How to set up an outdoor watering system for while you're on holiday

 I have just got back from a 2-week holiday in late June. I don’t normally go away in June, and when I left, it had barely rained for a month, so I was worried sbout my still small plants surving. To try and counter this, I set up a version of the irrigation system I usually use in the greenhouse outdoors. I had already made the decision that I wasn't going to try and keep anything alive in the greenhouse this year because of that holiday, so I didn't need it for that.

What I did was fill large plastic containers of the sort you can buy at your local DIY store with water. I then dipped self-watering wick cords into the water to get the whole cord wet. I arranged these cords to run from the bottoms of my containers to the soil near each of my plants and tucked the ends of the cords into the soil.

I did this a couple of days before my holiday so that I could see if the water was coming out at an appropriate rate. In one case, it seemed to be running too fast, so I tied a knot in the cord to slow it down.

Luckily for me, it rained quite a lot while we were away, because some of the containers came very close to running out of water. I'm not sure how much the rain replenished them. Anyhow,  I came back to this:

What didn't survive was my kale, although I can’t rule out this having been eaten in its entirety by slugs rather than having bern insufficiently watered.

At any rate, the irrigation system seems to have been worth setting up. It's more unpredictable than setting it up in a greenhouse, and I wouldn't want to have to bet on it working under all conditions, but it does seem to be worth a shot.

Lack of progress in the garden

 I've had another year where I haven't had much time for gardening. Fortunately, a lot of my back garden is now self-seeding, so although I haven't made much progress with the vegetables, the garden still looks pretty and is attractive to pollinators, sparrows and robins - and less fortunately to slugs and snails.

I have plenty of foxgloves, aquilegias and cornflowers. I also had a lot of a new weed (or at least I've been assuming it's a weed), and it got into my irises. I went through pulling it up, but that or one of the many other myriad factors that can upset irises, has left the plants sulking, and it looks like they're only prepared to give me one flower this year.

I've also had difficulty with my seedlings. They are growing exceptionally slowly. I'm torn between blaming the cheap Aldi compost we bought and the more expensive mycorrhizal fungi I added to the seeds in the hope of improving their growth. My seedlings have, without exception, remained tiny and the leaves of the squashes have gone a worrying yellow colour.

My rhubarb has also become unhappy:

I think that may be a combination of the heat and a lack of water. I'm going to try and get out and water it more often in case that helps.

My strawberries, however, are very happy. Given my general failures this year, I'm trying to boost their chances with liquid seaweed feed.

I've just put in some runner beans as well. I have the suspicion I'm going to lose them to slugs, but I live in hope. I decided not to pull up the majestic, pink aquilegia in the middle of them and instead just to chop it down to the ground when it finishes flowering. I think, from next year, I may rejig my crop rotation and leave that shadier part of the garden entirely to flowers. In that case, though, I will need some flowers in there that bloom later in the year than my current May/June display of foxgloves and aquilegias. I may even go so far as to buy a shrub!

Our red climbing rose is also doing well and smells divine. Flowers are just so much easier than veg, providing you pick the slug-proof ones.

Ducks - if you build it they will come

 Our tiny pond attracted ducks! Such a happy moment.

Can you kill mint?

 I bought some apple mint last year. The pot I wanted to put it in had something else in it, and while I was waiting to transfer it, I forgot to water it. It shrivelled away to crispy brownness. And I thought I'd achieved the dubious honour of killing mint. Wrong! The mint was tougher than I gave it credit for.

I also failed to empty the pot and put the "dead" mint and its soil on the compost heap. It's just as well I was so lazy in my gardening. Without any further watering from me, during a wet patch in spring the mint revived. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's now thriving. There's clearly a lot less of it than there was before I forgot about it. But it has survived, and I'm confident it will be thriving by the end of the summer.

In other news in the garden, my apple tree is having a bumper year. After a crop of just 5 apples last year, this year we have this many:

I'm fully expecting the tree to decide it's worn itself out again next year and to give me another crop of just five, but for this year it's apples galore.

I planted quite a lot of sunflowers this year because the seeds were near their use by date. My first one has just opened.

It's a pretty short, skinny one, but I have a taller, fatter red one just coming into its own.

The garden as a whole is full of things growing. There aren't as many bees as I remember, which is strange, as I have more wildflowers than ever. Perhaps they're on holiday. The crew of sparrows that spends most of its time in my back garden disappeared for a while but has returned. I was very relieved to see them back. Despite the racket they make, constantly shouting cheep at each other - or maybe even because of it - I had missed them a lot.

More flowers than veg this year

I've ended up with a frozen shoulder, so I've been doing as little as possible in the garden, as a lot of what I would normally do has been resulting in a ton of pain. This means I've let the flowers (and weeds) take over even more than I usually would. This year's biggest weed is, as ever, rocket. I don't understand the plant. I find it almost impossible to grow from a seed packet, but when it self seeds I find it almost impossible to get rid of. Anyway, here are some photos.

We have so many flowers on the iceberg climbing rose (which I like to call "The Bride"), that we even cut it back a little and brought the flowers inside.

We cut all the leaves below the water in the vase off so that they wouldn't rot in the water.

It turns out that planting a variety of broad beans that can be planted even earlier than most was a good idea. For the most part, the broad beans have managed to produce edible beans before getting overwhelmed with blackfly (like they do every year).

April in the vegetable garden, optimism and a flurry of birds

We have glorious weather in the garden today. It's so warm that seeds I thought I was optimistic to sow in my unheated greenhouse might actually germinate. I'm generally quite an optimistic gardener. I'm optimistic each year that I will keep up with the weeding and that some plants will survive onslaught by snails (actually, my optimism there is much more limited, and I've started googling the names of the plant with slugs before I buy anything for the front garden. If it can't survive slugs, it can't survive our garden). I also optimistically sowed other seeds that were out of date or close to it or for which I'd lost the label. These have been a bit of a mixed bag. Some have done better than others. My sunflowers (below), which are mainly in the greenhouse to give them a fighting chance to get big enough to withstand the snails when they go outside, are growing away very happily. Other pots remain resolutely empty (some of them labelled, some of them not - remembering to label is not my forte).

My yard-long beans have sprouted, and based on watching Alan Titchmarsh, I'm going to keep them in the greenhouse for as long as possible, as his more or less stopped growing when he planted them out. I'm hoping London's warmer weather will be a help, but I'm going to give them maximum greenhouse time first. I might even keep a couple in the greenhouse to see if that works, as my peppers and chilis have all failed to germinate this year, so I don't have as many plants for the greenhouse as I'd like. Most of the seeds were admittedly a couple of years old or self-collected.

My rhubarb's going from strength to strength. I still haven't dared to pick any yet, but I'm increasingly confident of getting at least one pie out of it. I love how it looks next to the pond. That was the perfect place to put it, and it seems not to be too bothered by the fact that it's living in partial shade.

This being April, it was time to finish getting the garden ready for the growing season. And when I got weeding and digging, quite a few birds showed up to take advantage of the creepy crawlies I'd exposed. The robins were particularly brave, swooping in to within less than a metre of me while I was working. I'm not sure how many we have, as I can't recognise individual robins other than the skinny robin (and there may be more than one of those), but I've seen two of them fighting it out in an aerial battle over the garden, so I think there may well be more than one. Our garden is also frequented by a mini-flock of about a dozen sparrows. They're not quite as brave as the robins, as humans walking about tends to send them scurrying for the bushes, but they will happily ignore us and carry on about their business on the ground if we're sitting in chairs. Maybe the sparrows have realised that beyond a certain age, humans just can't get up out of chairs at any decent speed, and the sparrows can be in flight before we can take even half a step towards them. This still doesn't explain the fearlessness of the robins. But then, maybe the robins have realised that they're not big enough to make a decent meal for us, so aren't worth chasing. Or maybe they've simply seen our Christmas cards and have realised how much we like them. Sparrow hobbies in the garden include taking dirt baths, eating the creepy crawlies, stealing string, flying about loudly – I never previously realised just how much noise sparrow wings make – sitting in next door's lilac tree watching our garden, chirping at each other or to the world in general, some noisy project in the eaves of our house (quite possibly raising young) and generally hanging out. They are a joy to watch, and I'm so glad they visit.

German baked cheesecake recipe

This recipe is based on the Dr Oetker recipe in German, adapted for products available in the UK:

For the springform pan (diameter of 26 cm):

a little extra butter/margarine for greasing 

Shortcrust pastry:

150 g plain flour

½ tsp baking powder 

80 g vanilla sugar*

1 pinch salt

1 egg (medium)

75 g soft butter or margarine

Filling:

2 egg whites (from medium eggs)

200 g cold whipped cream

500 g quark (low fat)

100 g sugar

2 tbsp lemon juice

35 g cornflour

2 egg yolks (from medium eggs)

1. Grease the base of the springform pan. Preheat the oven about 200 °C/fan 180 °C

2. Mix the flour with the baking powder in a mixing bowl. Add the remaining ingredients for the dough and mix everything together with a mixer (dough hook), first briefly on the lowest, then on the highest speed, then form into a roll. (If your butter or margarine isn't already very soft, you can rub it into the dry ingredients with your fingers before adding the egg).

3. Roll out a good 2/3 of the dough on the base of the springform pan and place the springform pan rim around it. Prick the base of the pastry several times with a fork. Keep the remaining 1/3 of the dough to one side (do not do anything with it yet). Place the tin on a rack in the bottom third of the oven and pre-bake the base for 10 minutes.

4. After pre-baking, place the springform pan on a cake rack and leave the base to cool. Reduce the oven temperature to about 160 °C/fan 140 °C

5. Form the remaining dough into a long roll. Place the roll as a rim on the base of the dough and press it against the tin to form a rim about 3 cm high.

6. To prepare the filling, separate the eggs, then beat the egg whites until stiff. Set aside in a bowl.

7. Beat the whipping cream until stiff. Set aside in a bowl (optionally the same one as the whipped egg whites).

8. Mix the quark with the sugar, lemon juice, cornflour and egg yolks until well blended.

9. Fold the beaten egg whites and whippec cream into the quark mixture. Spread the mixture evenly on the pre-baked base. Put the dish back into the lower third of the oven Bake for about 70 min.

10. Turn the oven off and slightly open the oven door. Leave the cake in the turned off oven for 15 minutes.

11. Take the cake out of the oven and place on a cooling rack still in its tin. Leave to cool.

* You can make vanilla sugar by keeping a vanilla pod in your sugar. Over time, it flavours your sugar with vanilla