[Jane WildingMember]

I’ve successfully grown potatoes (and all sorts of other stuff) in tyre towers. I started off with good soil and organic matter, put 3 spuds in and covered them, and as the haulms grew I put another tyre on top and filled that with soil too. I ended up with 3 tyres, and the results were very good, potatoes all down through it. I’m not sure that it saves space though, unless you’re growing them on paving rather than earth. The only trick is to fill the wall of the tyre with soil by pushing it outwards as you go, so there isn’t a great big air space. And you can always get tyres from Kwik fit or wherever, for free. Tyres collect and retain heat (because they’re black) so apart from the fact that they’re ugly and made partly from fossil fuel and will be around for millennia after we’re extinct, they’re a fabulous garden resource!

[Jane WildingMember]

Blackcurrant cuttings are almost foolproof, so if you’ve dug up a blackcurrant bush, simply cut them into separate twigs and bung the bits into some clear soil. I once used year-old blackcurrant prunings to stake peas and they all rooted, even after lying in a pile by the compost heap all that time – since then I just take cuttings whenever and made a whole blackcurrant hedge once out of prunings. It flowered and made a good crop the next year, at about a foot high!
Jane

[Jane WildingMember]

A friend of mine read about Jean Pain (a Frenchman who delves into heating with compost) and made a small bin about one cubic metre, insulated thoroughly with polystyrene sheeting (pre-loved of course) and duvets and so on, she filled it with seaweed and horse manure and managed to heat a bedroom from a pipe going through it (it was outside the bedroom window so not much heat loss on the way). By-product – very quick and usable compost for the veggies!
How did we get from Garlic to hot composting??
Jane

[Jane WildingMember]

I try to save all sorts of brassicas, spinach, lettuce, parsley and parsnips (both germinate well if just left to it to seed themselves), onions, various flowers, runner beans if they survive… this year I’m letting some long beetroot go to seed and perpetual spinach, if it ever will! Sometimes it all goes wrong, I’m still a bit haphazard. I don’t use much space because I haven’t so far kept several plants of each variety seeding for the genetic variation, generally I just leave one or two (and work round them while they seed), I’m not very scientific and haven’t been doing it long enough to notice whether or not they’re degrading in quality.
I haven’t grown squashes although for some reason I always save the seed from bought ones! It’s very wet here with a short growing season (Scotland) but this year coming I’ll have the use of a polytunnel – hooray! – so that will extend my range hugely. I’ve been researching more about seed saving because of the EU business (Real Seeds has lots of good info) and I’m planning to be a bit more careful and systematic – maybe grow a bed of ‘seeders’ every year, select really good plants and take note of what happens. Do you think if I grow seeders in the polytunnel for protection from the wet, I’ll end up with delicate strains?

[Jane WildingMember]

I cut off the top like a cabbage (and eat it of course) whereupon lots of little side shoots like purple sprouting broccoli pop up. Tender and delicious!

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