Closer to home AKA fish food, courgettes and tomatoes

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.

Have a good gardening week and “may the comfrey liquid, bees and weather by with you” as they say on GQT.

They’re on their way!

Now some of the flowers have dropped off the tomato plants we’ve been giving them and other fruiting plants a weekly feed of comfrey liquid. We’re also been giving the tomatoes some support with canes and garden wire as in a few week’s time some of the fruit will get heavy.

We’ve been using the home-made feed sparingly as we haven’t been getting that many comfrey leaves to make the liquid out of. We usually try and pass the feed on as it’s brilliant stuff but up until now have just about enough for ourselves. Fingers crossed we get a splurge of comfrey leaf growth soon.

The zucchini/courgette we planted in a in a pot is starting to flower now too and the climbing beans plants we got from Shannon’s are setting fruit on one of the three runner bean cane tripods we put in. As for the other two tripods, one went for a burton through underwater and the other one has been overun with blackfly. It’s strange as there’re only a couple of feet apart from each other.

So keep on with the watering through this dry spell and get some plant feed to your vegetables to get the best out of the plants cropping wise.

And while we’re on beanpoles here something brilliant bean support-wise from a few years ago from Vic Godard from The Subway Sect’s Dad’s garden. It’s a 16 caner with a nice tying system at the top and it really looks the part!

And the question is…

It’s been lovely weatherwise this week and now it’s a Saturday, why has it decided to rain? To tell you the truth the ground is a bit dry so we could do with a bit of rain but as long as it clears up later we won’t hold it against mother nature too much. 

As for the garden we’re loving that we’re getting the first tomatoes ripening (above), the plant isn’t at its best looking as a few of its leaves have been taken off so the sun can reach them but as the great Bob Flowerdew says below at around the 4 minute mark “I don’t eat the plants.” A video worth watching.

Things are hotting up in the raised beds too even though plants are battling it out with each other (that reminds us we’d do a bit of a thin out of the veg there tomorrow as we’re sure there’s some carrots we can pull up.) We weren’t sure if the below was a chilli pepper at first but it now looks like it’s a pepper pepper (so to speak). We’ll be keeping up with the watering and the weekly feed of comfrey liquid as those beds tend to dry out well quickly.

And it’s only taken a day or so for the first courgette/zucchinni to show after its first flower. We chucked a bit of organic matter from the bottom of the compost heap around the plant and a good feed won’t go amiss either. Never mind the lockdown, keep on gardening! #gardeninginlockdown #londonlockdowngardening

And here’s a nice and chilled tune if you’re stuck indoors this morning from Adriak called Sandalo (original mix), it’s a tune to cheer you up if it’s dull outside. Eight and a half minutes of nice ambience with a lovely bassline.  #lockdownambience

Who knows what tomorrow will bring (in lockdown)

It’s funny how the days all melt into one during lockdown but certain days bring certain pleasures. Yesterday we spotted our first courgette/zucchini flower even though the plant was sown very late as the ones we sown earlier amounted to nothing. We’re going to be keeping this one watered and fed a lot so we can get some decent fruits.

And after a delve into the compost in the raised beds (making sure any small marble sized spuds were covered over as they turn green in the sun making them poisonous) we got a nice amount of small new spuds!

And we found these two fibreglass tubs in the street to be chucked out for the binmen. They’re about a foot high and needed a wash and a lick of grey paint (which we found in a half opened tin under the stairs, we didn’t even know we had it) and they are as good as new. There you go, something good to report in lockdown!
#gardeninginlockdown #lostandfoundinlockdown