Early May 2007

Two months on with the vegetables seeds and we are learning all the time about gardening and plants. Debra (one of our neighbours) had said that it was better to wait and plant the seedlings when the weather was right rather than to try force things along. She was right.  

 

The salads and tomatoes (Oriental salad mix, radish, gigante liscio tomato,red and green lettuce, coriander, parsley) I planted early on struggled along not showing for ages in fact some of them are still not growing. My latest sowings done in late April have burst out of the ground. This has been helped I think by a good mix of rain and sunshine whereas April was hot with very little rain and in my inexperience I did not keep the soil moist enough.

I did in fact give up on the tomatoes and peppers altogether and bought some plants from the market. These included Coeur de Boeuf tomatoes which I also sowed the seeds for. Predictably I will probably have too many tomato plants now.

Both the early (Charlotte) and late (Desiree) potatoes plants have been earthed up. We are now watching them closely for signs of colorado beetle. These are rife here and destroy many a potato crop. The only organic solution seems to be picking them off by hand and removing the plants leaves with eggs on. We had read that chickens would eat them, our friend Bob reckons not. We'll give it a go though if we get any.

We have been eating from the vegetable garden, salad leaves only though, and the odd radish.

Other words of wisdom that we ignored was that we had bought too many seeds. Perhaps not if we could devote all our time to the garden but definitely yes when trying to get started with chickens and create a habitable house.

Late May 2007

The Charlotte potatoes have started to flower, well one or two of them have. Of course we had to dig up one to see what was happening down below. We only got five little new potatoes from that plant so we'll be leaving the rest for another few weeks. However the five that we got were absolutely perfect little potatoes, no damage from insects etc of any kind.

The Gigante Liscio tomatoes that were finally appearing at the beginning of the month succumbed to slugs completely due to my carelessness in leaving the trays out on the grass and laying on a picnic for them. I have sowed the last few of my seeds now and hope to at least get a few plants past the seedling stage. I have also sowed my few remaining Costoluto Florentino tomato seeds.

The Collective Farm Woman melon was also included in the slug fest and since I have no more seed I have started the Ananas d'Amerique a Chair Verte melon and the Blacktail Mountain water melon to see how they progress.

The Serpette Guilloteau climbing peas are starting to work their way up the old ladders that we found in the barn and the Or Du Rhinn french beans are also reaching for the sky very promising! As an experiment I have tried another half a dozen peas straight into the ground now that things are warming up.

 

The Ashworth sweetcorn isn't quite as high as an elephants eye but it is certainly heading that way. A bit early to put the pan on?

There seems to be always something new to discover in the garden as various plants pop up that we've never seen before. You'd think we'd notice a tree wouldn't you. Well we had in as much as we thought oh yes that sapling will probably have to go. It's staying now as it turns out to be a plum tree and here's the first little fruit to prove it.