Baked or steamed to death?

Well I got home in a mood to do some gardening, glad to get out in the good weather and bounced out to my plastic greenhouse only to discover that *shock horror* I'd forgotten to unzip the bloody door this morning. All my tomatoes, peppers and broccoli wilted to death in a great seedling massacre. Thankfully a few survived in the shadier shelves and my lettuce at the bottom wasn't too badly scorched, but it feels like I'm back to square one...


On a plus point, the calabrese I planted out on Saturday is still alive down the plot and I have my first broad beans flowers appearing!

Flowering courgettes!

My first courgettes have flowered, both of the ones on the windowsill in the kitchen. I did a spot of late night gardening yesterday and put the rest of the tomatoes outside.

I've been on slug patrol every night this week with my scissors and the body count is mounting up. Trouble is, they seem to be attracted to their own dead friends. I may also have to reconsider my lentient policy on snails, there's hundreds of them out there and something munched my broccoli in pots last night despite the killing spree...

New Potatoes and the Snail Hotel

Spent all day on Sunday gardening today from about 10 till 8. Started off by chopping down this shrub under th kitchen window, which had become rotten with mould from a nearby rose bush. It turned out to be a chock full of snails. I've never seen so many in one place before! With veggies in mind I should probably have killed them all but I like snails and it's the other end of the garden.



There was another guest in the snail hotel as well!


Next job was to plant out another growbag of tomatoes with their respective scaffolding. Then I sowed rows of carrots, rocket, lettuce and spring onions.

Mum, Dad and Merlin were all out in the Garden for the day as well. Merlin, the terror, killed a baby Robin yesterday morning. One of it's parents kept us company for the day as well, sitting on tools and tugging up worms from where I was working. I couldn't help but feel sorry for him knowing that our little menace had slaughtered its offspring for the year, despite his cheerful song.



After lunch we made a family trip to the garden centre to get some new pots, grow bags and spray for the whitefly. I experimented on just the biggest sprout first as I'm not sure whether it's good for the seedlings or not. I also used some on our Japonica which is infested with blackfly.

It says in my book that new potatoes are ready to harvest once they have flowered and the tubers are the size of a hen's egg. I had an exploratory poke around a plant that flowered a few weeks ago and found a few which matched this discription, so Mum and I decided to pull it up. I was a bit dissapointed by the low yield (bottom picture) but was glad to find them all in good condition, bar one with superficial common scab.



I also picked a couple of radishes and was thining out my carrots when I found my first root - a micro carrot! Was a very tasty nibble. I think I'll leave thinning out till a bit later next time.


There's a lot of mini mushrooms growing around my courgettes (below). I need to get down the Leg'O'Mutton field early one morning to look for some edible ones.


The day's harvest (below) - not much but it's early days yet! As the day ended I sat on the bench by my patch, re-potted some broccoli and sowed some coriander, parsley and basil in seed trays. As I sat there, a song thrush perched on the conifer opposite and sand his heart out for about 15 mins. They've got such a random tune but very pleasing on the ear. It was a really peaceful end to a busy day!

Permaculture, naked tomatoes, slug sections and a pup

Well I'm back from Sunrise and ready for new gardening challenges after attending a begginers workshop on Permaculture and chilling in the portable gardens on display (above). Permaculture is basically a design system approach to organic gardening with ethics at the core, although it can be applied to all aspects of life. I'll try and write about it a bit more when I've got time, or you could read about it here or here. It may be a while before I can really get into it, although some of it I do already and there's things I can build on.



I returned to find my Tomatoes still alive although further infested by the disease. Thanks to direction from She who digs though, I've managed to identify it as Mosaic Virus and have followed advice on a website that suggests removing all affected leaves and leaving the healthy ones. That meant just about all of them so now my poor plants are looking extremely bare. Apparently though, according to this secret its the best thing I could have done anyway. Lets just hope its not all some internet hoax! Many thanks for the help SWD.



I went out on slug patrol this evening and found this little blighter biting the beer bait. I also found another in a different trap... and one on the eggshells - which proves they don't work. Despite all my new found hippy permacultural intentions, I had a bit of a turn. I was holding a pair of scissors in my hand for cutting bits of loo roll to protect my lettuce. Chopping slugs in half is apparently the most humane way to get rid of them... so I tried it. At first I was horrified as slime pumped out both sides of the little fella's disected body. I actually like slugs when they're not eating my plants. But then I found another one and tried again. It must be a bit like serial killing because it got easier and I desenstised pretty soon. Before you know it I was chopping away like Floyd on a Saturday morning. Oh well... the way I look at it, it'll provide some food for the birdies tomorrow and its not like I'm even a proper veggie anyway. I'll stop once I've installed a pond with toads, honest...

Oh alright, just to make you feel better here's one of my friend Zoe's puppies. Well, not hers exactly but her dog Poppy's. Isn't he/she/it cute?