Just a quick update to show some of the produce that I'm getting from the garden at the moment; we're getting fresh veggies daily at the moment, and it's awesome!

The carrots are not quite traditionally shaped... apparently they forked a little but they are both huge and hugely tasty so I'm not overly bothered :D

The beans are equally massive - two or three of these monsters are more than enough for the two of us to eat for dinner; at the moment they're almost growing faster than we can eat them.

 And these fellows aren't edible but I thought they were quite pretty - for some reason one particular weed on the upper patio was absolutely covered in little stripy caterpillars, so I left it for them to enjoy!

Garden Update

This one's for you mum - I did my very best to take some pictures of the whole garden to give an idea of the layout but it didn't exactly work... hopefully a kind of mini-tour will help you explain to John what it looks like!

Whole Garden (April 11)

(July 11)

This is the best shot of the whole garden I could find... it's not particularly clear and there's a tree in the way but you're going to have to work with me here.  I'm standing on the balcony outside the back of the house - and we can see the top level of the terrace really nicely... yep, that's the slightly manky concrete bit with the tiny agapanthus by the stairs.  Look a little further and you can see the decking where the patio table and the strawberries live.  Peer through the tree on the left and you can just about see the shed sitting on it's paving-slab level and look even further, way down by the back fence where it's all washed out from the sun, and you can see the wood-chipped area where most of the plants live.

If we move down a level and stand on that lovely decking we can actually see a bit more of the garden.  On the left hand side we have the strawberry's (now fruited and putting out runners like there's no tomorrow) and up against the shed my valiant little raspberry canes (please ignore the half-built garden furniture... one day I promise I will reassemble it :s)

The plants around the front of the shed are all being very uninspiring at the moment so I'm not going to show you those; take my word for it that there is a cherry tree (from which all the cherries have now been eaten), two slowly dying sunflowers (which used to be beautiful and now look a bit tatty) and a rhubarb (which is hibernating).

Once we get behind the shed things start to get more interesting; first we come to the hippo bag full of delicious young carrots.  So far I have eaten just a single carrot and it amazed me how 'carrotty' it tasted... Rob failed at photographing my intended shot of triumphant-Sam-wielding-a-beautiful-leafy-carrot so that will have to wait until I want to eat another one.  If you have keen eyes you will also notice an invading tomato plant... I'm not entirely sure how it snuck in there but it seemed mean to uproot it after it had clearly made such an effort to find a nice home.

Moving further to the right we have the runner beans, which are making excellent use of the slightly beaten up TV unit.  I thought I'd killed them but I guess not because they have some beautiful flowers and if you make the picture bigger you can hopefully see the very first beans starting to appear.

If you were to continue around the corner and along the back fence you would currently see some very sorry looking broad beans and mange tout; they produced beautifully in their prime but, alas, they are now rather shrivelled and dead looking.

All is not lost however!  Stepping back a few paces into the middle of the wood-chipped area reveals my favourite bit of the garden at the moment.... my tomato forest :D  It is possibly hard to appreciate the magnificence from a photo but on the left there are no less than 9 beautiful tomato plants, each lovingly reared from seed and now crammed with a truly ridiculous number of tiny green tomatoes.

On the right are my courgettes which are getting back on track nicely after the pesky weather nearly killed them by forgetting it was summer.  I have two which are doing very well and another two which are struggling but will hopefully make it through.

Do you see the tomatoes?

The mighty courgette

And that's about it; I've skipped over a few lone pots here and there but I seem to have forgotten to photograph them and it's dark now!  Instead I will leave you with my latest addition - the slightly pathetic Aubergine.  This pot was left empty after it's courgette succumbed to the cold and it was a bit late to be planting new seeds so I popped to the garden centre to pick up a replacement.  It seems that 'grow your own' season is now over as far as the shops are concerned so there wasn't much choice - this little fellow was about the only thing that looked like it still had some life in it (well, the lettuce too but that's not really a proper plant) so we shall see how it gets on.

Update

The garden is in full swing now; not many updates recently because of the dreaded revision monster but I've had a stash of photos waiting to be posted so here they are:

The cherry tree is the surprise star at the moment;  I was expecting to wait many years before it gave me any fruits but I think at the moment it actually has more cherries than leaves!  They may be cooking cherries but I still haven't been able to resist nibbling a few and whilst they're a little tart they're also totally delicious :D

The strawberries are in full swing at the moment; nearly all ripened now and oh so delicious; so many more fruits than I had last year and the flavour is just divine

It doesn't get much better than this !

 On the healthier side of things I've definitely decided that growing lettuces is much, much easier when you buy baby ones from B&Q!  I haven't had much luck with either sowing direct in the garden or raising seeds inside and transplanting but my £1.69 selection pack from B&Q is thriving and delivering wonderful side-salads for dinner; they're all cut and come again varieties so I can just keep snipping bits off and then they grow me more... perfect!

And finally my tomato forest is rapidly getting denser; I'm beginning to think that I may have been a tad optimistic with my spacings  but on the plus side the tomatoes seem to have developed some really sturdy stems so I'm hoping that they'll be better able to bear the weight of their fruits than last years batch were.

It may not be the prettiest garden on earth but there is definitely something deeply satisfying about looking out over all of this and knowing that I nursed all of these plants from the tiniest little seedlings right up to the big, green monsters that are thriving today (except the weeds... those managed to tend themselves ;p)

It's all about ME!

In Jake's world everything is about him; when I squat down to tend a plant I am clearly realising that the paving is a little cold and hard for his tastes and offering him the opportunity to sit on my "lap" and naturally, when I decided to sink some pots into the soil, so wonderfully close to the edge of the flower bed, I an politely providing him with a choice of watering holes; most silly of me to leave that pesky plant so inconveniently in the way ;p

Also, whilst clearly less awesome than cat I shall take a moment to extol the glory of the mega-radish... almost seems a shame to eat it!

Weekend Photos - New Additions

Above are some baby chilli plants from Angela - these will live inside I think and should make for some lovely spicy dinners

Two new variants of tomato plant - one of these is the massive beefsteak variety :D

And some of my own additions - on the left we have courgettes coming through and on the right my second (far more sensible) sowing of runner beans.

Weekend Photos - Vegetables

Radishes

The few surviving lettuces

Carrots

Broadbeans

Mangetout - Flowers

Mange Tout - Edibles!

Weekend Photos - Fruits

Some photos of the garden this weekend:

The small blueberry bush

The large blueberry bush

The large blueberry bush - closer to being blueberries

 

First Strawberries to be seen

And some weird looking rasberries-in-the-making

Cherries!  Years ahead of schedule but no complaints :D

Cherry Tree

I love this time of year; it seems that every time you go into the garden something new has happened - yesterday there were just a few sparse blooms on my cherry tree - today it's covered in them.

Don't they look more 'arty' when I zoom in ;p

These little wild flowers have managed to make a home for themselves in my ugly concrete steps... I know that in theory I should be tearing them up and sticking them in the trash but they're just too pretty to harm - I've decided that this year I shall love my weeds (or at least the colourful ones)

My strawberries have definitely started to flourish again, they're putting out new leaves and, just spotted today, starting to set flower buds.

Someone was very interested in my camera but not amused that it was the plants getting all the attention

Planters

Starting with the easy one - this used to be a TV unit a while ago, the TV became a flat screen and moved upstairs so we didn't need it any more and with a few extra nails it has become a nice deep Runner Bean planter (or will next month when the runner beans are garden-ready).

The real achievement of the day is my pallet-planters.  I'm really pleased how they've worked out.  They are about twice the depth of a grow bag so should make my tomatoes very happy (when they finally get big and strong enough to go outside).  The second one will definitely play home to some courgettes and/or patty pan squashes when the weather gets nicer and for the time being will probably make Rob very happy with some quick radishes (which only need a month or so and can be yanked out of the way by the time the squashes are ready to go in)

Unexpectedly the biggest challenge with these planters was filling them - between the planters and the TV unit they've taken 6 of B&Q's biggest (cheapest) 125L bags of compost; poor little car had to make two trips to the shop to get it all and I definitely deserve a nice hot shower to recover from lugging it all around! So final cost of planters = woodwork £NIL, nails £5, liner £10 and compost £42; pretty reasonable I think.

I also treated each planter to a generous helping of blood, fish & bone as I suspect that b&q's cheapest doesn't come with much in the way of nutrients for my plants!  Still, this really was a case of needing quantity not quality so I think it should work out fine.

I had a slight lettuce fail... apparently my lovely grow bag full of seedlings looks an awful lot like a luxury toilet to the neighbourhood cats.  When I was down at B&Q buying compost for my mega-planters I saw some little trays of lettuce seedlings... £1.48 for 24 plants - I'm hoping that as they are a bit bigger the cats will realise that this is not something laid on for their benefit and leave them be... we shall see ;p 

Finally - a close up shot of my brand new Morrello Cherry Tree - this little beauty was my birthday pressie from my godparents (by way of a very nice cheque ;p) and is promising to look absolutely gorgeous when all the buds come into bloom... in all honesty it's pretty stunning already with just a couple out.  It's living in a pot at the moment and the chap at the garden centre said that as long as I keep buying it a new, bigger one, each year it should be happy enough although one day I shall hopefully have a nice big flower bed/lawn for it to live in.

Out in the Garden

We've had such a lovely weekend that it seemed a shame to stay inside so I've been out in the garden for the first time this year.  I moved all the plants back to their regular spots and planted out my little Mange Tout and Broad Beans.

A nice easy one to start - only the mint is new, all the others survived the winter

Mangetout - Before

After

Broad Bean - Before

I hope the Broad Beans like it better than the Strawberries did

I think we'll definitely get to eat some this year

Those teensy green bits = lettuces!