Garden Update

Wow, June is suddenly over. I'm not entirely sure how that happened, except that it happened quickly. I seem to have had precisely no time to work on my various self-sufficient projects for most of this month - my two pieces of knitting are at about the same stage as they were at the end of May, and my skirt is as yet untouched. We've barely had time to go to the farm, and despite a total milk glut last week I didn't even get round to making yoghurt. This is because we try and do too much despite having demanding jobs. Even worse, I know that I would get bored quickly if it were any other way.

I'll stop moaning now and move on to the actual point of this post. Unlike me, my garden has noticed that it is now July, and is behaving accordingly, so I thought I'd like to give a quick summary of how things are going, what's working well and what would clearly prefer to be in a real garden and not in pots on a rooftop patio.

Anything pea-based is the big success story of June. Both my Golden Sweet mange tout and the sweet peas are rampantly healthy and produced veritable buckets of flowers and pods. The mange tout clearly love sunshine and shelter, and aren't too bothered about limited growing space. I don't know if it's made a different, but I planted some nasturtiums in the same bed and they have also done really well. The first crop of radishes was also a great success, but the peas have made that bed a bit too shady for the second crop to do as well and I don't have a great alternative at the moment. The beans have been less of a success. The cherokee beans are growing now, but sooo slowly. I have decided that they are perhaps a bit delicate for me, since they seem to react extremely badly to any temperature below about 8 degrees celcius and above about 23. Still, they seem to suddenly get going properly once they get to the point where they start to climb.

The courgettes are confusing me. Lots of flowers, few baby courgettes. This variety (chose specifically for container growing) is confusing me a little by growing two flowers rather than the usual one on each female stem. Has anyone else come across this? Do they both need pollinating? I've been a bit worried about the scarcity of pollinators on the patio - we do get bees and things, but far fewer than would be found in a 'real' garden. I've tried hand-pollinating, as suggested by the book I have on seed saving. It seems easy enough, but I'm not convinced that it's actually work. I have one possible success at the moment, so I'll have to see how that goes, and hope that the lavender which is just starting to flower attracts more insects. On the other hand, the profusion of orange flowers is very pretty.

Talking of pretty flowers, the tomatoes are just coming into flower and very nice they are as well! I really like the flowers on my 'Costulato Fiorentino' plants; they are much bigger and a more vivid yellow than those you tend to get on standard garden centre varieties. The first truss has set on the tumbling toms (which are actually in very small pots for a tomato), and the centiflor plants are producing their first buds.

Strawberries. They were so delicious, and are now nearly finished :-( I'll definitely keep using my planter in future, as it saves all the trouble of preventing the fruit becoming rotten from contact with the earth, and it is also much easier to keep birds and animals away, since they just tumble down the sides. I've currently got it surrounded with little pots of compost in an attempt to catch the runner which are making a break for freedom.

OK, more updates coming soon! Now I think I might indulgence myself my going on a limeflower-picking expedition during my 'lunch hour'