault :rolleyes:

A couple of years ago I planted some mixed lettuces - cut and come ones, and the dandelions were part of this pack. I can tell the difference between the weed ones and the salad ones once they get going because they have a ridiculous quantity of foliage, but they are now in the middle of the grass, so they have to come out

Yikes - dandelions are a real pain, especially in the middle of the lawn :(

I tried those beer traps last night and had an impressive slug body count this morning :shocked: They are pretty tiny though, so perhaps that's why I missed them before :suspect: Hopefully I'll see less nibbles in my herbs now :P

Something still ate my last chilli last night though (and that was in the greenhouse) :(

i'm growing celery, beetroot, carrots and beans in the garden at the moment, and have peppers and tomatoes in a mini greenhouse thingy.
i just like watching them grow - i grow most of the produce for my guinea pigs/rabbit
miis sx