Growing

A very modest crop from my lemon cucumber plant, although there may well be more on the way.

I’ve just gone through all the plants, only picking the good firm sprouts, and not worrying about any that weren’t – they went in the garden waste with the plants.

Even so, I have a ridiculous amount of sprouts. Far too many to eat before they go bad.

I’ve been harvesting the odd tomato here and then, as the ripen on the vine, but I have now given up and stripped my plants of the remaining tomatoes. Which are actually quite a few.

Having finished up all the good broccoli heads from the garden during the summer, the plants kept giving. Once the heads were taken, the offshoots start flowering – broccoli spears.

As mentioned on my Facebook page a few days ago, high winds knocked over my tomato plants. Quite a few branches broken, but non of the main stems. I stood them up again and did a quick tidy the day after, which yielded me a small bag of green tomatoes […]

It’s been a few years since I last grew tomatoes, and I’d forgotten many of the little things I had learned. Mainly on how to remove suckers before they became major fruit-bearing parts of the plant, and how to keep the plant neat. As a result, my tomatoes have been […]

I thought it would be interesting to document the various stages my back garden has been in, both good and bad.

(Note: despite the title, this post is somewhat long!)

This is the first lot of Brussels I planted, which at one point I was thinking of digging up and throwing away, because they looked so unhealthy.

And this is the second planting. These thrived a lot better, but recently got hit with an infestation of tiny flies. But a spraying of lightly soapy water seems to have gotten rid of the worst, and let the plants recover.

My garden furniture is 8 years old, and I really haven’t taken the care of it that I should.

It was on my list of things to do for a long time, so when I hired some gardeners to do some work, stripping and retreating it was high on the list.

However, I am considering an alternative.

For the first time in about 4 years, I have all 4 of my vegetable troughs planted with vegetables. But boy, that 4th one was tough.