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!
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| 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.
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| Do you see the tomatoes? |
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| 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.
