May, the month of making up for lost plants

As ever, I've had quite a few things go wrong in the garden in May. Slugs have devastated my brassicas.

Slug rings have proved very effective, as you can see from the picture above, where all the turnips in the ring have survived and all the ones outside it, including quite large ones I transplanted from inside the ring, have been eaten away to nothing. Fortunately this doesn't seem to apply to rocket (on the left), but it does apply to kale, broccoli and, to a lesser extent, to kohlrabi. I know this because I then tried planting the same kale seeds that appeared not to have germinated in my beds in normal soil in pots:

They germinated fine, so I can only conclude slugs and snails ate them before I even got a chance to see them. I've tried leaving a pot of water in which I've boiled garlic out and I've tried spraying garlic, but neither has worked, possibly partly because my regular watering just washed the garlic spray back off the plants again.
I now have a choice between:

1. giving up on growing brassicas other than rocket and the hardier of my kohlrabi this year, 
2. ordering enough slug rings for every plant (I am actually considering this), 
3. using slug pellets, or 
4. destroying the sage, marjoram and oregano patch where the slugs and snails live. Destruction of places where snails shelter has been very effective elsewhere in the garden. 

I really don't want to use slug pellets - I've managed entirely without so far this year, having instead crushed all snails I find beneath my shoes. But unfortunately the sage is beloved by bees, which means removing it will impact them.

On the other hand, I've already planted sage in my front garden. Also, bees and I generally have pretty similar flower preferences, so there are generally bees everywhere in my garden for most of the year. Moreover, bees do also enjoy my vegetable flowers, such as my broad beans:

So, my current decision is that I am going to wait until the sage has finished flowering and then pull out all of it that's in the back garden. That way bees get the benefit this year. I'll leave my brassicas in pots until then.
Elsewhere in the garden I have been devastated once again by my own incompetence with cucurbits (in this case squash and courgettes). It was all going so swimmingly. I waited till April to start them indoors in pots so they didn't get too big and delicate before I planted them out, as I have a tendency to damage the stems when that happens. They were growing great guns. Then, I took them outside to harden off. I made the mistake of putting them in far too sunny a spot and far too close together. Instantly leaves started withering from all the sunshine and its rapid drying effect on the soil in their pots. Then, when I came to plant them out, I discovered I had put them far too close together and their leaves and stems had become tangled. Lifting them up broke several of the stems, so when I put them in the ground, most of them upped and died on me. This scraggy looking specimen is one of the hardier and larger survivors. So here I am, back at square one, just like last year when slugs ate all the squashes I planted out.

So, as I was out of courgette seeds due to the infestation of my cucurbit seed envelopes, I nipped down to the local garden centre and bought some new yellow courgette seeds (in line with my unusual colours policy for this year). I then planted these and some winter squash sweet dumpling seeds both straight in the ground and in pots indoors. Indoors worked a lot faster, although I know from some of my current weeds in last year's cucurbit patch that some cucurbits are capable of growing from seed outdoors in my garden.

It's funny to think that within a couple of months this plant will be big enough to give me courgettes, but past experience suggests it will.
I also learned a lesson about the power of being indoors on a sunny table versus being in the greenhouse. The greenhouse gets a lot more sunshine, but indoors has a more consistently high temperature. I wanted to see which one promoted more growth, so I took several of my tomato and pepper seedlings out to the greenhouse a few weeks ago and left the rest indoors. The indoor plants are now giants compared to the greenhouse ones.

In each case the plant that grew in the greenhouse is on the left, the one that grew indoors on the right. They almost don't look like they're the same species, the difference is so big.

However, if you don't have a sunny place indoors to grow plants, the greenhouse is probably a better bet for them than a warm, unsunny indoor room. The year my dining room table wasn't available for plants, most of my seedlings barely grew or died because of the lack of sun in the room I kept them in.
Let's finish this post with a couple of pictures of the shade garden and the apple tree. Both look like they're doing rather well this year. I'm particularly impressed with my hart's tongue fern. It's grown the best of all my ferns and has the most interesting leaves in the shade garden.

How asparagus grows

I currently have one stem of asparagus planted in the garden. I grew it from bare roots, which isn't my favourite way of growing plants as I have such a high failure rate with the bare-root ones. But in this case, I never seemed to manage to get to the garden centre at the right time to buy asparagus in pots and one of the two roots I bought took and I now have a thin single stem of asparagus. This year is its second year in my garden. Here it is on 13 April, a tiny very scrawny stem. It's recognisably asparagus, but way too thin to be worth eating - and harvesting it would probably have killed the plant.

Here it is on 21 April, just 8 days later. It's not got any fatter, but it's got a lot taller and developed side shoots and the beginning of leaves:

And here it is on 12 May. It now has loads of fluffy leaves, but it's now so heavy that it's too skinny to hold itself up and I had to help it with a cane. When it's been in the garden for a few more years, it should have nice thick, sturdy stems and shouldn't need the cane any more.

Edited: excitingly, on 25 May I noticed my asparagus had grown a second, ever so slightly less spindly stem:

Back on 13 May, in other news, all my onions are growing fast and strong and my beans are now all planted:

I've had a bit of trouble with black fly on my broad beans, but it's still at an early stage and I've given them a good spray with water mixed with a few drops of washing-up liquid. The trick to spraying plants for aphids with water and washing-up liquid appears to be to do it when they're in the shade. This seems to avoid damaging the plants.

I hope I've planted enough beans to get a good harvest this year. They definitely seem happy in the partial shade side of the garden, it's a shame crop rotation means I can't just keep them there.

The strawberries are also doing well. My other half kindly fixed the sagging bottom of their container and they are now happy as Larry back in their wooden planter. I've used shredded paper as mulch because it's much cheaper than straw. In fact, companies keep sending me ever greater piles of paper to shred for the garden and what I don't need for mulch goes on the compost heap. The red thing you can see that looks like a strawberry  is actually a painted stone, designed to persuade the birds that these plants produce inedible strawberries. I can't say for certain that it's worked, but I haven't suffered any damage I believe to be caused by birds yet.

I've also taken all my seedlings other than the tomatoes and peppers outside to start hardening them off. Unless there's unexpected bad weather in the meantime, they'll mainly be going out into their final positions in the garden next weekend.

I'm pretty pleased with how the pond area is looking too. It was meant to be a fernery down there, but the ferns are taking their time growing, whereas foxgloves have self-seeded everywhere and I love the look, so I'm now thinking it should be more of a shade garden than a fernery. I'm considering moving my astilbe from the front garden back there as well, or maybe dividing it. I got it for 50p from the manky plants section of B&Q where they sell off all the plants they haven't looked after properly at a discount. I was swayed by the 50p price tag more than having a definite place to put it in mind, and it's very much a shade-loving plant. I think I may also need to look for some more shade-loving wildflowers to fill in the gaps and feed the bees.

I've also cleared most of the duckweed out of the pond with a sieve. Getting all of the duckweed appears to be an impossible task, as no matter how hard I try more always seems to appear, but in a pond this size it's easy enough to keep down to a low level with a sieve. You may also notice that all but one of my pond plants has died - or all but two if you count the duckweed. I'm not sure what happened there, but I have no plans to buy more in the near future.

So, the garden is almost ready for summer, the hard work I've put in planting things is barely visible right now, but it should be an completely different story in a month of two.