Growth spurt in the garden

We went on holiday last week and when we came back we found the garden looking like this:

Garden on 28 June 

Firstly I'm thankful that nothing died in the week we were away and that it got by on the bit of rain we had. But secondly, look how much it's grown since I took this photo on 16 June,  just two weeks ago.

Garden on 16 June

In particular,  my runner beans are now huge and covered in flowers.

Runner beans in flower

One of my courgettes has practically become a marrow.

Courgette plant growing a courgette almost the size of a marrow

And my cucumber plants have flowered and started producing little cucumbers. 

Cucumber plant in flower

First mangetout and pea harvest of the season

Yum.

Mystery seeds revealed

A couple of months back I found a foil wrapper of seeds with nothing written on it, or at least nothing that would tell me what was inside. It took a good couple of weeks before curiosity got the better of me. I wrote "MYSTERY" on the wrapper,  wrote the same thing on a stick and planted a pot of them hoping to work out what they were when they grew.

It turns out it's rocket (probably). My husband thinks it looks like it, I (braver) think it tastes like it. If this is true it's highly fortuitous. My other rocket, the variety that looks like the rocket you get in the shops, has almost entirely failed to grow or died when still a seedling and I've now used the last of my seeds having made four attempts to grow it. I've planted some of the mystery seedlings where my other row of rocket was supposed to be. This means I do have some rocket, but I'm also a bit dissatisfied with both varieties. The one that looks like shop-bought rocket has largely failed to grow or died (I do have a couple of seedlings that I think may be this rocket that are still alive), the mystery one is coarser than shop-type rocket and most of it bolted pretty fast last year. I hope I find another variety next year, as we eat a fair amount of rocket,  so it's a handy crop.

Our first pea pod

We have our first ever pea pod. Now all I have to do is remember not to deadhead it. Seeing it brought out all my deadheading instincts. Clearly I haven't fully made the transition from flower gardener to vegetable gardener yet.

Seedling timelapse

I missed the impressive few hours when it burst through the soil and grew to that height, but here it is turning towards the sun then growing a tiny bit.

Thinning my veg

My other half googled whether turnips were supposed to flower before producing the turnip. They're not. In fact once they flower, that's it, game over. Either they won't produce a turnip at all or the turnip they've already produced will have gone all woody.

The YouTube video he found said they often did it because the weather was too hot. Well, having sat here freezing in multiple jumpers all May, I know it wasn't that. Which makes me think they must be stressed in some other way.  My vote is for lack of water (I didn't water them much because they looked big and healthy enough to survive with the occasional deluges we've been having) or overcrowding. So I decided to thin.

I ripped out all the turnips that had flowered already and thinned them to fewer than one every 10 cm. Only one had a decent sized turnip on the end - well, decent is a relative term here. Let me rephrase that: a turnip thicker than a piece of string. 

I thinned my other brassicas as well,  as I don't want them bolting.

I'm not convinced the purple sprouting broccoli is going to survive,  as I transplanted the biggest ones to the only viable positions given the huge amount of room they need and now they're wilting. Still, I still have some in reserve in pots.
I've also had my first harvest of kale from my thinning: cavolo nero from the back garden (left) and red Siberian (right) from the front.

In other news, my peas are flowering already - but that's good news because the flowers turn into the peas.

Also, the runner beans have mainly found their poles and curled themselves round them. Unlike last year, there hasn't been a massacre by slug yet.

The tomatoes have also practically outgrown their cloches. This is excellent news in the sense that they've grown, but bad news in that I'm not allowing them out till Tuesday, as the weather's not due to be consistently good till then. I hope this is the less damaging decision.

First flowers in the vegetable garden

My first flowers are out. My courgette is very much at the bud stage, but I'm pretty sure these are going to become the flowers which will grow courgettes behind them. Like tomatoes and squash/pumpkins, courgettes are also technically fruit, i.e. they contain the plant's seed.

I have flowers on my broad beans, which will eventually open and then turn into the broad beans and their pods (the broad bean pods are the seed pods and the broad beans the seeds). We only eat the beans in broad beans, so I think we can properly class them as a vegetable, but I wonder with mange tout, where you eat the pod as well as the immature peas (seeds) inside whether what we're eating should technically be classified as a fruit. Then again, I wonder whether this distinction is worth wondering about at all.

My turnips have also flowered. I've never grown turnips before, so I hope this is a normal part of the process. The turnip is the root of the plant. I've no idea what the flowers turn into. I've scattered some bone meal to promote strong root growth, as last year I suffered from not fertilising my veg enough and got a poor crop.