About the weather (in June)

Weatherwise it hasn’t been the best week this week but tonight looks like it may be taking a turn for the better as we had a little bit of warmth and even a hint of the sun an hour ago. It was nice to be out there.

The raised beds (below) have been doing great, there’s all sorts of stuff in them, spuds, carrots, beetroot, cabbages, tomatoes and even peppers. Talk about square metre gardening and sticking in as much as possible! They’ve come on a long way since that first week of lockdown when the local shop had the 3 spuds per person rule that made us think that we must obtain some seed spuds and any packs of seeds we could get our hands on.Now we’re off the furlough we’re only spending the lunchhour and after work gardening and much of the big work was done when we were off. Once you get a good headstart on yourself, gardening gets a lot easier but it’s getting that start. We managed to keep the bed on the right hand side (below) a lot tidier than usual and even stuck in some tomatoes, cabbages and spuds amongst the flowers. The comfrey we use daily, pulling off massive handfuls to stick in the compost heap and for putting in holes before we transplant something. That keeps the comfrey under control as it can swamp everything if it gets its way!

Something we forgot to do on most of the tomatoes was to pinch out the sideshoots of the variety we have, so the plant can put all it’s goodness into the trusses on the main stem. We’ve been through all of the plants now and there was only one that had two stems but that doesn’t matter, we’ll keep it as “an tomato experiment”. More on sideshooting tomatoes here.

And talk about best laid plans and all that, this bed below was supposedly going to be rested this year and was going to be full of the Thompson and Morgan wildflower seed mix. Well we sowed them at the back with the borage and we’ll see what happens. Can we now have the sun back please? It is June.

And here’s a wonderful piece of music to welcome the sun back when it does finally return from the great Blundetto called Paseo. Tune!

Have a look in the box!

People tell you it’s all in the preparation and they’re right. Before you start planning and buying new seeds, see what you actually have in the seed tin already.

We took a look last night and suprisingly found stuff we didn’t think we had. There were some seeds left of the sunflowers (below) we were given as part of the seed trials from Thompson and Morgan. We’re not 100% sure on the variety but it may be the ‘Sunshot Golds Mixed’ (If anyone knows do give us a shout). We also found some Skyscraper Sunflower, Green Sprouting Calabrese, Tomatoes and Carrots. As the saying goes “it pays to have a butchers first”!

In the beefsteaks of your mind

Oh my lord! The Thompson and Morgan seed trial tomatoes are as large as a medium sized eating apple in some cases and they are getting riper by the day. We’ve done the beef/beefsteak variety possibly only once before but with the results on the three plants we’ve got we’ll certainly be doing some more. It was just a case of regular watering and a comfrey feed once a week if we remembered, nowt else. And look at the results!