One Month On . . .

An update to last month's garden post - as you can see the onions are still going strong - although we're having to watch for flower-heads and nip them in the bud as it were.







The peas have grown somewhat, although that initial row we cultivated so carefully in its nursery gutter didn't really come to anything, except for a few plants at one end.

The other two rows are looking ok, and there are plenty of pods although the peas haven't swollen yet.  The main concern is whether they'll survive to be harvested by us, as the mice seem to be doing a good job of scoffing their way through them at the moment!

On to the beans - the climbing variety in the pot either got too much rain or too little and only one or two appear to have survived.  The other beans did indeed turn out to be a bush bean variety - which means that they are particularly vulnerable to the mice . . .

We know it's mice - the little blighters are quite bold about it - while I was weeding the garden one of them was sitting quite happily under the guttering with baby onions in it, nibbling on something or other!

As well as weeding, I did plant some additional climbing beans and replaced the now died-back potato plant with a few late courgettes (as the ones I planted earlier in the year aren't doing much).

In fact, yesterday's harvest totalled a handful of beans, a few potatoes and one courgette!  Plus lots of green tomatoes, rescued from the jungle of the big greenhouse - here the plants had got out of hand, and the compost we'd dug in had germinated a fine set of weeds.

Generally the tomatoes are still looking a little disappointing in comparison with last year's crop - July just hasn't produced the sun needed to ripen them, and quite a few had gone mouldy / rotten on the vine. Two hours weeding and chopping did reduce it to some kind of order (see before and after shots below) - in fact I suspect I may have over-done the cutting back a little.   Hopefully now there's a bit more air circulating the current crop will ripen in due course, and we may get some re-growth:

 

The 'cheap' cucumber seeds I bought have produced some amazing plants, but very little in the way of actual cucumbers - a bit of a contrast to last year where we had a real glut of the things.  Lesson learned - if you want good produce, buy good seed stock.