just another morning here

While it’s quiet on the blogring, time for a ‘relatively boring and only of interest to me’ type of post – garden update for this year! For anyone who doesn’t know, I am a complete novice gardener with only one small border which is sunny enough for veg growing, so it’s a challenge all round. And anyone who does know me is probably still completely shocked that I’m gardening at all, but there we go – miracles can happen.

We grew from seed a few: peas, beans, sweetcorn, tomatoes, courgettes and pumpkins. Ended up with too many seedlings for the space we have, but there we go.

Peas: (two plants, at the back on the blue trellis) started off well but have mysteriously withered/died now. Not sure what I did wrong there. We had about 10 pods which we picked and ate today, they tasted nice, even if the plants have given up!
Courgettes: (front) I like courgette plants, they are easy to grow Doing well, must dig out that Nigella Courgette Cake recipe that we all loved when we had a glut of rockery-grown courgettes a couple of years ago.

Beans: still doing well, a couple of flowers starting I need to get some taller canes asap though!

Sweetcorn: after on-blog discussions we kept 6 seedlings and they are doing well, I think. Although if it’s about pollination I suppose we have yet to see if they actually produce fruit.

Tomatoes: only actually planted out two seedlings into pots (only half of the family really like tomatoes!), but they seem to be doing fine. Again, need some taller canes!

Pumpkins: I haven’t tried growing pumpkins before, the seeds were planted at the same time as the courgettes and seem to be slower to grow, but at least they are still there! I have one plant in the bed next to the courgettes, and one in a pot as a trial run – I ran out of space!

Our other gardening project has been this ‘Big and Unusual’ plant kit. From there we started from seed: sunflower, tomato, pumpkin, mimosa (touch sensitive plant) and sundew (carnivorous plant).

The tomato is one of those in the picture above – the unusual thing is supposedly to put a square box over a tomato as it grows and turn it into a square tomato. This is what made me buy the kit, I couldn’t believe you could grow a square tomato, had to find out how the manufacturers were claiming you could do it!

Here is the sunflower – I’m hoping it might get to be as tall as the garage, we will see.

Pumpkin from this kit (next to sunflower above) is supposed to be a giant one but the plant itself is looking a bit small and sad – smaller than my other pumpkin plants. I think it has suffered a slug attack. Time will tell if it recovers!

Mimosa and Sundew: Both of these were supposed to be started off inside, in a terrarium, watering with only table water (not tap water) and taking 4 – 6 weeks to germinate. I wasn’t sure that either of them would grow at all, but recently I noticed a tiny seedling. Nothing in the other pot yet, and I’m not convinced there ever will be.

The other failure has been the cacti seeds which Mark and Heidi gave us when we moved house last year, I sowed those as per the instructions and they’ve been in my little greenhouse, but nothing visible has happened, it’s been over a month so I would have expected to see something by now

Oh, and just for posterity, here’s our avocado tree – planted over a year ago!

Anyway, on the whole, I’m pleased with that side of the garden this year. Now, if we could only sort out the other side, and the front garden, we’d be well away! And speaking of gardens, aren’t we supposed to be picking gooseberries sometime this week?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 28th, 2005 at 20:37 and is filed under gardening, general. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.