First strawberries today. These have had a little help from my plastic growhouse but lots more to come. And so far they’ve defied the vine weevils. And the plums look as if they’ve recovered from their traumatic accident a couple of years ago. Apples also doing well: Looking forward to a fruitful summer! Continue reading Fruit
We have mice in the garden. Not the kind that nibble the peas and eat the bird food. Not the kind that Bella watches every evening from her perch under the picnic table. We have these as well, though Bella does her best to keep their numbers down. The mice I am talking about are Latin scholars with very odd flowers: Arisarum Proboscideum – mouse plant I don’t really do Latin names for the plants in my garden – I prefer to think of them in terms of how I can cook them, what they smell like, where to grow … Continue reading Latin mice
It has been tropical today – pouring rain and hot sunshine – so perfect for planting out the scarlet runner beans. They go in beside the wigwam poles, along with some sweet pea seedlings and some rainbow Swiss chard to grow away happily in the shade in the middle. Self-seeded borage will produce blue flowers. There should be some lovely colours in a couple of months: and more rainbow Swiss chard: and checking up on the progress of the pink and blue peas. No flowers yet but they’re doing well: While doing this, I also harvested some purple sprouting broccoli … Continue reading Garden rainbows
Six years ago I dug up part of my lawn and built raised beds to grow vegetables. I used planks from an old shed and some old bookshelves (and yes, to quote my assistant gardener, I removed the books first). Six years on and the wood is beginning to rot a bit. One side fell off this one. Bella probably helped: So today’s task was to try and fix them up to last at least another season. DIY is not really my thing but I can manage the simpler tasks of drilling holes, with a trusty hand drill, and tightening … Continue reading A little DIY
There’s nothing better than going away for a couple of days and coming home to discover it’s still the weekend. But a lazy one so far: Bella is making the most of the sunshine, so I brought all my baby tomatoes, aubergines, chillies and cucumbers out to join her in the sun: They seem to be very slow to get going this year and it’s still too cold at night to put them in the seed house so they are languishing a bit in the house. I’m confident they’ll start growing properly eventually. In the meantime there is promise of … Continue reading Lazy Saturday
Forget-me-not growing through the paving stones. Sometimes I wonder why I need to put all this effort into reclaiming paradise when nature can just do it for me. Of course there is the small matter of really pesky weeds growing there too but I’ve left this one. It seems a bit like Wall-e’s plant – a symbol of hope. Continue reading Plant
.. and reds and yellows: Yesterday I got on with the big task of pricking out seedlings. I seem to have an awful lot of purple sprouting broccoli and rainbow chard. So that’s next year’s multicoloured spring sorted. I also sowed all my runner bean seeds in paper tubes, ready to be planted out once the cold weather really has gone: and dug my runner bean trench – see last year’s post on how to do that. This year there were no musical scores in the trench but there were some other bits of writing drafts which I’m delighted to … Continue reading More spring purples
Reclaiming Paradise 