A busy season in the garden

May is a busy month in the garden. A lot of plants go in and a lot of things grow. On 10 April, the garden still looked like this:

The mustard (the patch of plants by the bend in the path) was still tiny and I was still kidding myself that I might eat some of it. We hadn't yet got the shed or the water butt and no annual veg except the onions, last year's leeks and the mustard had been planted out. Although at this stage I was already growing broad beans outdoors in pots and had planted a ton of seeds that were living indoors.

By 14 May I had several courgettes and squashes in the ground and already had a variety of peas and beans in.
The mustard had begun flowering, although it was far from reaching its full height. I'm actually currently growing it for its appearance, because the seeds it produced last year tasted pretty disgusting. I'm going to try and harvest them earlier this year to see if that improves things, but I don't hold out too much hope.
At the back on the left of the gate we'd also planted our first climbing rose. It's an Iceberg rose and will have tons of big, white flowers. It gets afternoon sun, and once it makes it to the top of the fence, it'll get sun all day. Since then, we've planted a second Iceberg Climbing Rose on the right-hand side of the gate.

The problem with this is, with the possible exception of midday in summer with the sun directly overhead, this particular corner of the garden never gets any sun. I've never yet even caught it getting sun at noon (possibly because I haven't been looking at the right time). The above picture was taken at 10.55, roughly two hours before London's solar noon (1257 pm today). And here it is at solar noon, catching the sun on a tiny proportion of its foliage:

It's possible the rose on the right won't make it, but if it can hang on in there until it gets to the top of the fence it will be fine. The plan is for the roses to be both beautiful and a security measure to stop anyone climbing our fence. My other half has promised to add some trellis for them to grow up before they reach the fence (ideally it should have gone in before they did, but I lost that argument, partly due to my excitement at the prospect of buying roses).
I also yesterday made a start on planting out the sweet corn. It's really loved growing in the greenhouse, and my other half says it's bigger and healthier than he's ever seen me grow sweet corn to the planting-out stage before.

That entire bed will be filled with sweet corn by the time I'm done (I hedged my bets by planting some of it out now and leaving some of it till later).
In somewhat sadder news, I've caught the first tiny spots of powdery mildew on my cucurbits already and ripped the leaves off to stop it spreading. It clearly relates to how wet they get, as the spares in the greenhouse are completely free of it. I'm going to have to be a lot more careful about not getting them wet when I water and maybe spray them with diluted neem oil or milk to stop the mildew sticking to them after big rains (the problem with that being I can never find a spray bottle prepared to carry on doing a decent spray with anything stronger than water in it).