Our garden: July 2014
I feel like all I've been talking about on here lately is gardening and plants! But this is the first year I've had a whole garden to look after and I'm loving it. It's also taking up quite a bit of my time. I have a quick whizz round every day but there's always something to do; watering, dead heading, hunting down caterpillars, pinching out suckers, identifying creepy crawlies… Soon there will be a better balance of craft and gardening posts. But for now...back to 'the plot'!
The most exciting thing happening this week is that we have beans! A week ago we had flowers.
Now we have these beauties. And some of the larger ones are nearly ready to pick, I'm amazed at how quickly they've grown.
The red lettuce seeds from my friend Kat have grown into these colourful leaves. Not long now and we'll be enjoying freshly picked salad leaves.
The plum tomatoes from Linda are getting big!
We harvested our first curly kale this week and it was delicious. I blanched it and chopped it into pasta.
Our chilli plant from last year keeps on giving. I'm not sure what type of chilli they are but don't be deceived by their size, they are hot.
I've had no luck with spinach this year. When we had our little patch of garden at the flat we were picking it for weeks. Not here, the leaves get eaten whatever their size. I assumed it was slugs but Scott caught a house sparrow having a cheeky nibble and I've since seen them doing it too. Now it all makes sense! As you can see they are very organised when it comes to decimating spinach. They start at the left and gradually work across the row. I admire their neatness. I'm going to leave it in as a distraction from the two rows of curly kale in the other bed.
After that I built a small (and rather shoddy) cage around the kale nero to deter sparrows and pigeons. Now the netting is up it's growing without interference.
The chamomile in the front garden is covered with flowers. I nearly didn't buy any this year because it always goes brown and scraggly at the bottom. Does anyone know what causes this? I'm glad I planted some in the end though, it looks so nice.
I put some chamomile in a vase with cornflowers. I like the bright yellow and blue together.
And I'm not sure what this plant is. Does anyone have any ideas?
These beautiful flowers popped up a few weeks ago (as a result of me letting a few weeds run to flower for the bees) and I think it's called Viper's Bugloss - correct me if I'm wrong. The bees love it and this photo doesn't really do the flowers justice but they are bright purple with flecks of pink and blue.
I've been putting quite a few garden photos on Instagram lately. Come follow me!
