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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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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Diary of a suburban food garden, August 2016.

This month has been hot!  Or rainy!  I've tried to get some gardening done in the cool evenings, but I haven't done much.  Poor garden, I'm going to start looking after it properly!

This snap pea plant has been excellent this month.  The variety is called 'Shiraz' and I have more growing in the greenhouse for a late sowing.  I'll definitely grow loads more of this next year - they're great in stir fries.

My patty pan summer squash finally has a patty on it!  Yey!

The front garden raised beds are my favourite part of the garden at the moment.  I think it's because they're easy and things grow well in them.  Although there's some lettuce that's not really growing much.  I've planted some more carrots and spring onions in there this month.

My mum was getting rid of this old bin she'd been using as a waterbutt so I took it off her hands.  There's a guttering pipe that comes of the conservatory but doesn't go all the way to the drain, so I popped the butt under the pipe.  It filled up really quickly and now I've got delicious rain water to water the garden with.       

Down the side of the house the garden's looking good.  The herbs are rampant, the buddleia is enormous and the raspberries are crazy tall this year!  My two new apple trees are growing well, no apples this year because they're only babies but I hope to get some next year.  Look at that ominous grey sky, that's what I've had to contend with most of the month!

I didn't plant any nasturtiums this year, and yet still they grow!  Good job, because they're my favourites.  Can you see my sweetcorn to the right of the photo?  They've had a slow start, and are the second lot I sowed, but they seem to be growing strongly now.

Mum gave me a pumpkin in spring, I planted it down the side garden and slugs ate it all up.  Mum gave me a pumpkin last spring, I planted it down the side garden and slugs ate it all up.  So I've taken the hint with this pumpkin mum gave me a couple of weeks ago and planted it in a pot by the conservatory.  No casualties so far!

It's a little late, but I had all these packets of wild flower seeds hanging about, so I mixed them all together and planted them in some big pots.  There's loads left so I'm going to scatter some in the garden and look out for some bare patches of ground around town to plant up too!

And here's the whole garden.  Not looking it's best I think.  I'm going to get back into doing my 20 minutes gardening a day, so hopefully it'll look a lot better this time next month!

How's your garden this month?  

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