A few months ago we picked up some plants (cheap) from a community garden stall outside Crystal Palace park (here). There’s been a bit of growth since then and the Persicaria (description from the excellent Go Gardening Facebook group: “It’s a perennial & once established spreads quite rapidly. It sends up tall..usually red…flower stalks with small flowers”) is now sending up those red flowers.
The Sweet rocket (Hesperis Matronalis – from the Go Gardening Facebook group: “It’s a biennial or short lived perennial”) has now some nice white flowers on it. That was a great few bargains we bought that day, sure all the plants were £2.50 each!
We also had a suprise today when making space for new sowings of lettuce, basil and parsley and found some beetroot from a plant we thought was some sort of Perpetual Spinach. We pulled them up and got these light coloured baby beets which we boiled for half an hour. Not bad for something we didn’t know we had!
This afternoon wandering around the garden we saw some bees going to town on a 
If we have to thin plants out of the pond we sometimes put them in micro ponds we’ve dug into the ground in the wild bit at the bottom of the garden. This time here’s some water mint in an old M&S plant container. Waste not want not.
Things are looking great in the garden, the late sown Courgette/Zucchini plants are flowering and here’s one of them with a little fruit showing on the left hand side (above). In the picture is also some sort of wild geranium/pelargonium that came out of a wild flower seed mix we flung around the area beside it.
There are a couple of fruits starting to ripen on the very early sown tomato (above) we put in a broken food recycling bin that is up near the house. And (below) an ebay purchase (of £11) of fish food for the goldfish in the pond (50p for size comparison). Reckon this’ll last until the end of the decade! Does fish food have a “use by” date? Another silly question put to you by Weeds up to me knees.
Weeds up to me knees 