Peak garden

The garden has reached the best it's probably going to look all year, give or take a bit of weeding and grass trimming.

I realise I judge this heavily on the state of the cucurbits. I like it after they've become really big, but before they get powdery mildew. Notice my sense of inevitability here? Powdery mildew is coming. And one reason for this is that they've got so big that I can't cope with the work of carefully spraying the both sides of all leaves with either a mixture or milk and water or a mixture of neem oil and water. It's not the price of the milk here, it's the number of spray gun squirts and how much the pump action makes my hands ache after a while.

This year the squashes are even bigger than usual because I trained some of them up canes and they love it. Or at least some of them do. I tied two types to canes. The ones that grabbed the canes for themselves with their tendrils I kept on the canes and the ones that drooped and didn't grab on I removed from them. I'm hoping being up on canes with more air around them and away from the ground will give them some additional protection against powdery mildew.

In case you're looking at the leaves and thinking, "she'll be lucky, I can see signs of mildew already", fortunately for me that's just variegated leaves on the courgettes.

What's particularly nice about these plants is that the fruit is bright yellow, making it easier to spot that I have something to harvest.

I will be getting my first harvest from them pretty soon.
Some of my outdoor tomatoes are also getting pretty huge, but refusing to ripen.

It's the same story in the greenhouse, where I have huge plants and lots of green tomatoes but nothing ripening yet.

I'm also growing plenty of peppers and chillies (I'm not entirely sure which of them is which, as I had a bit of a label mix-up while repotting), and all the plants have produced at least some fruit, but only one plant has anything ripening.

I'm thinking of expanding my range of greenhouse plants next year. Chrysanthemums are a must for their deterrence quality, but I also want to get aubergines back, as I so enjoy looking at their furry leaves and flowers. I'm also thinking of growing something like melons as a completely different type of crop. I'm going to have to look into what my options are in the UK.

Garden growing gloriously

The garden is growing gloriously. I think it's liking all this heat. Previously the beans and the cucurbits had resolutely been staying tiny. Now they're taking off. My squashes are climbing up their poles - or at least the winter squash Sweet Dumpling are. My Bulgarian one, which produces absolutely huge squashes, seems less keen on climbing and is not grabbing the canes for itself.

My beans are also happily wrapping themselves around canes.

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The raspberries have also excelled themselves and despite officially being autumn-fruiting, have produced their first couple of raspberries already.

I've also finally got round to clearing away the large clump of sage and marjoram or possibly oregano, even though they were still flowering, as they were a haven for slugs and snails and nothing was lasting near them. However, I decided it was high time for the kale to go in the ground, as being in pots seemed to be massively restricting its growth. The kale plants in the picture are still so tiny, you probably can't see most of them without enlarging the image. If it's big enough to be easily visible, it's probably not kale.

My tomato plants are also growing.

As are their fruits, although nothing has ripened yet.

I love the shape of this variety. It's called Marmande and it's ridged like a pumpkin. I hope they taste as good to eat as they look. Certainly, in a not in the least bling taste test comparison with Sainsbury's Taste the Difference, their strawberries were huge and beautiful, but bland and a bit tough. Mine were sweet, delicious and tender, but misshapen and small. I know which ones I prefer.

Photo from early June when the strawberries were still flowering

The companion planting is flowering and, at least in some cases, working

It's a great year in the greenhouse so far this year.

One thing that's going well is that the peppers, chillies and tomatoes I've grown from seed are getting big and bushy with plenty of flowers:

Some have even set fruit already.

But just as importantly, after two years of constantly battling aphids and spider mites in the greenhouse, I haven't had any infestations of pests yet, other, strangely enough, than on my companion plants, which I put there to discourage pests. This has been far more successful than anything I've tried in the past. This year's companion plants have been chrysanthemums that I grew from seed and geranium cuttings. The geraniums were not technically intended to be companion plants. I just wanted to make cuttings and this seemed the most sensible place for them. I have no idea if they're helping. But something clearly is. And they're making the greenhouse prettier to boot.

I will definitely be growing chrysanthemums again next year - and possibly taking geranium cuttings again too.
Outside, it's not so clear how well the companion planting is going. I planted calendula with the carrots and leeks. Firstly, I failed to look in advance how big they were going to get, so I planted too many too close together in clumps by my approach of scattering randomly. Secondly, they're covered in some sort of black insect. Now, calendula are considered good companion plants for the very reason that they attract all the pests and keep them away from your other plants. But I'm not so sure my carrots and leeks were ever going to be affected by these.

I continue to hope that they have fooled the carrot fly. However, I am not impressed by the calendulas' colours.

I thought I had selected much more subtle shades.

Never mind. You live and learn. Speaking of which, I'm not entirely sure how sensible my decision to grow black hollyhocks was either. Up close, the individual flowers look beautiful, especially when the sun is shining on them and you see they're not so much black as very deep purple.

However, the plants as a whole swamp the flowers with their big messy leaves, almost all of which have caught hollyhock rust.

Possibly these would look good adding height to a border, but I'm not sure. I suspect hollyhocks need a flower colour that stands out more from their leaves to look really good. I think I may have to take the RHS's advice and grow them as a biennial only, removing them this year after flowering.
On the other side of the garden, my outdoor tomatoes are doing well. Although they are barely visible from a distance, I left some violas that self-seeded themselves in with them.

My squashes and courgettes have also finally started to grow. For ages they just sat there at the size at which they left the dining room or greenhouse, but now they're having a little growth spurt, I think because of all this warm weather.

Doing far less well are my beetroots, lettuces and brassicas. Slugs and snails are to blame for my brassica problems, and as I'm refusing to use slug pellets, my only recourse is to pull out the sage and marjoram where the slugs and snails are sheltering. I've been waiting for the sage to stop flowering to do so, so I don't deprive the bees. I think we're close enough to the end that I'll remove it this weekend or next, depending on how much time I get.

I'm not sure why my beetroots are doing so badly. It might be the heat. They strike me as a plant that doesn't like it too warm. My lettuce is also suffering from slugs and snails. The wee beast have removed whole plants over night. There's nothing nearby I can sensibly remove to reduce the slugs and snails in that area, so I think I'm going to have to wait till my slug rings are available from elsehwere in the garden or just accept that I won't be getting much lettuce this year.

Having had to grow my bean plants in pots until they were big enough to survive the attentions of the local snail population, my beans are now doing well. It might help that they're planted on the shady side of the garden, as I don't think they like it too hot. We'll have to see what happens when it comes to producing beans for the violetta, runner and the blue lake beans. The broad beans have done me proud, though.

My raspberries have got even huger than I remember them from last year and are getting ready to flower.

They need no help from me at all. I don't water them. I don't companion plant for them. All I do is chop off or dig up the runners when they try and send them out into the grass. Digging up is much more successful than chopping off.
Let's finish with a couple of pictures of the garden as a whole:

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: