It’s mad, the photo above shows the raised beds just before lockdown in March. My, how time’s flown eh? How many week’s have we been lockdown for? 14, 15, 16? The garden isn’t bothered how long though, it’s cracking on and with this present warm and wet weather here in London it’s getting on with what it does best. Look at those raised beds now (below), the spuds (Two bags of seed potatoes from Shannon’s. By the way the garden centre did a sterling job getting people supplied with stuff around the start of lockdown) are starting to take over and it’s becoming a bit of a jungle around there. There’s peppers, lettuce, carrots and a cabbage somewhere in amongst that lot! That’s our new incinerator too, ta for Marc B for dropping that off in a social distanced manner!

We’ve pulled out a few handfuls of spuds from around the potato plants making sure that the plant wasn’t disturbed too much and then we piled the earth/compost over the crown of the plant so any spuds near the surface wouldn’t have the chance to turn green. And here’s the spuds (below), we’re confused if they’re the first earlies, second earlies or premature maincrop ones. It doesn’t really matter, they tasted excellent and what did they taste of? Yes potatoes but real potatoes!

The lockdown may be getting us all down but if you’re fortunate enough to have a garden/windowsill/balcony and growing stuff, you know that it keeps you that little bit sane(r)! By the way here’s two tips we swear by here at Weeds, the first is to nip the sideshoots out of your tomato plants (not if they are the bush variety though) so all the goodness goes into the main stem and the flowers.

And a silly but effective one, if you know it’s going to rain get the hoe out a few hours beforehand and just scratch up the surface of somewhere in your garden that don’t look that grand. Below is a particulary not brilliant bit at the bottom of the garden which seems to get all sorts of weeds and bindweed a lot. We gave it a good “tip-around with a hoe” (as they used to say in the council) yesterday and it now looks great! We’re hoping it get’s a good covering of borage for the next couple of months to keep the bees happy. Happy lockdown gardening! #gardeninginlockdown #goingmadinlockdown