I appear to be turning into quite the blogger, this is my third this month I think. Anyway, had some time to myself this afternoon as both children are at nursery/pre-school, so finally got around to doing some gardening.
Last year I had a somewhat surprising success at growing French beans, I had always fancied growing my own veg, saw the seeds and thought “Why not?”. So planted them and they actually did what they said on the packet, and grew, giving us quite a lot of beans. The children really liked them, think it was because they had a hand in the planting and picking. We also grew strawberries and tomatoes, lots of tomatoes, lots of green tomatoes that made chutney (note to self – that is probably ready for eating now) and a few strawberries. Would have had more, but the second they turned red, Jessica ate them off the plant.
So this year have got a bit more organised and have got a raised bed of some size, constructed by my lovely husband. It has taken huge amounts of soil to fill it, but it is looking good. Had a minor set back with some lettuce and parsnip seeds whereby Ben and his girl friend from across the road decided to plant a mixture of bean and pumpkin seeds over th top, not sure how that is going to turn out – picked a load of the seeds out, but who knows? Don’t think it will have done the lettuce a lot of good.
Anyway, back to this afternoon. Have had quite a constructive time, have put up stakes and string ready for planting out the pea plants (Ben’s choice). In the raised beds I have planted out the pumpkin plants (Jessica’s choice), the parsnip seedlings and a dozen leek plants. Have got some more leeks to do, but figured I would try and stagger the planting so they are not all ready at the same time – am hoping this works.
Have gone for bush tomatoes this year, should hopefully produce a lot of small fruit on a compact bush, so no need for staking. They are already doing really well, with lots of flowers on a couple of them already. Am now wondering it if is too late to plant some cucumber seeds, although I think they are quite tricky – certainly didn’t have much luck with te marrows last year, they got to a certain size and just rotted away.
So this is the first of my vegetable blogs, if it all goes quiet you know I will have had some sort of setback and given the whole thing up. The next big challenge in the garden is taking down the greenhouse that has been here since we moved in, and don’t really use, and assembling the shed I had delivered last week. The greenhouse already has a new home to go to; we put it up on our local freecycle site. This site really deserves a post of it’s own, but will leave that for another day. Take a look anyway.
Tags: gardening