Garden Journal - Things Are Starting To Happen !

What a strange year ! After last year being wet and cold pretty much all through followed by a mild winter, everything in our garden seems to be happening incredibly fast right now.

Starting with some rather nice roses....

I was actually a bit worried about these. I don't spray chemical pesticides, and up until now we've had loads of birds come into the garden and pick all the aphids off. But Chester cat has decided that his new favourite hobby is birdwatching, and I think the sparrows and finches find it a bit too intimidating. So we've ended up with a lot more aphids around than usual.

Can anyone tell me what this flower is ? The shrub that climbs over the top of the garden arch has made loads of them ! I tried to take a more distant shot as well to show how many there were, but the sun gave it too much contrast.

The potatoes are growing like weeds 😁 We're doing them in fabric planters, and if they turn out like the buckets we used last year, when harvest time comes it'll be a case of just turning the planter upside down and finding that we've got a 95% mud to potato conversion rate.

It's a bit hard to see, but this is one of the raised beds we've hooped over and turned into a polytunnel. It's given us about a kilo of spinach a week for the last two or three weeks just by cutting leaves (not killing the plants), and is growing back as fast as we can eat it !

This is a climber of no edible value, but it makes incredibly pretty purple flowers that the bees love, so it gets to stay. It's loving the anti cat escape mesh we put up.

Another slight hard to see one. I pruned out little fig tree really hard last winter and pulled off all the half-made figs which the frost normally kills anyway. It's made soooo many new figs, and much earlier than usual, so I'm hoping that for the first time ever we'll get a decent crop rather than just one or two.

Climbing beans. They were only started a fortnight ago, spent the first week on a windowsill indoors, and they're already growing healthily.

Yeah, yeah, it's a patch of grass. I re-seeded back in March; before that it was bare earth. It did nothing for ages, and then suddenly started growing as the weather warmed up. Another few weeks and it'll be established enough for a first cut.

The inside of the greenhouse. Full of aubergines (eggplant) and bell peppers. Some of them are already starting to flower.

We bought five dwarf fruit trees last autumn. Four of them survived the winter. Hopefully in a few years they'll start giving us apples, pears, cherries and plums.

But the cherry is mostly to help with cross-pollination of our main cherry tree, which gave "empty" cherries with no stones for the last few years - ones which never ripened because there wasn't another tree in range. With few exceptions, cherry trees can't pollinate themselves, so the bees need to carry pollen across from another nearby tree.

And this is a view from below up into the main cherry tree. Lots of cherries, and strangely one I tested did have a stone in the middle, so someone nearby must have a tree that's come to maturity and made flowers. I really hope they ripen and we can get to them before the birds - when this tree does make ripe cherries, they're really dark and sweet.

It also looks like we've going to have a decent loganberry crop. If you look carefully, you might just spot the bumblebee going about his work 😀

Even better, two of the loganberries (which actually self-seeded themselves) are making massive quantities of new growth. The way they grow means that these are the stems which will give us next year's crop. The idea is that stems grow for a year and them give fruit the next year, while the old stems that have given fruit get cut down and added to the compost heap. Although we've got three self-seeded plants from the original, they don't breed true; ones that self seed from the second generation revert to spiny, spiky brambles.

So that's an update on the stuff growing in our garden. Every year we're adding more edible things, and while we don't expect to ever be 100% self sufficient (we'd need more land for that !) we're a long way down the path for some key crops. More importantly, home grown tastes nicer and we know it's not been sprayed with chemicals.