Harvest #2

Our squatting sweet peas from Elsie's next door seem to have had their best time while we were away but there's still a few to come:


The dill harvest is impressive. Corrina picked about half of it to dry:

And given that the tates were packed into a really rather-too-small container they cropped pretty well ... oh, and they taste great :-)



The shallots have been slightly disappointing after last year's bumper crop, the weather this year hasn't been kind and the recent wet spell has caused a few to rot. There are still a good few that we've managed to harvest and now they're out of the ground the leeks have been planted in their place.

What 6 weeks of rain does...

... it makes everything grow, and when you go away for 3 weeks that's a lot of sald to eat!


Our plucky sprout plant's battling against the cabbage whites now - how they manage to find the only brassica for miles amazes me.

Fennelicious...

Dillicious, heheh, see what I did there...

The Garden Reaches Adolescence

Like a surly teenager the flower border is shooting upwards, outwards, generally misbehaving and looking a touch untidy. After 3 weeks away the growth is surprising and I'm already starting to think about what needs to be moved and changed for next year.

The hebe's almost lost behind the dicentra and the fucsia has exceeded all my expectations and is going to have to be moved - maybe to the front garden or possibly to the redesigned back patio. Next year there should be plenty of plants I can move or divide to fill up the rest of the garden.



The rudbekia "Indiansommer" is almost touching 2 meters now and is showing up the verbena bonariensis which was meant to be filling the gap between the helenium and the rudbekia - but there's only one shoot visible! The helenium ("Herbstonne") would be looking a touch brighter if it hadn't had a couple of weeks of rain on it but I'm very pleased with the contrast between it and the cotinus.

And then there's the plant that got me in to daisy flowers in the first place; our echinacea is thriving following its division this spring.

Stoned

We're getting close to choosing some paving now and I've put together some plans thanks to the Marshals garden designer. Here are some screen shots:

The area at the rear of the garden currently looks like this:

The plan below shows how we intend to fill it with a circular paved area and bamboo (actually, the garden designer didn't do bamboo, so I improvised with hornbeam):

The Last Boy Sprout

The last brussels sprout from 4 that germinated, the other 3 were lost to slugs but this one's looking quite perky.

Early Summer Promise

The border's starting to grow far bigger than I expected or hoped in its first few months, though I'm realising that I haven't put in enough late spring and early summer colour. I imagine that aquilegia will no doubt seed itself throughout the garden very shortly.


Something that does provide a little colour is our globemaster alliums which are doing surprisingly well given that they're still in their pots and the bees are particularly pleased with them.

They're also very tactile and when they're in your own garden it's ok to to touch

The First Harvest

GARLIC! And lots of it! Corrina's pulled up 30 bulbs and tied them up to dry and they should see us through the year with effluvious ease :-)

Seagrass

...is the colour that Corrina painted the shed.

For my birthday Corrina bought me a

Cold Frame :-)

And Then We Changed a Few Things

First I built some raised beds and we filled them with Denise's Delight and Corrina planted bulbs to provide some spring colour while we wait for the veg season to begin.

I started to plant the border...

View from the patio... except everything from the patio is sitting in the garden.

Clean lines

Once, I cleaned out all the weeds between the paving slabs. It hasn't happened since.

In the beginning...

...well, not quite the beginning but this is how the back garden looked last summer (2006). A healthy crop of second-early tates on the right, some salad on its way on the left and the two separated by a rather weedy patch of grass. At the front the patio's in shade but look at the shed enjoying the late afternoon sun. Lucky shed.