Garden Journal - The Edible Stuff Is Growing Well !

It's been a while since I did one of these !

It is fair to say that the garden is pretty scruffy but doing nicely, and I always like a bit of undergrowth to help the frogs and insects hide.

My wife has been doing a lot of the work, so I'm not going to claim credit for everything we've grown, it's definitely a team effort !

Starting at the back of the garden, the pond irises have started to flower, which the bees love (hey, it's World Bee Day !)

Just in front of the almost-hidden pond is a small trough of strawberries. They've been popping out a strawberry every few days, and they're delicious !

We have mostly focused on growing things we can eat. It helps build a bit of resilience if some produce disappears from shops or has more massive price increases, and we know that the fertilisers and insect repellents used have been minimal and organic. But most importantly home grown stuff just tastes nicer than fruit and vegetables from the supermarket.

This is one of the two troughs of coriander in the greenhouse. One set was bought as seedlings, these ones were grown from seed, and both are doing about equally well. Picking a leaf or two off each plant when needed is allowing them to regenerate on an ongoing basis.

Newly planted aubergines and peppers (bell peppers, not chilli peppers...)

Just the other side of the pond, we've got a raised bed with potatoes. They are growing like weeds ! I call it the Spud-mazon Jungle, and by the time they're ready I'm wondering if we should just unbolt the raised bed and find all the earth turned into a massive pile of spuds.

Behind the potatoes is a raised bed of onions. They've been quietly growing since winter and are looking a bit tatty, but should be ready for harvesting soon. The bare bed to the left is ready for tomatoes to be planted in a week or two. I'll need to set up some wires for them to climb up before then.

This is probably the change that will do the most good ! I've used an old (and very cheap) garden arch and some plastic fencing to put a cage around the white-currants. Last year, we lost the whole crop to pigeons who stripped the bush just as they started to come ripe.

It seems to be working so far ! Look at all those lovely strands of white-currants hiding under leaves and gradually ripening 😀

On both sides of the white-currants are loganberries; with all the rain we had in the first quarter of the year, I'm hoping for a good crop.

The self-seeded oregano is going wild. It's gradually taking over the lawn, but I'm okay with that, oregano tastes much nicer on a pizza than grass, clover and weeds 😁

Around the side of my office is a small patch I deliberately go natural, just to see what turns up. At the front is a mix of catnip which we had put in a pot, and lemon balm which reappeared from nowhere after all disappearing last year. At the back are forget-me-nots. I have absolutely no idea where they came from, but they're one of my favourite flowers so I'll encourage them to grow and see if I can get some seeds to plant in other parts of the garden.

Finally, I got another raised bed. This one is behind some of the loganberries, and is just starting to be used for composting. We had to buy a massive amount of compost to fill all the other raised beds. By the end of the season they will all need topping up again by six inches or so.

To save some money (and recycle cuttings) the plan is to create as much compost of our own as possible. The bed will have one end filled first, then the other, and then the compost bin. By the time the compost bin is full, with any luck the first half of the compost bed will be ready to be used, and we can get into an ongoing cycle.

So that's how our garden is dong right now ! Based n last year's crop, I reckon this year we'll have a period of about 4 or 5 months where we don't need to buy any potatoes or tomatoes.

All photos in this post by me