Dark water & Mental Pumpkins

We were watering at the lotty at 21:30 on Friday evening, it was almost dark! We waited until the heat of the day had dissipated a bit, and we gave everything a good drench.

We found that we have blackfly on the runner beans, boo! I sprayed them with a soapy solution (washing up liquid in water) so we'll have to see how that goes. I may need to give them another few goes. Strange thing is the broad beans, which are right next to the runners, are currently blackfly free, which are normally prone to them. I pulled off some of the most infested leaves and sprayed them and flung them into the compost bin. But we ate our first runner beans at the weekend, and they were lovely.

The pumpkins and the squashes on the lotty are going mental - the one big pumpkin is almost football sized now, and the plants are still pushing out fruits. And we cropped our first courgette! It's only a small one, but it's a start. Some of the other courgette plants are being swamped by the pumpkins so we'll see what happens, we haven't grown courgettes on the lotty before. The courgette plant in the garden is very happy and is producing mini courgettes already. Wonderful.

Oh and I tidied up the tomato plants a bit, by removing the extra stalks and a lot of leaves from the base so I can see the plants properly again now.

Hubby works near a coffee place, and they have given us some of their used coffee grounds - we are going to try just composting them for now, as we have heard conflicting reports of how good/bad they are for the soil - some people say they suck all the nutrients out, others say they add nutrients in... we will find out. But the compost bin is pretty warm at the moment, which is good, it is now full of tomato leaves as well as coffee grounds.

Have reorganised the two greenhouses, the main one and the little plastic one at the side of the house - this one is now a pot, tray and compost store, and the main one will have the staging in it and the plants next year. Got rid of a load of rubbish from the little gh, we had allsorts in there, and because it is several years old the cover is disintegrating, and things get wet. So storing pots will be fine.

In yesterday afternoon's heat hubby and I tackled a bit more of the ivy on the back fence - hubby managed to cut out a lot of the thick ivy stems that were wrapped around the bamboo, and he also cut a stump of hornbeam right down to the ground, so that's good. I cut a few bits of hornbeam and ivy out of the side fence, we'll need that clearer in order to tackle to back fence. Still loads of ivy and russian vine to get rid of, that will need bagging up and taking to the tip again, but it was too hot yesterday, we gave up and went back indoors.