After the rain

The dry heatwave finally broke yesterday afternoon with a thunderstorm and tumultuous rain. The dustiness has gone. The garden feels fresh. Moisture is still in the air, making it cooler. The earth is damp and the lawn has already started to green back up. The smell of the rain itself has gone, but there is a smell of freshness and vegetation hanging in the air.

After the rain - 28 July

Before the rain - 27 July

Funnily enough, the storm did not completely refill my pond, but it did fill up a fair amount of my two water butts, so I have topped the pond up with my watering can using the rainwater. The pond smells badly of sulphur when disturbed, so something is probably rotting in it. I need to clear it out when I get time.

The reason I was out taking photos yesterday is that my sunflowers have finally flowered! They're facing the wrong way from my perspective, as they face away from the house, but they're still lovely.

They're much shorter than last year because I planted them late and left them in pots for longer than I should have. But actually they're already a good height - well over 5 foot - and I expect them to continue to produce more flowers and grow in height for a while yet, so their relative shortness right now is no bad thing.

Garden beating expectations

Apart from my carrots, which we won't dwell on, the garden is massively exceeding the expectations I had of it at the beginning of the season. Because I started late and then had to restart several squash plants after slug damage, I was worried that I might have a poor season and not get a decent harvest. Well, my garden has set out to prove me wrong. With my regular watering and all this hot weather and sunshine, almost everything is flourishing.

I've harvested around half my onions, so that I could use the space for more beetroot. They've come out a decent size this year and none of them went to seed.

I've also got at least one squash that looks like it's going to be a decent size.

My raspberries have grown really well, considering how little I've watered them. I've had a few ripen already.

More of my kohl rabi is ready to eat - I need to remember to have salad next week, possibly with raw courgette in it. I'm producing so many of them.

The lettuce I grew in pots is working out far better than when I grow it in the ground - far less slug damage.

My sweet corn has grown cobs already, though they're not ready to harvest yet.

My beans have grown flowers, even though I planted them so late.

And I have my first pepper growing in the greenhouse. It is a banana pepper and will go yellow when it's ripe.

Overall, I'm very pleased with my progress.

Courgette, potato and Parmesan soup

I made this soup based on ingredients I had in the garden and in the fridge. It turned out nice, so here's the recipe:

800 g potatoes
1 kg courgettes (big ones are fine)
2 medium carrots
2 vegetable stock cubes
6 tbsp grated Parmesan
1/4 tsp nutmeg
salt and pepper

1. Boil a kettle of water.

2. Optionally peel the potatoes. Roughly chop them and put them into a large pan with just enough boiling water to cover them. Crumble in the stock cubes. Bring back to the boil, then cover and cook for 5 minutes.

3. While the potatoes are cooking, peel and chop the carrots and chop the courgettes into chunks. After the 5 minutes is up, add the carrots and courgettes, put the lid back on and cook for 10 more minutes.

4. Take off the heat, then stir in the Parmesan and season with the nutmeg, salt and pepper. When it has cooled enough not to damage your liquidiser, liquidise it to a thick soup. Optionally add more boiling water if you would like a less thick consistency.

Heatwave dries out the garden, solar panels installed

London has been in a heatwave with no rain for several weeks now. I've been watering the vegetables, because they won't survive without watering, but I've left everything else. As a result, I now have huge vegetable plants and yellowing grass. But that's OK, grass is hardy, it can survive any weather Britain throws at it. It'll green up again as soon as we get some rain.

The pond is also suffering badly. Several inches of water have evaporated.

I have no rainwater left in my water butts, so I am currently letting water sit for 24 hours in the watering can to replenish the pond, as no rain is expected.
In a move to harness all this sun, we have a new addition to the shed. My husband has added solar panels. He designed and built the stand they are on so that they take maximum advantage of the sun. It has three positions: the middle one (in the picture) is angled to capture maximum summer sun, there's an even steeper angle for winter sun and flat against the shed roof so they can weather storms without getting blown away.

He also built us a log store. I've got to say, I'm really impressed with all his woodwork, especially as he works in a completely unrelated field. The log store in particular looks very smart.

A lot of growth in just 3 weeks

Just three weeks ago the garden was looking pretty bare. Well, that's all changed:

I am now confident that I'm going to get a harvest of some sort from my garden this year. Probably not as much as last year, when my seedlings grew and my slug damage was less severe, but a worthwhile crop, nonetheless. I already have my first courgette growing.

In fact, my cucurbits in particular are a key part of the growth in the garden.

Some of the squash plants are smaller than the others because slugs and snails completely annihilated several of my seedlings, so I had to replant late in the season. I'm not sure why the rest differ so much in size. Perhaps I more successfully got water to the roots of some than others, perhaps some were just better genetic material than others.
A lot of the rest of the growth comes from my sweet corn and to a lesser extent, my purple beans.

This makes me happy, as it makes the garden a pleasure to look at and be in, which is part of the reason I do my gardening.

And yes, the garden is very dry. I'm watering it every night, but we're having such beautiful, blistering hot days at the moment and weeks in a row without rain that it keeps drying out.
I've also got some gaps that I'd like to do something about. In particular, none of the dwarf beans I planted grew (this year's lesson: beans and peas don't last beyond the best before date on the packet and nor do a lot of other seeds). So, I'm going to fill the gap with some evening primrose seedlings that I had originally been planning to plant elsewhere.
Also, although my onions have done well this year - not a single one went to seed -

they look unappealing now. However, there's a row of red chard down the middle of them, with the plan that it will take over when they die.

The alliums and root vegetables bed in general isn't looking too good. I had to replant my beetroots and still don't have a full row. Also, once I'd cleared the weeds out, it turned out that I had a lot more bare earth than carrots. I'm not entirely sure what I did wrong, as it's not the worst bed in the garden for sunlight (it's my second worst) and the carrot and beetroot seeds were all in date. The carrot and beetroot packets say it's not too late to be planting the seeds, they're still OK until July, so I will be scattering more in a bit and hoping.

Non-edibles doing better than the edibles

The garden is looking neat. I spent all of Saturday toiling away. I removed at least 95% of the weeds. But there are not two ways about it, the vegetables aren't doing nearly as well as the flowers and ferns. The foxgloves are gorgeous. The white roses at the back of the garden are in full bloom, and have coped surprisingly well with their shady position.

My ferns are growing well.

Amazingly really, considering that the far end of the garden never gets any direct sunlight and generally somewhere between damp and positively soggy. That's me finally learning the lesson that you need to match the conditions to the plant. I specifically picked ferns that do well in full shade (most ferns) and damp (fewer ferns than I originally thought).
The raspberries (in the bed down side of the shed) are doing brilliantly too. They're growing like weeds - strongly and everywhere. What they have in common with my non-edibles is that I didn't plant them this year. The vegetables, which went in this year, aren't doing well at all. I've already bemoaned the fact at length that I started late and badly (see previous posts for the full moan). Well, if that weren't enough, now I've got slugs and snails decimating my seedlings, or in other words my entire vegetable crop. Actually, I wish they were only decimating them in the original sense of the word. "Decimate" originally meant to kill one in every ten of a group. My slugs and snails are much more voracious than that. I  suppose technically if you included my weeds in the group of plants that slugs and snails are eating, then it might be just one in ten. It's just that my garden gastropods are passing over my weeds and going straight for the things I want to eat too, and devouring them to the point of no return. We're talking every single trace of leaf gone on a lot of the seedlings.
This is what my cucurbits (squash, courgettes etc.) ought to look like right now given how late I planted them:

But the ones where I wasn't quick enough with the copper rings and the slug pellets have been eaten right away:

I don't like using slug pellets. I worry what they're doing to the local food chain and environment. But I lost nearly a quarter of my plants in one night and decided I had to do something.
As a compromise, I've been going out on slug patrol every morning to collect the dead slugs and snails, to try and stop them from entering the food chain. My bin is now full of them, I've collected dozens.
I'd like to use the garlic solution instead, but I haven't had time to trial it yet. I heard about it on TV and it sounds promising. What you do it boil up several garlic cloves in a small pan of water. After that I've heard two different options recommended: either leave the garlic in the water in a bowl and put it out in the middle of the garden or put the garlic water into a spray bottle and spray your plants with it.
This year has been problem after problem after problem, none of which is the fault of the weather, which has been great. Here's a picture of last year for comparison:

4 June 2017

My cucurbits were flowering already!
In fact, most things looked bigger.

4 June 2017

Still, I am persevering. All is not lost yet, despite the best efforts of the local slug population.

Peak pond

The pond has reached peak prettiness for the year. The foxgloves I planted all round it last year are in flower. So are the buttercups that I didn't so much plant as decide not to remove. On the other side of the pond, honesty is on its way to forming the seed heads I grew it for.

The only slight problem is, I grew tall plants around both sides of the pond, so now you can't tell there's a pond there at all until you get right up to it.

Next year, I will stick to low-growing plants in front of the pond. In particular, I will probably try and move my maidenhair fern to in front of it. The Internet says that maidenhair ferns don't like to be move, but, in hindsight, I put it in the wrong place (it's at the back currently hidden under foxgloves), so I will have to cross my fingers.