It doesn’t take long, just a few days of dryness to ruin what you have in your garden. Our good friend Gerry Hectic came back the other week from Gilles Peterson‘s We Out Here festival and his tomato/strawberry experiment in one of those strawberry pots was looking the worse for wear. It is totally sad to see the before (above) and after (below).
Please tell us there’s a happy ending Gerry!
And to change up the vibes on this sad event here’s a wonderful number from Cyril Diaz Et SonOrchestre with Feeling Happy. May this tune lift spirits and sad dry plants everywhere.
That’s the mad thing with gardening, you’ve been waiting all winter for everything to start and before you know it, it’s nearly June and horticultural madness has ensued and you’ve a “to do” list as long as a garden hoe. There’s no magic day where everything just changes, it just happens and without you even seemingly noticing!
We’ve had some lovely days over the last couple of weeks with glorious sunshine and then overnight on Saturday came some heavyweight rain. Talk about the garden now being in a state of fecundity.
Oddly though we have a strawberry plant in a pot up near the house and been wondering why it hasn’t been doing anywhere as good as the others dotted around the garden especially with the current weather. We assume this could be the reason why (pic above).
Big shout to Rich R for getting in touch with us after a good few years with pictures of his garden in the Lake District. We don’t think you can get a better view than that from a back garden. We all moan about the winter but there’ll be no more moaning if the pic below was the view from your front door.
We get a bit frustrated here with the Ladywell Fields Heron, Lewisham Parakeets and the south London sliced-bread snaffling Fox posse but up there they have proper wildlife to contend with: badgers, deer and rabbits which eat everything veg wise if they were to grow it. So Rich grows wild fruit and strawberries, raspberries, blueberries and a bit of marjoram. The back garden is literally on the side of a mountain, made up of 5 terraces and rises to about 500 ft. How good is that?
It’s a good looking garden Rich and the carpet of bluebells look great and we’re loving it here, more pictures please as the season cracks on!
Big shout to Gerry Hectic for sending us a pic of his dustbin fruit container conversion job which he did last year. It’s coming on a treat at the moment, look at those strawberries turning red! That’s a great idea Gerry!
And (below) here’s a few random flower pics from the Weeds garden taken this morning.
If you’ve got pics ofyour garden do send them in! Email them to onedeckpete (at) gmail.com and also send us a tune if you fancy it as well!
It’s only a few days after the summer solstice and boy the garden is growing well. It’s getting lots of sun and we’re trying to water it as regularly as we can so that’s a great combination.It’s funny how changes can revolutionise things, the Jasmine above (purchased from Shannon’s many years ago) never really did much. It slowly crept up the trellis on the back of the house and there wasn’t much of a scent when the flowers did bother to come out. Then the other month the Berlin wall type structure went up next door (post here), we thinned out the belfast sink it was in (there were others plants in it at the time) and since then kept it watered and fed with comfrey liquid and lo and behold look what’s happened (above). There’s a lovely fragrance from it in the evening too. TLC that all it needed!
In the bed at the bottom of the garden (below) the spuds are now flowering and on the purple flowering broad beans there’s a good few pods forming. Also in that bed there’s onions, beetroot and strawberries somewhere all busy competing with each other which isn’t ideal but we’ll be pulling up the spuds in a couple of weeks so there’ll be space soon.
The side bed (below) where once was a greenhouse is doing well too. It’s usually clayed up this time of year but earlier in the spring half a compost bin’s worth was dumped on it and around the plum tree the ash from a couple of barbecues were sprinkled around. Lots of watering and a regular bit of comfrey liquid helped too! My, look at those tomatoes…
To celebrate the summer growing season here’s a great tune on the Stone’sThrow label from Washed out called Get lost. A tune with a brill cut and paste video too. Happy growing my friends!
This post was written whilst listening to the excellent radio show The Garden of Earthly Delights (live every Friday 10pm til midnight GMT on CRMKhere and on mixcloud here) Tune in!
I’ve got a collection of leggy tomato plants waiting to go in the garden until after the risk of frost has gone, like I have every year. After starting them off on the kitchen windowsill a couple of months ago, I put them in the plastic mini-greenhouse outside with the front open during the day to harden them off. This weekend I stuck one of them under the terrarium outside and also sowed a mixture of seeds beside it. There’s onions and garlic on their way in the bed behind and in the raised bed furthest away have seed potatoes under a good deal of earthed up soil. The bed at the bottom of the garden which I was going to keep veg-free this year has now a row of leek seedlings which I sowed indoors on xmas eve last year and a couple of courgette seeds which went in over the weekend under jam jars for extra protection. The rest is a mixture of flowers, a purple sprouting broccoli gone to flower, rocket and strawberries. It won’t be long now until “they’re off” and we can’t wait!