Friday 9 July 2010

We've got 33° in the shade here at the moment, so the SFG is looking rather wilted despite copious draughts of water every evening. It's only the top layer that's dry though, and all the plants seem to recover well.  The SFG on the right is empty - I harvested all the lettuces this morning, which were shooting upwards, and have planted garlic cloves in one of the squares. I need to go to the garden centre and get some more rocket seedlings, as the ones I bought in spring are ready for picking. I haven't done as much in the garden this year as I did last year, but at least I've managed to have a couple of courgette plants,  a cucumber and a butternut squash, which, as I grew it from seed, rather late, I don't know how well will do. We'll see.
This one has a broccoli plant, an artichoke and some nasturtians in it. I cut off the top of the broccoli and am gradually seeing a few small shoots coming at the sides. The ants seem to love the artichoke, for some reason. I thought that it would flower this year - it's already a year old - but I've not seen any flower budding so far. I'm going to get some more bark chippings and repair some of the worn patches where, after a year, the weeds insist on breaking through, despite weed cloth and bark chippings.
This one, for some reason got off to a bad start - I think it was the deer which jumped over the fence from the wood and nibbled all the tops off my mange-tout before I got round to covering them up. But interestingly, the bush tomato plants dropped a lot of seeds, which are now coming up, so I've got a few extra tomato tiddlers for free. They're rather late in flowering of course - we had  such a long cold winter and spring - but I've moved the one which is furthest on, to the terrace, in the hope that we'll have a few tomatoes which won't be mulched by rain falling on them, which is what happened last summer. Rain, and the garden sprinkler system, which is impossible to keep off certain areas. That's why I have the tomatoes, peppers and aubergine on the terrace this year. 
Two big courgette plants, the cucumber and the butternut squash - dwarfed by the zucchinis as yet, but eventually it'll be massive. I couldn't believe how enormous it grew last year. I'm going to have to train the branches on wires and poles over the potato bed, I think. The 'pots' are coming on well, although I planted them rather late - they're in flower anyway, which is a good, so when they've wilted I'll start digging them up.Right are my carrots!! I didn't sow them in a SFG bed this time because they just didn't like the soil - too much nitrogen (horse manure) and they seem to be doing much better in the normal sandy soil. I haven't pulled any yet. 

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