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.

Dried Tomatoes

I've been stockpiling cherry tomatoes all this week, they're ripening like crazy and there are only so many times you can eat tomatoes in a week before they get a bit boring, so on Saturday I decided it was time to do something with them.  Some sort of pasta sauce seemed like the most obvious use for them but the receipes I found all wanted them skinned.... I think not!

After a bit of searching I came across the idea of oven-drying them (an english solution to sun-dried tomatoes!) so I enlisted Rob's help to squish all the innards out of the little tomatoes and then left them in the oven for several hours with some olive oil and herbs until they came out all chewy and dry.  They taste just like the sun-dried tomatoes I've bought before with very strong tomato flavour (which to be honest I'm not all that keen on!) so I'm thinking I will try chopping them up and baking some tomato bread later on or just let Rob eat his way through them in salads etc.  Much better off this way than gradually going off in the fridge though - for now they are tucked up in the freezer until I get inspired to use them!

Om nom nom

There are only so many pictures I can show of plants-with-fruit-on before it starts to get a bit repetitive so I'm making a bit of a detour onto the subject of just what exactly I'm going to do with all these things once they've grown.  Entertainingly I hadn't really given this much thought when I was planting and I think next year I may try and grow things that will be useful for eating.  Nonetheless it makes a nice change to have some garden-fresh veg in our meals and it has prompted me to cook some new things because there's no way I'm letting it go to waste after all the effort I put into growing it!

And so I present - Salmon with Broad Bean cous cous and cherry tomatoes

This was from a recipe on goodtoknow.co.uk and was both tasty and stupidly easy to cook... my favourite combination :D  In short, stick the salmon in the oven, boil the beans in water just before it's ready and cover the cous cous with water per packet instructions, combine cous cous & beans, add a little lemon juice and serve!

I'd never eaten a broad bean before and was pleasantly surprised by them... probably not enough to go out and buy some but I shall certainly be eating the rest of the ones I've grown.

For my Daddy....

Apparently my dad is very jealous of my speedy tomatoes - his are taking their time and just about at the 'pretty flowers' stage whilst I'm very near to having tomatoes for my salad.  Being the lovely daughter that I am I thought I'd do a whole post of tasty tomato pictures just to show him what's still to come (or praps just rub it in a bit more ;p).... dad, this one's for you! 

The Indoor tomato - recovering well from its fall

The hanging tomatoes almost have more fruit than leaves!

Different plant... honest!

The grow bag tomatoes are still all green

And finally the slowest of the lot - the 'extra' tomatos are limping along - the poor things managed to blow over in the wind and lost some branches.  I think they'll make it but they are definately looking worse for wear at the moment.  Just to clarify that bag is *very* heavy; I can kind of shuffle-walk it around if need be but that's about it - the force it must take to topple it would be pretty considerable; when I said we'd had  some bad weather lately I really did mean it!

An Update

I spent most of the afternoon out in the garden today tidying up various plants and settling in a new one. 

This was an impulse purchase from Thompson & Morgan with Tesco Clubcard vouchers; the vouchers were due to expire and needed using up so I purchased a new blueberry bush (and some winter potatoes but they're due later) to use them up.  This little fellow turned up in the mail and is now settling in beside its big brother

I also have some 'new' strawberries - the existing plants have started putting out runners which I have been trapping in little pots around the big one and these fellows have finally grown big enough to strike out on their own (and make way for even more new runners!)  Jake unfortunately seems to consider 'strawberry runners' close enough to 'string' to be worth chasing round the garden.... I may have to keep an eye on my little ones!

The agapanthus is doing very nicely in it's pot by the stairs and looks like it's thinking about flowering soon

The rhubarb is also continuing to grow well, occasionally one of the smaller leaves seems to wilt and die but they always get replaced by new ones so i'm not too concerned about it!

This raspberry plant has got me totally confused!  I had read that the type of raspberry I had would fruit on last years canes.... but it's fruiting on new growth so I think I need to do a bit more reading!  Still... it looks like I might get 4 whole raspberries to eat this year so there's an unexpected treat!

The strawberry plants seem to either be doing very well or very badly; some of them (like this one!) are putting out beautiful crops of tasty strawberries whilst others have broken their stems and the fruit has rotted :(  I think I will need to modify these bags if I use them again next year or maybe look for a better pot with more rounded edges to give the fruiting stems a little support.

 All the tomatoes are fruiting now but the hanging baskets are definately leading the way - I can't believe that such a small plant can be so liberally covered in fruit - salads are going to awesome this summer.

And finally  my beautiful beans are thriving - this one is now going so well that i've given it a 'trellis' onto the roof of the shed!  I should probably have cut it down but its got flowers on the 'overflow' now so it seemed a shame to take them off.  I did think about tying on another cane but realised that there was no way I would be able to support it so left it at 2

All grown up

My little plants are getting all grown up now and showing signs of fruiting. I imagine I'll get used to it over time but at the moment I still get a lovely sense of wonder when I look out of the back door and see my drab stone patio covered in lovely vibrant growing things!

Just a quick post today but here are some photos of the growing that's been going on:

No sign of fruit yet but it's definately getting 'bushier'

These little guys are growing so well I had to tie on extra canes to keep them going... if they get much taller I'm going to need a ladder to harvest them tho ;p

Apparently Rhubarb does just fine in pots - that leaf at the bottom is easily 3 dinner plates in size!

Even the latecomers are getting on well - this is the Raspberry cane that used to just be a stick!

It's growing well... and I still have no idea what it is!

I think 'Yummmmm' about covers this one

The tomatoes seem to have recovered from their brush with the frost but I think I need to seperate them out a bit more; at the moment they look rather like one mega-plant!

Oh Dear.... My poor indoor tomato had a nasty run in with the wind - it was a lot more spindly that the outside tomatoes and got knocked over :(  It's now tied to the fence and shortly after this picture I removed all the broken limbs... poor thing looks a little bare now but I'm hopeful it might make it through as the top is still growing nicely.

It seems I forgot to take a photo of the potatoes but they too are thriving - bushy greens are now springing out of the top of the grow bag and i've banked it up with compost to the top. Tasty taties are anticipated!

Tomato Update

First a look at the outdoor tomatoes - I didn't think that these guys had done very well but looking at the photo from a few weeks ago they seem to have pretty much doubled in size so maybe I was being pessimistic:

As first planted

Look - almost as tall as a water bottle!

But then we look at the indoor tomato:

What a monster!

Oh yes... it rather puts the others to shame! Admitedly it's not quite as tall as the perspective in that shot makes it look but using the water bottle as a reference you can see that it's doing really rather well.  In short... tomatoes like warm protected places much more than nasty cold gardens... who'd have guessed!

Planting - Tomatoes

And for the last of my baby plants that most traditional of british vegetables the humble tomato.  Well, maybe not traditional but when I think of growing things to eat the tomato is what comes to mind - most summers at home were accompanied by a bag of tomatoes by the side door basking in the sunlight and narrowly avoiding being crushed by errant car doors, shopping bags and trampling feet.

I may have jumped the gun slightly on my tomatoes though as whilst I checked how to plant them it wasn't until after they were all tucked into their little grow bag that I remembered to check when to plant them.  All of the plants I bought were happy to be planted in the spring but it seems that these little fellas would probably have prefered to be kept inside a little longer.  I think it will be more disruptive to them to try and lug their growbag up several flights of stairs into the kitchen than it will to leave them where they are so they will have to do their best to survive outside.

I have gone with an organic cherry tomato cultivar "Gardeners Delight" which is an outdoor variety which can be grown as a bush or on trusses.  I've given my little plants some stakes to hang onto and popped 3 into the grow bag and 3 in various other plant pots.  Tomatoes seem to be where my planning failed :( I managed to buy 6 plants but only a grow bag big enough for 3 of them.  On the plus side the potted plants are more portable so I have brought one inside to the kitchen to be lovingly cared for just in case the garden ones don't make it.  As a side note I won't be at all suprised if I manage to kill the one indoors and have the outdoor ones do just fine on their own!

The ever so stylish plastic bottles are phase 1 of my cunning anti-frost measures.  The internet tells me that if I surround my baby plants with a wall of water this will absorb heat during the day and then slowly release it overnight.  Given the insanely cheap price that tesco sells water for (12p a bottle!) I shall be constructing a water bottle fence around my little ones as soon as I get back from the shops tomorow.  In the meantime I've filled 3 empties from the recycling with warm water which I hope will be enough to keep them safe tonight!  Hopefully this will keep them toasty-warm until the end of May at which point all the neighbours will be looking jealously at my beautifully established tomato plants and wishing they had my green fingers.... alternatively I will sneak out in the dead of night to replace my poor wilted darlings with shiny new plants and so hide my shame at killing my first ever tomatoes!