I’ve lived most of my life without a patch of land to grow stuff in. Now, I have a square of sad, pointless grass. I’ve made the leap and planted some cold resistant carrots in a grow bag & made the first wild spring salad with dandelions just come up. May my spoons hold…I have plans. #gardening while #spoonie Any green thumbs in cold climes have tips for easy wins? I’m new at this. #orkney #Scotland #compost #allotment

@bearsong their monthly sowing guide is so handy. Yeah, the seeds I planted were F1. I didn’t know what that meant. Thanks.

@AllysonShaw @bearsong I second potatoes. We had great success with the Mayan Gold heritage variety, which was the first potato to be grown on these isles from the indigenous Phureja potatoes of Peru.

Forget your Maris Pipers, these make the best roasties and thick-cut chips (or fries, for Americans reading!) of any variety! Hands down. Some of the top restaurants are now recognizing this and using this variety exclusively.

If you have clay-laden soil you may want to enrich it with compost.

@ApostateEnglishman @bearsong interesting! Where did you find the seed potatoes? Online or…?

@AllysonShaw @ApostateEnglishman

there are lots of online seed potato growers
many are based in Scotland, i believe

we get our seed potatoes from the trading shed on our allotment site, who do a bulk order in January

if you get epic armies of slugs in your garden (which we do) then Kestrel is an interesting variety to grow, reliable, able to cope with lots of soils, including our heavy clay, tasty, but most usefully, the slugs in these parts don't seem to burrow into them at all

@AllysonShaw @bearsong A friend just donated them to us! We'd planned on growing Maris Pipers, until our friends urged us to try this variety that we'd never heard of at the time.

Our purple broccoli also did well, so much so that we were giving away bucketfuls to the neighbours because, delicious as it is, there is only so much broccoli one couple can eat. 😆

@ApostateEnglishman @bearsong how amazing! How big was your broccoli plot?

@AllysonShaw @bearsong Our main vegetable plot was around 18 sq m, not sure how much of it the purple broccoli took over! Perhaps half of that, at its peak. It did really well.

The parsnips were grown on a separate plot which was a lot smaller, maybe only 8 sq m.

@bearsong @AllysonShaw We also had a lot of clay in our soil, which was hilarious when we got our first crop of parsnips because they all came out looking like the facehuggers from Alien(s)! Still tasty though.

After that we spent quite a bit on turning all the soil in quality compost.

@ApostateEnglishman @bearsong all hail the wonky veg! You can just say they are mandrakes, right?

@AllysonShaw @bearsong Hehehe, yes I suppose so!