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.

Excitement in the greenhouse

A baby bird found its way into the greenhouse today. I'm not sure how long it had been in there or how it had got in. This is particularly confusing because of a new addition I've made to the greenhouse to try and prevent a repeat of last year's red mite invasion:

I bought a magnetic fly screen door online and put it up over the door last week.* This afternoon I noticed a little bird was sitting in the window on the other side of the sealed fly door. It didn't seem particularly distressed, but there was no clear way out (or in, for that matter). So we decided to help it on its way.
We pinned back the fly doors with pots and my other half went in to usher the bird out. But the bird didn't move. So my husband very gently moved his hand in around the bird, where it was sitting on the window sill, to pick it up. His fingers were millimetres away from its feathers when the bird fluttered up and out of his grasp. He froze and the bird fluttered back down and alighted on his hand. His hand held out in front of him, he walked out of the greenhouse with the bird perched on his finger. I wish I'd had my camera, but we'd been anticipating frantic fluttering and panic, not the calm poise of the little birdie. Outside the greenhouse, the bird sat for a moment, then flew up to the roof of our house before finally returning to next door's lilac tree.

The fly screen isn't the only improvement I've made to the greenhouse. I've also painted its floor with yacht varnish. I was doing very badly at not watering the floor, so the wood in it was beginning to turn black, which did not bode well. I've given it three coats, along with the wooden shelves, and hope both will now cope better with spilled water.

In other news,  as I mentioned in my last post, I've been a bit behind with the gardening, because I've been busy. Also, a lot of my seedlings died as a result of not being able to keep them in the dining room while we got the floors restored.

I have now more or less caught up, and at less cost than I feared. My beans all went in the ground last weekend, as did my brassica seeds that could still be planted at this time of year. I've been watering more or less daily ever since with water from the water butts. The first beans are already coming up through the soil.

This weekend I planted out my squashes and courgettes, after hardening them off in the greenhouse, then outside. Lesson learned: do not leave outdoor plants in the greenhouse during sunny days when hardening them off. Some of the leaves shrivelled and burned.

I started them off late compared to usual, but they seem fine so far.
I also bought some purple sprouting broccoli seedlings from the local garden centre to fill in the gaps in my brassica bed, and some tomato and sweet pepper seedlings from the greenhouse to make up for the ones that died. I originally thought I was going to have to buy far more seedlings than that, so I'm pleased it wasn't that bad. The garden is definitely less well planned than in previous years and my seedlings aren't as far along, but I hope I should still get a decent crop, especially if we continue having such lovely weather.

*Edit: this screen turned out to be a really bad idea. I managed to keep all the pollinating insects out, while still letting aphids in. I removed it at the beginning of 2019

The garden gets its first haircut of the year

With all the rain followed by the glorious sunshine we've had this month, the garden went a bit wild:

It's a very photogenic sort of wild. Somehow it looks a lot better in the photo than it does in real life.  I've got a bit behind with the garden for various reasons, including that I've been very busy and we've had the parquet floor restored downstairs. But we finally made some time to have an initial tidy of the garden.

This was pretty much reverse-photogenic. If you stand out in the garden, it now looks a lot better. But the photo makes it looks less appealing.
The garden is actually behind where it would normally be at this time of year. Not only did we have snow in March, but I've been busy with another project. Also, the restoration of the parquet floor means I haven't been able to grow seedlings on the dining room table like I normally do, because the dining room table is outside under a tarpaulin. The greenhouse and shed are also full of furniture that we had to take out of the downstairs to make way for the floor restoration, so they were no use as a replacement either. Basically, I've had to fit in plants wherever I can and they haven't been impressed with me. Several have died.

I'm not sure how bad the situation is yet. It's still fairly early days. But I suspect I'm going to have to buy in more of my seedlings that normal this year! On the plus side, it will be an opportunity to try different varieties I don't normally grow.

First snowdrop of the year

The first signs of spring have arrived in the garden with the first snowdrop of the year:

I planted the snowdrop bulbs around the pond in the winter and when I went out to pick some rocket (not that there was much in an edible state) I found myself wondering if my snowdrops were coming up round the pond yet. Not only were they coming up, but two of them were flowering. I love early spring bulbs, they're the first sign that winter is coming to an end.

Carrot, celery and fenugreek soup

I made this based on what I had in my fridge, my garden and my cupboards and it turned out lovely, so I thought I'd put in on my blog. This is vegan if made with a vegan stock cube. I think it would probably also be pretty good without liquidising.

2 tbsp olive oil
1 large onion
most of a pack of celery (I used 4 sticks for something else)
1 tsp ground fenugreek
8 large carrots
1 vegetable or chicken stock cube
salt and pepper to taste
boiling water

1. Put the olive oil in a large pan over a medium heat.
2. Peel and chop the onion (fairly fine), then add to the pan and stir.
3. Chop the celery, discarding any tough ends and any leaves.
4. Add the celery to the pan. Add the fenugreek to the pan. Stir.
5. Peel and chop the carrots. Add to the pan.
6. Add the stock cube and salt and pepper to taste. Stir, then add enough boiling water to just cover.
7. Simmer for 20 minutes.
8. Leave to cool until cool enough for your blender, then liquidise until smooth.
9. If necessary, reheat to serve.