Friday 3 July 2015

... garden update

Hello everybody,

Gosh, I had no idea that it had been so long since I posted. Time gets away on you sometimes. We had been away for a family gathering and I had to work like mad to get caught up when we got back.

The garden is doing quite well so far this year.

The strawberries have settled nicely into their new home and are thriving. I have been removing the blossom and the runners from all the June bearing plants. They keep trying to send out more runners and they can be hard to notice in the straw mulch. We are allowing the Day neutrals to bloom if they want to and I very much hope that they will so we can have at least a few berries.


The rhubarb has taken the transplanting into their new homes and each of the plants is growing a treat now. They have never put on this much growth before. Just goes to show you that you need to provide the right soil conditions and away they go. We will just let them grow this year and harvest next year even though there is probably enough there to take a few pieces. I prefer not to stress the plants at all this year and will wait for my rhubarb pie until next year.


The five raised beds that we have installed are all doing great.
 
  
There are two beds of the heirloom tomatoes. We have not staked any of them as yet but they are incredibly sturdy plants. The stalks are almost as thick as my thumb and the plants are only about a foot tall at this point. Frank believes that is because it is pretty much always windy here and he thinks that has helped them to toughen up. 

This first bed is inter-planted with spinach and lettuce which is also doing well. We should be able to start to harvest the spinach in another couple of day which is just as well since the hot weather has arrived and it will soon bolt if not picked.


 This tomato bed has Swiss Chard down the middle. I would normally just cut it off close to the ground to allow it to re-grow but the tomatoes will need the room so we will just remove the entire plant when we harvest.


This is the bed of beans, both green and yellow. The empty spot is where I planted out the beans that had not germinated when I pre-germinated all of them. As you can see, they were dead seed as they never did come up. I have tucked three small kale plants in the space. I plan to harvest them leaf by leaf for salads so will not need to worry about the fact that they would normally get far too large for that space.


This bed contains the root crops, the beetroot, carrots and parsnips. You can see that the beetroot is growing a treat now with lovely healthy plants.


The carrots are smaller because they are much slower to germinate than the beetroot but they are healthy and getting bigger each day.
 

The parsnips are very very slow to germinate, sometimes taking up to three weeks, which they did this time for me. They are quite small but making progress. They have a very long growing season so we will need to protect these as they will not be out of the ground until October.
 

The last bed contains the runner beans, courgettes and cucumbers. They have all put on amazing growth since planted. I am sure I will soon begin to wonder what to do with all the courgettes but I do love to eat them. We are growing both the dark green variety and a yellow summer squash also.
 

There is another area of the garden that I have been working away on in addition to these raised beds. It is not at all pretty but hopefully it will be productive. I will make that the topic of my next post.

Thanks a lot for visiting with me. Do leave me a comment if you wish as I love to hear from you. Cheers.

1 comment:

  1. Your garden is wonderful Melanie, all your hard work is really paying off. I can't imagine keeping up such a big garden, but all those fresh veggies, yum!

    Kelly

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