Monday 7 July 2014

From then to now

We have achieved so much in such a short space of time, it is astonishing when I think about it. The lotty was empty except for weeds when I sprayed with glyphosate on Good Friday this year, and we now have an almost full plot and an almost full garden at home. All we are waiting on now are the courgette plants to mature a bit, and the braaasicas that are still in the greenhouse.

The growth on the plot has been tremendous, the two pumpkins are spreading and we've spotted two female flowers with little yellow blobs behind them, fabulous. There may be more, but two is great! The runners and french beans are growing away nicely, but the cannellini and italian yardlongs aren't looking too great, hopefully they will pick up. The two other squashes (Winter and Butternut) we planted last week are looking settled and are beginning to produce flowers, and the tomato plants have fledgeling tomatoes on them and lots of flowers, yay!

We are already planning ahead for next year's plot, and have started a free trial of some garden design software, it seems ok, it is probably quite useful once we become accustomed to it and all its little foibles. Using the software it seems that we could fit a lot more on the plot than we currently do. And I thought we squashed stuff in already. Ww will have to see what we think come next year. We have already decided to put some permanent paths in, and begin an asparagus bed, we will tidy up the raspberries and the blackcurrant and put some supports in for them, and that will give the plot some more definite structure.

Oh and we ordered some more seeds from the vegetableseeds.net website :-) They sent me the missing Ailsa Craig onions from my first order, and a free packet of Tosca onion as a gift, nice :-) Good customer service.

We need to find a way of organising our seeds, we have lots, and it is becoming difficult to find the ones we want. A simple card index system should do it. They are all in used Jacobs cracker tubs, so all I need is a few A4 dividers and cut them to size.

At the moment we are thinking about getting a polytunnel for the back garden. The garden isn't very big but it would mean that the productive space would be concentrated in one area, and we would hopefully get more produce and earlier. Still working out the logistics of it really, it would mean some cutting back (or even cutting out) of some of the established trees and shrubs, and moving the beds about, but we'd planned on moving the beds around at the end of the season anyway. 




So that's it for now, I'll keep you all updated when more things happen.





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