Garden Journal - It's June, And The Rain Makes The Garden Grow

June has arrived with a belt of rain here in the south of England. The upside is that it saves us a huge amount of time (and money) watering things. The downside is that temperatures are a good 5-10 degrees cooler than is usual at this time of year.

Despite the unseasonal cool weather, the garden is doing well. But I'll give credit where it's due and say that it's my wonderful wife who has done most of the work !

This is the Ballerina - it's kind of wild rose, and was a present from my mother when we first moved into our house. It's making a really nice load of flowers this year.

This is why I like the Ballerina so much. The bees adore it, and you can hear the volume of bumblebee buzzing from several feet away as dozens and dozens of the little furry friends work hard collecting pollen and nectar.

After sitting in a pot being boring for weeks and weeks, the calendula has just come into bloom. Super-pretty !

Here's a side view. Sadly it's got quite a lot of aphids on. We didn't use to have an aphid problem, because the birds would come and eat all of them up, which led to lots of birdlife in the garden.

But Chester cat has discovered how to ambush them, so they stay up high and don't deal with the low down aphids. If anyone knows a natural way to control them without spraying chemicals, I'd love to know !

A bush tomato, with Duncan cat looking on in a judgemental kind of way.

There's a story with this one. When Chester went missing last year, he eventually turned up hiding out at a house down the road, and when we picked him up the lovely lady who lived there gave us some miniature tomatoes. She'd grown them from the seeds of a tomato she ate when she visited a friend in South Africa. In turn, we saved some of the seeds and grew this bush.

Strawberries ! Not a lot to say about these other than that home grown ones are just so much more delicious than shop bought ones.

Lots of aubergines (eggplants) in the greenhouse.

If you look closely, you can see some of the really beautiful violet coloured flowers the aubergines make. There are lots of them hiding in the undergrowth ! What you have to do is shake them regularly, and that drops off pollen so the flowers can fertilise each other. It seems to be working, we could have rather a lot of aubergines to eat.....

The bell peppers also have lots of flowers 😀

It's a bit hard to see, but this is the white currant bush, with lots of lovely bunches of currants starting to swell and ripen. The mesh will hopefully stop the birds stealing them. Last year, we lost the whole crop to blackbirds and pigeons.

We should also have a good crop of loganberries, although they seem to be quite late this year. Hopefully they'll grow more and start ripening from mid-June onwards.

So that's how the garden is doing - there are masses of slugs and snails, which is a slight problem, but so far most of the vulnerable plants have been well enough protected from them. Oh, and the potatoes are growing like weeds 😁