Grow your own endive?

[MadHatter]

You might want to look into your soil chemistry. From memory, higher Nitrogen levels promote lush, leafy growth. If your soil is deficient in Nitrogen, your plants will tend to go to seed rapidly. Either that, or my recollection is faulty. Worth getting advice on I rekon.

[Buzzard-1]

From memory, higher Nitrogen levels promote lush, leafy growth

This is correct Madhatter but the PH is the most important. Alkaline soils will lock up nitrogen and make it unavailable to plants, Acid soils will retard plant growth. Get your PH right buy adding ag lime or sulphur to correct, feed with fish emulsion and sea weed concentrate and you'll have to buy more birds to eat the growth

[bleeding green]

In my area the soils are all clay. It's hard and horrible.
The particular patch where I grow my vegies has been used for the last two seasons. Prior to the season I have added clay breaker and mixed in manure and other fertilizers. The top section is now not too bad. The spinach, strawberries, tomatoes , celery and other things have grown there OK, it's just the endive that I have problems with.

[jusdeb]

I did my endive in foam broccoli boxes ( empty of course ) with wettasoil and slow release fert pellets in potting mix . It went off .

[bleeding green]

Good idea. I actually intend to built another vegie strip, a raised one in front of the aviary. If I do this I will fill it garden soil so it will be good enough. But like everything, I'll put it on the list of to do's.

[jusdeb]

Since this post fizzled Ive planted a heap of leafy vegs and am now ( in such a short time ) feeding the birds Buk Choy leaves . The Kale and wombok will be ready in the next few weeks followed bu chards , spinach and silverbeet .
The endive is a bit slow but getting there and the parrots are going to love the chilis which are flowering .
Its probably cost me more by far to grow these but in the long run the birds get fresher greens and Im not running to the green grocers every 3 days .

The trays of sprouted bird seed are a winner with each tray feeding a mixed aviary for 3 days , they've been put back out in the sun to see if I can get a second crop from each tray before replanting the pot .



Cinnamon Blue doing what Grass Parrots do .....