A cottage garden year in the garden

I didn’t have much time this year, so I largely let the plants that self-seeded have free rein. It wasn’t much work and was surprisingly beautiful. 

Protecting runner beans from slugs

Last year, slugs and snails devoured all but one of my runner bean plants. So this year I got smart: I started them off in pots in the greenhouse, so that by the time I planted them out they would have tougher full-grown leaves, which slugs and snails find less appealing than fresh young leaves. They've been in the ground for two days now, and so far it's working.

I've started off a second set of beans in the greenhouse, so the beans won't all be ready at once.

The only problem is that at this time of year, sparrows love to steal string, presumably for their nests. We have a small flock of sparrows (about 10 or 12 of them) who visit the garden regularly. I've already had to replace half the string I tied the bean poles together with. I've added some extra string to the poles in the hope the sparrows will take the non-structural string this time. We will see.

I'm pretty sure the sparrows have also eaten all the carrot seeds I planted, as I caught them pecking furiously in the area and not a single carrot has come up. Still, better to have sparrows than carrots or structurally sound bean poles.

In other news, the log I got for Christmas a couple of years back that was impregnated with oyster mushroom spawn has finally produced mushrooms. The only question is whether I should risk my life on eating them. What if they're not from the impregnated bits but instead an infiltrator? Sure, they look like they could be oyster mushrooms, but is it worth the risk?

Removing grass from a vegetable bed

One of my vegetable beds used to be primarily lawn. And it has made a few valiant attempts to return to lawn. When I first removed the grass, I simply turned some of it over and stacked other parts of the turf upside down. This time, I have attempted to put as much of it in the compost heap as I could. I'm keen for as little grass to grow here in the future as possible because of the difficulty of getting the soil out of its roots. This means it takes much longer to clear than a lot of weeds. I didn’t have the time or energy to finish it all this weekend, but I made a good start.

A visit from a fox

 There is a hole under the fence between our garden and next-door's, which we have long suspected to be a passageway created by foxes. Now we have the proof. A fox turned up in our garden in broad daylight, then, with only a little bit of extra digging, left via the hole under the fence.

Wildlife in the garden

 I was weeding today and I came across this little chap:

I think it might be a newt. I hope I didn't destroy its habitat in my fervent removal of green alkanet.

How to set up an outdoor watering system for while you're on holiday

 I have just got back from a 2-week holiday in late June. I don’t normally go away in June, and when I left, it had barely rained for a month, so I was worried sbout my still small plants surving. To try and counter this, I set up a version of the irrigation system I usually use in the greenhouse outdoors. I had already made the decision that I wasn't going to try and keep anything alive in the greenhouse this year because of that holiday, so I didn't need it for that.

What I did was fill large plastic containers of the sort you can buy at your local DIY store with water. I then dipped self-watering wick cords into the water to get the whole cord wet. I arranged these cords to run from the bottoms of my containers to the soil near each of my plants and tucked the ends of the cords into the soil.

I did this a couple of days before my holiday so that I could see if the water was coming out at an appropriate rate. In one case, it seemed to be running too fast, so I tied a knot in the cord to slow it down.

Luckily for me, it rained quite a lot while we were away, because some of the containers came very close to running out of water. I'm not sure how much the rain replenished them. Anyhow,  I came back to this:

What didn't survive was my kale, although I can’t rule out this having been eaten in its entirety by slugs rather than having bern insufficiently watered.

At any rate, the irrigation system seems to have been worth setting up. It's more unpredictable than setting it up in a greenhouse, and I wouldn't want to have to bet on it working under all conditions, but it does seem to be worth a shot.

Lack of progress in the garden

 I've had another year where I haven't had much time for gardening. Fortunately, a lot of my back garden is now self-seeding, so although I haven't made much progress with the vegetables, the garden still looks pretty and is attractive to pollinators, sparrows and robins - and less fortunately to slugs and snails.

I have plenty of foxgloves, aquilegias and cornflowers. I also had a lot of a new weed (or at least I've been assuming it's a weed), and it got into my irises. I went through pulling it up, but that or one of the many other myriad factors that can upset irises, has left the plants sulking, and it looks like they're only prepared to give me one flower this year.

I've also had difficulty with my seedlings. They are growing exceptionally slowly. I'm torn between blaming the cheap Aldi compost we bought and the more expensive mycorrhizal fungi I added to the seeds in the hope of improving their growth. My seedlings have, without exception, remained tiny and the leaves of the squashes have gone a worrying yellow colour.

My rhubarb has also become unhappy:

I think that may be a combination of the heat and a lack of water. I'm going to try and get out and water it more often in case that helps.

My strawberries, however, are very happy. Given my general failures this year, I'm trying to boost their chances with liquid seaweed feed.

I've just put in some runner beans as well. I have the suspicion I'm going to lose them to slugs, but I live in hope. I decided not to pull up the majestic, pink aquilegia in the middle of them and instead just to chop it down to the ground when it finishes flowering. I think, from next year, I may rejig my crop rotation and leave that shadier part of the garden entirely to flowers. In that case, though, I will need some flowers in there that bloom later in the year than my current May/June display of foxgloves and aquilegias. I may even go so far as to buy a shrub!

Our red climbing rose is also doing well and smells divine. Flowers are just so much easier than veg, providing you pick the slug-proof ones.