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, June 2017.

My wish came true and there's a frog in the garden.  Nowhere near the little pond I made though!  I think he was hiding in the long grass and we disturbed him when Joe mowed the lawn.

I was leaving the lawn long this year, but I think I saw a rat so I'm getting rid of any ratty hidey places.  It's a shame because we've had lovely wildlife this year, big beetles, all sorts of bees and wasps and insects, sparrows, and this little frog, and I think they've all been using the long grass to hide in. 

Joe's been giving me a hand this week and the garden's looking a bit neater and nicer. There are a few piles of grass about waiting to go into the compost bin and I still haven't finished painting the fence, but there are definitely less weeds!

Our second raised bed has been placed on the lawn and is waiting to be filled.  I was going to have a raised bed at the front and one at the back of the lawn, but it just didn't feel right.  About a week ago I had a total rethink of how I want to design the garden, drew a new plan and now I'm super excited to get going.  The whole back half of the garden is going to be fruit trees and bushes and shrubs, and the front half will be the raised veg beds and mostly cottage garden style planting with fruit and veg interspersed through.  When we can afford to do the hard landscaping I want to curve the path to the right, where we'll have a studio shed, and plant a tree in the middle of the end of the garden so there's a nice central focal point. 

Anyway, Joe's put the new raised bed in the lawn, and dug a little trench for it so it sits level, as the lawn is really slope-y and bumpy.

As you can see the other raised bed is doing so good!  I've only fertilised it once too and I'm only watering using the ollas and a couple of wine bottle waterers.  I slightly regret planting two courgettes in there because they've got huge, but at least I think I'll have some courgettes this year!

I've never grown borlotti beans before, aren't they beautiful?

I'm growing rat's tail radish this year too and it's a lot bigger and taller than I expected.  It has lots of flowers, and I'm waiting for them to form seed pods, which are the edible part.

In the front garden the raised beds are doing good, but I'm not planting anything new in them because we're going to change up the front garden too. 

We going to change the gravel, put in new round raised beds and a half barrow pond, a wheely bin store with a green roof and these wooden raised beds will move to the other side of the front garden. 

I bought some exciting new plants this month, there are lots of gaps to fill after slugs ate all my summer seedlings!

Other nice plants in the garden this month, this huge fern, pretty calendula, self seeded hypericum, lavender with very yellow nasturtiums behind and lovely sage with slightly pink tips.

How's your garden this month? 

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Photo an hour, June 2017.

Saturday the 17th was photo an hour day, in Susieland this is an excellent date because it's nice and neat, 17/6/17 - I always think I'll have a better day when the date's a nice number.  Here are my photos.

Photo an hour in organised by Jane and Louisa, anyone can join in and post their hourly photos on social media throughout the day tagging them #photoanhour.  Why don't you join in next time?

 

10am -  Feeling very hayfever-y so I took a long time to wake up - sofa + tissues + weetabix in the meantime.

11am - Plan for today involved doing at least 3 loads of washing so it can dry in the sunshine.  I think this makes me officially old. 

 

12pm - I pulled a few weeds up in the garden and admired these pretty flowers. 

 

1pm - I regretted my choice to go to the market, it was suuuuuuper hot, but 2 older ladies stopped me to say they liked my dress, so that was something. 

 

2pm - My lunch is home-grown salad, and couscous with chickpeas. 

 

 

3pm - Second lot of washing out, third lot of washing in.  Not the most exciting of days. 

7pm - I lost a couple of hours to a nap, then woke up really sleepy and out of it.  But I still managed to watch Doctor Who.

8pm - Watering the pots outside just as the light caught this pretty foxglove. 

9pm - I wanted to watch this when it came out, but no cinemas near me showed it, thanks to Netflix I got to watch it at last! 

 

Did you take part this time?  How was your day?

This time last year I was shopping and mooching round the house, and in 2015 we'd just moved into our house and still had bare floorboards!

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Garden visit, the forest garden at CAT.

Garden visits it a blog series where I visit gardens then blog about them! 

We're back at the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT) in Macynlleth again, there's too much there for one blog post! 

I loved the Forest Garden at CAT.  Forest gardening is something I'm super interested in and something that I intend to incorporate, on a small scale, into my garden.  Basically, forest gardening is a way of working with nature to grow food crops.  If you visit a woodland you'll see trees, shrubs and ground cover plants all growing together, they don't get watered or fertilized by human hand, but they still grow big and healthy.  What I've read about permaculture says that nature hates bare soil.  Nature will send in lots of things to cover bare soil, annual and perennial weeds, shrubs and trees.  Any ground left uncovered and uncultivated for long will turn itself into a mini forest and grow quite happily and abundantly.  So forest gardening uses these principals and tweaks them for human use, by choosing the right plant species, to grow low maintenance and abundant food forests that benefit people, wildlife and the environment.

Anywho, the Forest Garden at CAT is fairly small, but I think that's a good thing as it shows what's do-able in an average sized garden.

There are lovely old apple trees, underplanted with gooseberry and currant bushes and perennial food, flowers and herbs.

I loved the perennial salad area.  Growing perennial crops, rather than annuals, is another important idea in permaculture and forest gardening.  The idea is that perennials can grow better root structures and be more productive because they're longer lasting plants.  Perennials are also lower maintenance, they don't need to be sown or bought every year like annuals.  Growing perennials disturbs the soil less too, you're not yanking them out of the ground at the end of the season, so they're better for no dig gardens.  

There's an edible flower selection too, including things like pink purslane, creeping bellflower, snow garlic, ladies smock and campanula persicifolia. 

Wild strawberries are used lots as ground cover. 

And around the back of the forest garden are more fruit bushes and a beautiful carpet of something with blue flowers that was attracting a crazy amount of bees.  It wasn't labelled but if I had to guess I'd say it was maybe either vipers bugloss or hyssop.

This is what CAT's website says about it's forest garden, 

"A truly ecological way of growing food. In a forest garden, the plants grow under and over, in and among each other. It is designed so that the plants help each other grow - with trees providing shade to shade-lovers, ground covers suppressing the weeds, and nitrogen fixing plants increasing the fertility. It has the same multilayered structure as a woodland, but all the plants are edible or useful. Check out our string plant and our creeping raspberry."

Here's the string plant, in case you're curious! 

You can read more about the Forest Garden at CAT on their website. 

PS.  In case you missed it, here's my post about the allotments and polytunnels at CAT.

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