Last week I ordered a compost bin for the garden. It arrived today and it was a struggle getting it to the garden. We live in the middle of a row of terraced houses and it's easier to get it through the house rather than using the alleyway. Unfortunately the compost bin was rather bigger than I was expecting and it only just fitted through the front door.
Now I need to find somewhere to put it in our rather small garden. The best place for it would be the far corner, but there is a courgette plant growing there at the moment. While the plants are still producing decent sized veg, the compost bin will have to wait before it can be used.
Our peppers seem to be doing quite well. Most of the bushes have fruit forming. Some of the peppers are about an inch long so hopefully we'll have some ready to eat soon.
A while ago my parents gave us a large tub of soil, which allegedly contained some lilies. Green shoots appeared in the spring which gradually grew. They've now got quite a few large flowers.
I don't think the garlic farmers need to start worrying yet. We cooked with the home grown garlic today. The cloves were very small - I'm sure the whole bulb was smaller than the clove I planted last year.
The garlic itself smelt reasonably pungent - not quite as 'garlicky' as the Tesco Organic garlic (which has a much better 'fresh garlic' smell than their normal stuff).
Last year I planted some garlic cloves. They weren't bought to grow, they were just ones from the kitchen which had started to sprout. They are supposed to be ready to harvest once the stalks have started to dry. I noticed that they had dried and withered this morning so I decided to harvest them.
The bulbs seem a little small and only seem to consist of a couple of small cloves each.
Apparently the best time to plant garlic is the autumn, so I'll be giving it another go later in the year.
Or How I Wish I'd Labelled The Pots...
Our vegetable garden is doing reasonably well now. We've been eating the salad leaves for a few weeks now, and we've eaten one courgette so far - there are a couple more which are almost big enough to eat now.
I had to dig up one of the rocket plants which was growing next to the pepper plants. It had grown too large and was overshadowing its neighbours. We ate it last night as a 'salad garnish' to our home-made pizza.
The only real problem is the new tubs I planted a few weeks ago. They contained Leeks, Chives and 'Land Cress' but I can't remember which one was which. One tub has something with small broad leaves, which may be cress but could also be a weed. Several tubs have small thin green shoots. One should be chives and another should be leeks, but they look identical. They both look identical to the smaller tub which is definitely chives. I suppose they are all members of the allium family so they might look similar when they are small.
Flowers now - last year we bought some small Viola plants. At the end of the season I collected the seeds and scattered them in some tubs to see what happened. We have one small viola plant which looks identical to the ones we bought. This is actually growing in the gaps between the flagstones. The only plants which grew in the tubs were tall, spindly with pink flowers.
Click on the thumbnail to view the image
It's quite windy today - on the drive back from the shops this morning, I saw some cardboard boxes get blown out of a skip.
In our garden we've got a small lavender bush in a tub. The roots have started to grow out of the drainage holes in the bottom of the tub. This makes it unsteady and it gets blown over quite easily.
I've been meaning to plant it in the garden for a while and decided to finally get around to doing it today. I unlocked the shed door to get the spade, turned around and saw the lavender pot get blown over again. It's definitely time to re-plant it.
The salad leaves are the only vegetables in the garden which are ready to eat. I picked a few this evening which we chopped and ate with our tea tonight. The seeds were described as 'herb salad mixture' and included cress and rocket, so there was something with more flavour than just lettuce.
The courgettes are slowly growing. The pepper plants are still a bit too small and don't have any fruit yet. The garlic from last year is still there and should be ready to harvest in the autumn. The leeks and 'land cress' were only planted a few days ago so haven't germinated yet.
The spinach beet is starting to look a bit past its best, but we only keep that for the quail. It might be worth planting some more soon.
I've also planted a few trays of grass seed for the quail. They enjoy sitting in the grass, pecking and scratching at it. We bought a roll of turf for them a few months ago but they destroyed it fairly quickly. We now give them a tray of grass for a few days, then remove it before they can irreparably damage it.
I spent much of this afternoon in the garden: weeding, digging the borders, planting veg seeds. I should probably have started preparing planting winter veg slightly earlier, but if all goes well we should have some leeks growing soon, ready to harvest in late autumn.
The 'fruit' have started to appear on our courgettes.
Not quite free range but we got the quail out for a run in the garden. It was really warm today so when we got home, we got the chairs out and sat outside. We had to keep an eye on the quail so they didn't try to escape. No-one tried to fly over the fence but Maggie tried to make a run for it and aimed for the small gap between the fence and ground.
They enjoy to peck at the dandelion leaves near their hutch. They like most leafy veg, so we gave them some of the spinach beet leaves too. Our salad veg isn't growing very well at the moment so they'll have to wait before they can sample those.
It's vegetable growing time again. Unlike last year, when our herbs got eaten by slugs and our courgettes didn't grow very well, I'm better prepared. The slug pellets are ready to be used, and I've bought some slow-release plant food pellets.
Last month I planted various vegetable seeds: peppers, courgettes, assorted salad veg. They were in a propagator indoors, but are probably ready to plant out now.
I also planted some spinach beet in a trough in the garden. I had to put some mesh over the trough after I found them dug up. It turned out that a neighbourhood cat had used it as a toilet. I used to like cats, but not when they poo in my veg. We've bought some cat repellent now, so we'll have to see if that helps.
This afternoon we were in the 'garden' section of 'The Range', which is a furniture / homeware / garden / pet-supplies shop. As we walked through the water feature part of the garden section, I saw what has to be one of the ugliest, most tasteless garden fountains ever. I just had to take a picture on my phone.
Update 27/02/08:
We were in the shop again and I saw another fountain, which might be even worse...
Last summer, we tried to grow courgettes. We didn't get a very good harvest, which we put down to the poor quality and shallowness of the soil (there is a huge concrete slab under the patio/garden, which is too big to easily remove).
We decided that the easiest way to enrich the soil was to use compost so I started to use one of the spare tubs as a compost heap. Any garden waste or kitchen vegetable waste got thrown on to it. The tub was starting to get a bit full so I took most of the 'rotting' stuff in the lower layers and dug it into the garden, along with a few handfuls of the hemp-based animal bedding from the quail cage. Not only should the hemp rot down, but also the quail 'guano' should help fertilize the soil.
We've found out who has been eating the garden - as we suspected it was the slugs. Last night I put some slug pellets around the plants. Tonight I went out to water the garden and there were a lot of dead-looking slugs in the vicinity. Hopefully the rest of the herbs and vegetables will survive.
Finally a weekend without rain. Today we lifted up some flagstones to expose the soil underneath, so we could plant out the courgettes which were still in tubs. We were surprised to find that there were only 4-5 inches of soil underneath before we hit concrete. We will have to limit ourselves to growing things that don't need much root depth.
Something has been eating our herbs. The Tarragon has completely gone, and there isn't much Parsley left. The Marigolds have also been eaten. Our other herbs (Sage, Oregano and Thyme) were ok, as were the other flowers. We think it may have been slugs but the rain will have washed away any trails. We've added Slug Pellets to our shopping list.
Update 08/07/07:
Not quite a weekend without rain. Sunday started off sunny but it started raining by late afternoon.
Our garden is starting to fill with plants, although at the moment most of them are weeds. We did a little bit of light gardening this afternoon, spraying the weeds with weedkiller and re-planting our courgettes. We sowed them from seeds a couple of weeks ago and all but one germinated. They were getting a bit tall for the propagator so they are now in a larger trough. The propagator is now being used to germinate some Spinach Beet seeds.
