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.

How much can you prune a hypericum?

As much as you like it turns out. The hypericum has made a comeback.

From being pruned down practically to the ground:

From this:

This is bad, because the intention was to get rid of it. And worse still, it's harbouring snails:

I've cut it back again, but I think part of it lives on the other side of the fence, so I think it will probably keep coming back until we dig it and its roots up. 

On the other hand, if you cut a hebe back, it stays cut back. I've never known one grow new foliage on any stem I've ever cut. With a hebe, pruning is not an option.

Tomatoes under cloches after a warning from Monty Don

I was watching Monty Don on the Beeb yesterday, generally wishing I had his huge garden and his dog and the health to cope with both, when I noticed he was warning us not to plant our tomato seedlings out yet unless we live in the far south of the country, as it's still too cold for them at night. Now, London has its own microclimate, but it's no Eastbourne or Cornwall and I had been thinking the poor dears looked a bit peaky, especially compared to the spares still residing in the shed. So out I rushed the next day and covered them all with cloches. I only have three fancy glass ones like in the picture, but they make a far prettier picture. You'll just have to imagine the others haphazardly stuffed into sections of plastic bottles to yourself and cross your fingers they still have enough room to grow until I release them again when we finally hit June (or that the nights are warm enough for them when I panic about cramping their growth and remove the cloches early).

Devastation in the garden (sort of)

This has not been a good week in the garden. I've found black spots on on my broad beans. I assume these to be a fungus. I removed the affected leaves (quite a lot of them) and put them in the kitchen bin, not the compost heap because I don't want my compost to come with a fungal infection. I'd already previously removed affected leaves and it continued to spread, so I don't know if this is going to work. My only other hope is that I can get edible broad beans despite the fungus.

Then, as if that wasn't enough to be dealing with for one week, I found two snails inside one of my snail collars and the cabbages inside that one and another one are devastated pretty much beyond repair. I do have a spare or two though in the other slug collars - but I'm wary of using those, as I'm still expecting to lose more to molluscs, so I threw a few more seeds in and if those don't grow, I've got spare cauliflower seedlings which should fit fine in the area.

Another butternut squash plant also bit the dust. Its stem snapped right off. This is my second butternut squash to succumb to wind. They're clearly not very hardy. All my other butternut squashes are (partially accidentally) planted in pairs, but I decided not to try and risk separating them. Instead I planted another butternut squash seed in a pot in the shed. That means I only have three seeds left for next year, unless the ones that grow inside the fruit the plant bears turn out to be usable (assuming I don't lose all my remaining plants to wind).

 

Things are not going well in the world of sweetcorn either. Three of the eight I planted are not looking in the least well and I only have two replacement plants still in pots and no seeds of that variety left at all.

On the plus side though, my kohl rabi and peas are looking very good indeed (the peas in spite of attacks by slug and snail, many of which have now been drowned on snail patrol), so at least some plants in the garden are bringing me joy. And I've surely had at least £2 worth of radishes in my salad by now, well, OK, £1.50, but they've been fresh from the garden and I've enjoyed a sense of worthiness with my lunch that far exceeds the quantity I'm entitled to by sheer virtue of the fact that I actually eat salad for lunch in the first place.

Salad harvest

I managed this much of a bowl of salad from the garden:

Only lollo rosso and radishes so far, but I'm growing kohl rabi, cucumber and tomatoes. The plants are barely more than seedlings yet, but give me good weather, time and luck with pests and I shall have a full salad.

Carrot fly protection fail or some trouble with wind

Look at my carrot protection frame with its drawers around its ankles! That's wind for you. My parents came to see me (and the garden) and my dad said I needed to protect my carrots from carrot fly with a 2 foot barrier. He suggested horticultural fleece. So I put together a bamboo frame. I even lashed the parts where three canes meet  (albeit not to a standard that would make my guide leader proud) because the holes I cut in my Actimel bottles weren't enough to hold three canes in place at once. Two is their max.

It was meant to look like this:

But then the wind came along and suddenly it had its drawers around its ankles quicker than you can say Jack Robinson. Well, not literally, but less than a day after I'd put it up. It wasn't even particularly strong wind. I'd taken it down for those days of heavy gusts, fearing it would fly out of my garden like a departing Mary Poppins. This was just relatively normal wind today.
Those very strong winds from earlier in the week did their own damage though.

They blew the top straight off my courgette with a broken stem (you can see the remaining stem on the left) and also off a butternut squash that had previously seemed fine. Luckily I had planted another courgette seed in the ground right next to the damaged one because I had feared it wouldn't last long. It came up shortly after the other one departed. I'm hoping it acclimatises to the wind that's rampant in my garden at the moment. The butternut squash has been replaced by the spare winter squash that I had left over after finishing my planting, so I now have three of each instead of four and two.
In other news, some of the peas I planted directly in the ground are also coming up, which is good, as the slugs and snails love peas, so the existing ones have suffered a lot of damage.

Counting chickens

The month of May has arrived, which in London means that all danger of frost has theoretically passed. I say theoretically, as I don't think that a city that is capable of snow in June can really have passed all danger of snow by the end of April. Still, garden websites say I can act as if it has and I can't keep everything in pots till July, so I decided to plant everything out and hope they survive. Everything is still pretty tiny, so the garden as a whole looks pretty grotty in photos – a sea of brown earth with tiny, almost indiscernible patches of green (all too many of which are actually weeds), which is why this week's photos are all close-ups.

This was another week of discovering that my kind of chronic pain and gardening don't mix well. It was a joy putting everything in at the time, but I suffered for it the next day and the next. I didn't even do all the planting. My husband did the lion's share and 99% of the digging, but he's not got my issues with dandelions, so I went after a few myself, which I knew at the time I shouldn't be doing, but then I pretty much shouldn't be doing anything, and it's pretty difficult to either manage not to have anything you want done or get other people to do it for you (and not feel guilty about not being able to do anything of any practical use for them in return, especially when what you want is something as non-essential as dandelion removal).

I am now trying not to count my chickens before they hatch. I keep imagining the vegetables we will be enjoying if all this works out, despite the fact that past experience tells me I'm likely to get only a tiny fraction and at least some of my crops will be inedible or fail to grow in their entirety. Keep your fingers crossed for me that I get at least one corn on the cob though. I've heard they're far, far sweeter freshly picked, so it's the garden-fresh vegetable I'm most longing to try. Not counting any chickens here, honest, but at two cobs per plant, the eight plants I had room to put in could produce as many as 16 cobs (I pretty much guarantee they won't, but at least one each for me and the other half would be nice and any more would be a bonus).