Category Archives: Monty Dong’s Gardening

Hedgerow changes

Over the last few years, I’ve progressively been changing the hedgerow at the bottom of the garden from deciduous to evergreen.

After cutting out the Forsythia, I started from the left side with a red Robin, followed by cherry laurels up to the halfway point.

I then asked my maintenance gardener a year ago to rip out the rest and pop in laurels and a red Robin on the right. He’s a top chap, but people who know me, will testify that I do not like waiting around. So over the last two weeks, I have gotten on with it!

I took out the forsythia, plus an absolute bastard of a Holly Bush with never-ending roots, additionally also a jasmine and also a big shrub. Phew!

Last night I dug my trench and then today I popped the new shrubs in. Drenched the roots, popped some chicken manure pellets around them and covered with a bark layer.

Fingers crossed we are beyond the deep freeze that we’ve seen over the winter! I am excited to see this hedgerow thicken up and add some evergreen colour to my garden!

Bargain Camelia and potting Ericaceous plants

So I found 5 camelias at Dobies garden centre for £1 each. Bargain!

They looked a bit Bill Withered, but I decided to have a gamble on them and grow them on.

Polystyrene chunks at the bottom of the new pots and then a 50/50 mix of perlite and ericaceous soil, topped with pure ericaceous soil! That should give the Camelias a decent chance of kicking on.

I’ll post an update if they survive!

Runner bean slicing

One of my favourite childhood memories was slicing runner beans. Yes, you read that correctly, slicing runner beans!

My Godparents Joe and Joanie had a metal runner bean slicer and I had the great joy of feeding their beans into the machine whenever they had a roast dinner!

It was all quite a process. We’d go to the farmhouse at the back of Banstead Road (Near Oaks Park) to get the veggies and I loved hearing the tick tick tick noise as I sliced the beans to my hearts content!

Sometime during December 2020, I had a very vivid dream about my Godparents and remembered my childhood bean slicing nirvana; turns out that the Universe is a very strange twat. My beloved Joanie passed away around the time I had my dream, I had been estranged from her for over 8 years due to her very spiteful ‘family’. Very odd 🙂

Anyway! I am ridiculously nostalgic, anyone who knows me well knows this!  So I procured a slicer from Ebay!

The slicer is secured to the kitchen counter by a clamp and you feed the runner bean in the top hole, then use the handle to turn the circular blade. A very satisfying pile of sliced beans builds up as you go.

To do the slicer justice, I grew my own runner beans this year! Some of them are bloody massive 🙂 think I’ll grow them every year now!

So here we go, nostalgic box well and truly ticked. Roll on dinner time!

Santorini Tomatoes

Today I harvested the first batch of my Santorini tomatoes! I am pleased to report that they are every bit as tasty as they look!!!

Santorinis, or Mafiosa tomatoes, as they are known in Tooting, take a little longer to ripen compared to all the other varieties that I have grown this year, but they are well worth the wait!

They are comparable in size to a beef tomato, so I roasted these in the oven with a little olive oil, vegan spread and garlic. Then stirred into pasta.

Perfecto!

Shalob.  Guardian Of The Tomatoes

It won’t be long before the colder weather truly kicks in and finishes off my tomato plants until I go again next year!

So in the spirit of good partnership, I have included some pictures in this post to show my appreciation of my resident spiders, my amazing arachnid guardians who have kept pests such as aphids and other crop destroying gits at bay!

I have enjoyed a fantastic yield of truly tasty cherry and plum tomatoes from my crop this year, all of which were undoubtedly protected by Shalob and her eight legged spinning sisters.

Having an organic security solution to devour pests and parasites is much nicer than using a chemical from Bayer.  Plus its cool to see them at work.  

Scuttle scuttle scuttle.  Web web web.  Yum yum yum.

Strawberry Hanging Baskets

Another simple way to grow strawberries is using hanging baskets!  A bit of drilling, fix some fucking brackets to the wall and you’re off!

Strawbs1

Strawberries are very thirsty wotsits so you have to water them a lot, but it’s amazing how quickly everything kicks off once they are established!

Buds (bud bud bud bud), flowers, bees, strawberries!  Ain’t nature a fucking marvel bruv?

Strawbs2

Strawberry fields forever!

Veggie Trough

It’s amazing how utterly addictive gardening is and how quickly it can eradicate all other interests from your life; I have barely played my PS4 and Xbox One lately (thank goodness for my Nintendo Switch on business trips!) and I’ve hardly binged upon my usual TV serials at home (apart from an occasional episode during my lunch breaks at work!).

OK, so I exaggerated a bit about giving up the Geek lifestyle.

My pride and joy these days is my veggie trough; the planter was a Christmas gift from my Mum via my local garden centre, into which I have planted cauliflowers, carrots, mixed salad leaves (rocket and such), cucumbers and tomatoes.

Once I’d figured out the best place for it to sunbathe, I lined the trough with a membrane, added some broken up polystyrene and pebbles for drainage, then filled it with decent soil mixed with some compost.

Due to traveling overseas so much for work lately, I was not able to grow everything from seeds, so I opted for Plan B and purchased some young plants from my garden centre. I now have a little plastic greenhouse and will be ready to become the Germinator next year!

The universe wasn’t particularly kind to me in late April, when an unexpected harsh frost killed my poor cucumbers and left me with only one tomato plant from the four I had planted; fortunately, I left a tomato and cucumber plant in my greenhouse for such an event and added this to the trough.

Next year I will add some frost netting!  By jove I will!

Anyway, this is what the trough looks like at the moment, you can even see the pot of coriander growing next to the Christmas tree!

  • The carrots are about 2 weeks away from harvest, give or take.
  • The tomatoes now have flowers and are ready for the bees to do their work before the plant begins to bear fruit.
  • Cucumbers are almost ready to open their flower buds, so the bees can do the same thing.
  • Cauliflowers are massive!  But have a long way to go yet before I can harvest them.
  • The the mixed ‘salad’ leaves which have totally grown out of control, since I scattered a load of seeds on top of the soil.  The rocket and mixed leaves are ready to eat and bloody nice!  Yum.

I’ll add some updates soon!