Saturday 8 June 2019

Purple, green and yellow mangetout, the colourful vegetable garden

There was a brief break in the dark skies and rain early this afternoon and I used it to take pictures of the garden. The garden has loved all the water and I now have mangetout in three different colours. Luckily I turned out to have managed to plant all three different types, as I bought the seeds in a mixed packet.


From the remaining petals around the tops of the mangetout, it looks like my white flowers produce green mangetout and my red and purple flowers produce yellow and purple ones. The year of colourful vegetable gardening is getting off to a flying start here.
I'm also beginning to see my first strawberries.
But mainly my strawberry plants just look like a sea of green leaves, hiding their unripe fruits beneath a leafy canopy.
Elsewhere, I've ended up with more purple plants than standard green ones. Where I had mixed seed packets with identical seeds in them, I don't think this was really my fault. It was sheer chance that meant I ended up with more purple kohlrabi than green ones.
Mind you, next to all that rocket, I don't think it actually matters too much. It makes more of a contrast.
What was entirely my fault was that I planted twice as many trays of purple kale as of green kale.
I've got a more similar number of purple beans and normal green beans (almost impossible to tell apart in this picture unless you look at the full size version, where the purple beans currently have slightly less yellow leaves).
Unless you count my runner beans, in which case I have more green-coloured beans.
I also planted a couple of strips of red and green lettuces, where the red ones seem to be surviving better than the green ones.
The chard to the right of them is all rhubarb chard and the beetroot to the right of that is all Boltardy, but has great patches missing where it's either failed to germinate or been eaten.
While I'm talking about the colourful vegetable garden, did I mention already that I also planted flowers? There's a section of them in the full shade bed at the back where vegetables won't grow. Apart from the sage, it's the only area where they're already flowering.

Elsewhere in the garden, apart from the sage, the flowering plants are largely still in the growing stage and haven't flowered yet.
In other news, you can very much see the prevailing wind direction in my garden in the plants (pictures taken facing in opposite directions):


Let's finish off with another picture of the garden as a whole:

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