My Garden: 29th July 2015

Today I harvested my garlic. The bulbs on the right are the Solent variety and the reddish ones are from a bulb I saved from 2014's crop (variety forgotten by me). I shed a silent tear for the three [expensive] bulbs of seed garlic that got misplaced in the house (ahem thrown out by my lesser half I suspect) and that never made it into the ground. I should have had a bumper crop!

I used one whole head of Solent to make today's dinner of bean enchiladas. Here are some leftovers packed for tomorrow's lunch and looking nicely layered on a bed of rice and peas, baby salad leaves and coleslaw with a few cherry tomatoes thrown in.

Remind me to do a post on the bean enchiladas some time....

If you follow me on Facebook you might have seen this happy face greeting you good morning earlier in the week. My sunflower is about four feet tall. It is wondrous how such a show stopping plant can be so low maintenance and easy to grow. Right now I make a pledge to grow at least twenty next year! Although I said that about leeks last year and I don't have a single one...

This pretty in pink lady is Phlox. I have taken cuttings from the little plants that sprout up around the mother plant and they are coming on nicely in their pots (real size about 8 inches - sorry about the bad quality, just took them in the kitchen as it is night time):

My tomato plants have a nice amount of immature fruits but they are ripening at a painfully slow pace and in my impatience I have removed three almost ripe Indigo Rose tomatoes and am trying to force them to edible stage inside a brown envelope on my sunny kitchen window. Come on come on!!

That's all folks.

My Garden: 7th July 2015

I picked up a Phlox plant at a sale back in March. The variety wasn't labeled but as it is becoming a tall plant, I am assuming it is the common variety Phlox Paniculata. Mine has yet to flower but when it does I imagine [hope] it will look something like this:

"Phlox Paniculata" by Atilin - Own work. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Mine is looking much more under-whelming at the moment, but still healthy:

Flower buds are starting to appear. I am afraid to put it in the ground incase my rabbit eats it.

Lots of little plants have sprung up around mother plant so today I have taken cuttings and potted them on. I cut away the baby plants trying to preserve some roots and have planted them in pots of seed compost. Some of the cuttings had no roots attached so remembering something I read somewhere on the Internet, I applied honey to the cut end, to act as a natural rooting hormone. We'll see about that! I stripped off the lower leaves and covered the pot with a plastic bag.

They are sitting in my greenhouse at the moment. Tomorrow I think I'll cut a corner off the bags as the conditions might be too humid. I will know they have rooted when there is new growth but I suppose if they aren't limp looking in a week's time, things are looking good.

My Garden: 16th July

July is a lovely time of the year in the garden and the sunshine has been generous this year. There is plenty to eat but I must keep reminding myself not to neglect the sowing of future crops in order to avoid a sudden end to my bounty. This year I have introduced more long season crops - leeks and purple sprouting broccoli, along with my usual two brussels sprouts plants - to ensure a winter harvest.

We have been boiling beetroot for a few weeks. It is a real shame that beetroot has such a bad reputation from it's common disguise jarred in vinegar. The unadultrated root is so mild and earthy and really deserves to be as common as the carrot, being that it is so easy to grow and so suited to our climate.

The young leaves are a superior salad vegetable and the older leaves can be shredded and cooked in butter and garlic.





My first time [successfully] growing broccoli is a learning experience. So used to the firm heads in the supermarket, my looser heads were beginning to flower before I realised it was time to harvest. I should have cut the head when it looked like this:

No harm done thought, the steamed broccoli was without a doubt the best I have ever tasted. In fact, dinner that night came almost predominantly from the garden:

I am hopeful for a good harvest from my six tomato plants. If you recall, the plants suffered a lot when the were first left outside. Some plants were reduced to a stalk. They came back with vigour, thanks to the long season of sunshine this year. Care for the plants includes picking off side shoots (they could probably be thinned some more but I am taking a chance), mulching the soil (they are in pots) with comfrey leaves and feeding with comfrey tea as well as regular watering. I tend to give the plants a really good drowning. Recently, I moved them into slightly bigger pots, approximately 9".

This is my year for brassicas. I have about 16 plants, with a variety of broccoli, cauliflower, brussels sprout and cabbage. The slug and caterpillar damage has been surprisingly minimal. I am collecting slugs by hand and squishing the bright yellow eggs lain by the cabbage white butterfly on the underside of the leaves. I have also mulched around the plants with comfrey leaves, which are apparently appetising to slugs, in the hope of distracting them from the plants.

My Garden: 23rd June

I am trying my hand at jalapenos this year. Below are three plants that have been sitting inside my kitchen window since some time in June (cannot find a record of planting date). It's definitely time to give them a new home.

The moment they are moved into new 5" pots, I realise how cramped they must have been in a single cherry tomato pot!

My deficient in everything broad bean plant produced a fresh shoot some time ago and finally gave me some beans. I'll take two plump pods over nothing.

Recently I put tin foil around the base of my brassicas, which I read is to deter slugs who do not like the texture. THEY LOVE IT! They love it, the slimy bastards. I recently moved four plants to where my garlic had been lifted. They have been decimated and when I invested I found masses of slugs neatly sleeping inside the foil. For too long I had not the heart to kill them, and simply threw them in the back corner of the garden, in the grass clippings heap, but no more mercy. The smaller ones I squashed on a concrete block, the larger ones were thrown into a bucket of water. Not fool proof apparently as a load of them are climbing back out! They can move a lot faster than I'd anticipated too.

The only thing for it is to get chickens. Chickens love to eat slugs. And I love to eat eggs. Soon....

My Garden: 27th July

After three full weeks of scorching sun, and temperatures which we are just not used to in this country, Ireland was officially in a drought for the first time I can remember in my adult life. And then the rain came, while the heat remained and the garden just loved it.

My sweetcorn which was stagnant in size for quite a while is coming on and has started to produce the grain.

Carrots looking good enough to eat. Note I have mixed sand into the soil - supposed to be good for carrots. Make sure not to plant in freshly manured ground as it will have the effect of fine foliage but not much root. The root only grows to find food for the plant, so if your soil is too fertile, it will happily sit there enjoying it, rather than working for it!

Onions are swelling:

The beetroot isn’t ready to eat but the leaves provide a very tasty and under-rated salad crop while we wait

The legumes have been my success this year and the pea hedge has been almost stripped bare by us over the last few weeks

But if you search among the jungle of leaves, some fat pods are still there for the taking

But with every success comes a failure and even though I had my hopes pinned on a bumper crop of beautiful tomatoes after last years bounty, I failed miserably with my seedlings and have only two small plants which, although flowering, aren’t filling me with great hope

I planted a range of brassicas including cauliflower, cabbage, broccoli and brussel sprouts but only the latter actually germinated

And last, but not least, some random flowers from around the garden. I had hoped to have alot more to encourage bee population [which is much better than last year] but the weather has been so mixed that they haven’t done as well as I’d hoped [although I suspect some of my seeds were poor quality]