Sunday, July 29, 2012

Soup weather

We are still having weather that is winter one day and summer the next so I decided to make soup this weekend using a turnip I have been eyeing up for a while.
It was much bigger than anything I'd have bought and with some of last weekend's potato harvest, an onion, some carrots and lentils I made a huge pot of soup and felt very pleased with my industry.

Sunday, July 22, 2012

busy busy

It has been ages since I last updated and my only excuse is that I have been really busy - and at least some of my busyness has been in the garden.  To keep me right I'm going to backdate this post to the weekend I actually did all of this work even though I'm only just getting around to posting.

The weekend before last we had a dry morning while I was babysitting my nephew who is 5 and therefore the perfect age to help find potatoes.  He enjoyed a very muddy morning pulling up all of my potato plants at the back of the garden exclaiming "Another potato!" every time he found one, he was absolutely thrilled.  While we were working my son (who is 2) happily filled buckets with earth using his plastic spade from the sandpit (I'll have him double digging next year I'm sure!) and carried them from place to place.
I forgot to photograph my harvest but I filled a washing up bowl with potatoes most of which were a decent size.  I have a handful of tiny ones that could have done with longer in the ground but the leaves looked a bit dodgy so I didn't want to leave them.

In a fit of industry I kept working and got so much done:

  • I dug over the bed that was now empty and moved the strongest looking leeks over to it (I had far too many of them all too close together), I also thinned out my celeriac a bit by moving my thinnings into half of the old potato bed.  
  • All of the lettuce I had planted beneath the tomato plants had bolted so I cut it way back and thinned the plants out.  It is already starting to grow back some tasty looking leaves so I don't feel too bad about the volume I ended up putting in the compost heap.
  • I cut down my giant camomile and have tied it in bunches to dry in the hut (which smells amazing)
  • I planted my 10p (Wilkinson's sale!) carrot seeds in an empty trough in the first compost out of my compost bin.  It feels like magic to make compost out of rubbish. 
  • I dug up one of my garlic bulbs but it didn't look very big so I replanted it, I'll check again in a few weeks.
Then I had a big mug of tea and lots of cake and admired my flowers.


Friday, July 13, 2012

A couple of dry days

As you know it has been raining for weeks and is forecast to keep raining for weeks still. Fortunately yesterday the sun shone (although sadly I was at work) and today is forecast to be dry so I am going to try to get some essential tasks done today.  I'm using my handy book the Pocket Guide to the Edible Garden to identify what I need to do and update my to do list.

Yesterday I managed to take some pictures, I can't believe that everything is growing with so little sunshine!
Butternut squash

Camomile

Peas!

Pansies

The first tomato :)

Monday, July 2, 2012

Terrible weather = not much gardening

Since my last post there has been non-stop rain so I have done very little gardening.  I put some flowers into pots at the weekend and I emptied a bag of potatoes that I thought looked like it had early blight.

I love digging up potatoes, and they were delicious.


Other than that I've been eating strawberries and blackcurrants.  The squash has been flowering (never two flowers at once though so I'm not too hopeful of fruit), the tomato plants are flowering and some of my peas are starting to flower.  

It has just been on the news that this has been the coldest June since 1991 and has had double the average rainfall so it is not surprising that the garden is looking a bit sorry for itself.

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