My home grown harvest, June 2017.

Things.  Are.  Happening.  In the garden.  It's food.  And I'm growing it. 

This has been my best year so far for growing my own, and I'm really seeing the potential for being able to grow loads more as the garden progresses over the next couple of years.  My new raised bed in the back garden has been amazing and I want more!

I have so much lettuce, and so many peas.  The yellow mange tout I planted has been prolific.  Unfortunately they're not as tasty as the less prolific purple mange tout I planted last year, but happily the purple ones have self seeded so I have some of those too!

My favourite lettuce is this one, I'm not entirely sure what it is because I mixed some lettuce seed together without noting down what I was using, but it's huge and delicious.

I've had far too many mange tout to eat, so I've been blanching it in boiling water (about a minute - minute and a half is right for mange tout, it's probably not right, but I've just been doing odd handfuls in a mug of boiling water!), then drying and popping into a sterilised jar in the freezer to use in stir fries in the winter.

I've been enjoying garlic scapes, wet garlic and some unsuccessful elephant garlic (won't bother with that one again, I've included my finger in the photo for scale! It wasn't strong tasting enough for me either!)

 It's been my best year for strawberries.  I'm so happy!

We've been picking home grown herbs all spring and summer too, rosemary, thyme and sage are our favourites and Joe makes amazing herby roast potatoes.

How are your gardens?  Are you harvesting anything exciting?

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Diary of a suburban edible garden, May 2017.

The other morning the postman said to me 'your garden's gone woosh hasn't it?!'.  And 'woosh' is exactly the right way to describe the garden this month, it's been the perfect combination of roasting hot and big rainy that promotes lots of leafy wooshyness. 

Unfortunately the weeds have gone woosh as well as the plants I want, but you can't have everything!  The slugs ate all my seedlings when we went on holiday, and there's a blackbird nesting in my wigela so I can't get over there to prune and weed under it.  I'm quite happy to have a nester though, it shows the garden's attractive to wildlife which means I'm doing something right!

I've planted 3 new tiny trees this month!  In the side garden I've planted a rowan and a hazel.  There's a little oak tree too that I intend to grow in a pot (I'll increase the size of the pot as it grows, but there'll have to be some pruning too!).  I also bought a little dog rose to grow up the fence and (hopefully) hide the view of the neighbours heads bobbing up and down their driveway.  I bought all the saplings online from the Woodland Trust.

I wonder how many trees I can fit into my little garden.  I think I have 7 in the back garden and there's 4 in the front garden, and I have plans for loads more fruit trees.

My little apple trees have some apples on them!  Quite a lot have dropped off (June drop?), but I'm hoping for at least one home grown apple this year.

Here's the side garden, the raspberries are looking goood.

I have chives all over the garden and the bees are going mad for them.

The raised beds in the front garden are doing really well.  There's some slug damage on some plants, but I've got yellow and purple mange tout (the purple are self sown from last years plants), broad beans, minipops sweetcorn, borlotti beans, strawberries, nasturtiums, pattypans and some leeks in there.  It needs a bit of a weed!

The ground elder in the front garden definitely needs weeding!  Joe's dug loads out and we've covered the bare ground with cardboard, but there's still more to do (before those flowers set seed!).

My back garden raised bed is really giving me the happys.  The first photo is from 4 weeks ago, the next one is from now, so you can see how much it's grown in a month!

Woosh! 

I'm really pleased with the lettuces - I have never been able to grow salad and I currently have loads of the stuff.  I'm creating my own polyculture salad seed mixes to sow (and keeping track of them in my little gardening journal).  I just mix a few varieties of seeds that I think will complement each other and sprinkle them where I want them to grow.  I've been sprinkling quite liberally then eating the thinnings! 

I'll leave you with this beautiful rose, which smells lovely and has loads of flowers (because I didn't prune it last year and now it's about 8 foot tall!) and this lovely nigella flower cos it's pretty too!

PS.  I still haven't finished painting the fence! I did one more panel but it keeps raining!

How's your garden this month? 

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Harvest, June 2015.

Everything's going to be late in my garden this year, 'cos I started late!  

But, my first strawberry ripened this weekend!

I've eaten a couple of lettuce leaves in passing too.

Have you eaten anything homegrown this year?

Linking up with Harvest Monday on Daphne's Dandelions blog.

Gardening, May 2015.

I can't show you progress photos of our new house yet (It's still in the 'it gets worse before it gets better' stage! It will get better, right? Right!?) but progress is definitely being made in the garden.

I can't do painting or sanding, because I have pretty bad asthma, so whenever Joe or my mum are at the house doing painting I come too and do a spot of digging.

My main job has been digging out the grass and weeds that had grown over this raised bed thingy.  I've nearly finished the first half, there's more weeds out of shot on the right hand side of this photo, but I'm going to dig them next year I think.

I even did my first bit of planting, some mini-pops baby sweetcorn and some chives.  I started making a wigwam for sweet peas to grow up too.

I want the garden to be mixed flowers and vegetables, not in rows, all mixed up.  I can't find any online photos or inspiration for this though, only the book The Edible Garden by Alys Fowler.  If you garden this way or can point me in the way of more info or inspiration I'd really appreciate that!

I've been kept company by this baby blackbird, mummy and daddy blackbird, and lots of robins.  Also a huuuge rat, but I'm trying to poison her (I don't usually mind rats but this one is huge, not scared of humans and comes too close to the conservatory doors for my liking!).

There's a lovely white lilac at the end of the garden, and this pink flowery tree I can never remember the name of (it's something that starts with 'ooo' or 'yoou').

I spent a long time sorting this honeysuckle, that had completely slumped over and taken the trellis off the fence with it.  Once I'd cut it back a bit, I found that there was a rose under it!  I've put wires on the fence and I'm trying to train the honeysuckle to cover it.  I found a neglected clematis in a pot, and some ivy so I've planted them too to cover the two tone fence. 

It's funny, cos someone obviously loved this garden once, there's a shed full of tools, piles of pots and canes and some lovely plants hidden under the weeds.  The only things we've bought for the garden have been a lawn mower and some seeds, the rest has been provided for us by the ghost of gardeners past.  It's sad that it's been neglected for a while, but I'm enjoying making it look like a proper garden again.

I've planted some seeds in some pots full of weeds I found at the back of the garden (I removed the weeds first!).  In the pots below there are sunflowers and livingstone dasies, courgettes and competition sunflowers (that's not the variety, me and Joe are having a competition to see who can grow the tallest sunflower!).  I've got a mini nursery in another corner, with kale, cabbage, lettuce, broad beans, garlic chives and borage sown, so I have seedlings to plant when I've finished my last bit of bed digging.

What's happening in your garden this month?