What I did today 2012-2014

[Barneyskitchen]

Roasted sweet corn

Harvested the first sweet corn from the polytunnel. Roasted it wrapped in kitchen foil in the oven with butter, parsley salt and pepper and had it for my lunch. Words fail me to describe the taste.

Barney's Kitchen

[Two_Sheds]

Gave the Wildlife Garden a bit of a tidy:

- cut down the gone-to-seed flowers, like red campion. Left on ground as mulch
- pulled out lots of horsetail, and a bit of couch grass & bindweed
- deadheaded the buddleja to prolong the flowering season
- chopped up 3 buckets of comfrey, laid it down as a mulch on the veg beds
- planted out a tray of limnanthes
- covered another section of couch grass with wet newspaper mulch, with a view to digging it over in the autumn
- emptied 5 sacks of woody prunings (they don't make leafmould) into the messy area behind trees
- cut back anything spiky or stingy, away from the paths

[rustylady]

Played with grandchildren, made lunch.

Removed lower leaves from tomatoes in greenhouse to improve air circulation. Fed and watered.

Went to allotment this afternoon (heck it was warm). Scraped off yellow butterfly eggs and picked off green caterpillars from the brassicas.

Dug some spuds and picked french beans and three beetroot.

More bloody weeding.

[Dorothy rouse]

Picked more French beans, pak choi, 2 small cabbage (caterpillars had these 2 in mind), more courgettes, pathetic onions , scarcely any bigger than when planted. Gave old chappie of 92 ! The blackcurrant pie I made for him, from the blackcurrant cuttings he gave me, that grew and grew and produced so much fruit, in this first year, there is a loooonng story!


DottyR

[Florence Fennel]

Himself watered the outdoor toms again (so not now a first). I did the rest, my it was all gasping. I've spotted another two pumpkins in the patch tonight.

[Tiberius]

All I ever seem to be doing at the moment is scraping off those yellow eggs!

[Martin H]

All I ever seem to be doing at the moment is scraping off those yellow eggs!

Keep on it, don't give up yet!

Last year I was growing three Brussels plants near the kitchen door, no netting, with the aim of having my own Chr*****s sprouts. I was diligent with the egg crushing and caterpillar picking until it got to September, at which point I decided there won't be many more, they won't do much damage, the frost will soon kill them, etc. So I stopped.

The inevitable result: shredded leaves, just a few manky sprouts that my own family said tasted disgusting and not a patch on the supermarket ones (sob).

The memory still hurts.

So keep at it!

[Greenfingerpaula]

Cut the bottom leaves off my toms to try and coax them into ripening!
Fed and watered them and the chilli plants, took a few leaves from my Marketmore cukes to give them a bit more room now they're 3-4 inches 😊


🐞Every ☁has a silver lining🐝Every 🌸 has a 🌿

[JustPotteringAbout]

Own garden
Pfft, raining again. Have had a massive bout of can't-be-botheredness recently.
Tried to get some housekeeping done around the garden, mainly the greenery that is spilling over the veg plot paths. I've run out of sticks but have found some woody weeds that need a trim and can provide me with sticks.
Harvested some broad beans and peas, chopped spent ones back a bit to rot down, cut the stems for solitary bees and other insects to nest in.
Harvested strawberries, lettuce, perpetual spinach, kohlrabi
Watered and fed the greenhouse plants.
Chopped back some geraniums for regrowth. Looks like the bindweed has died back.
Cleaned out some plastic veg trays for harvesting and planting things in.
Riddled some spent compost, mixed in some home-made fertiliser then filled up some seed trays ready for sowing whatever.

Community garden
Last week
Crown lift to let light into building
With secateurs chopped up about half a tonne of partially-rotted and Aspergillus-ravaged branches that were left in a corner for many years along with metal, building, general and plastics waste. Bagged whatever I could ready for compost collection.

The tenant upstairs and has responsibility for part of the garden still hasn't cut the grass or weeded any part of the path and has put plastics in the compost collection wheelie bins. She only after three months of failing to put them out for collection complained they were too heavy after she left the lids open. I'm getting quite angry that she hasn't kept up her bit of the garden, despite her poking her nose into my garden affairs and even asking for veg . She gets quite competitive about her gardening knowledge yet she hasn't lifted a weed. Lazy so-and-so wants her arse wiped.
She has managed to carry a rather heavy recliner and bags of charcoal into the garden though.

[JustPotteringAbout]

Cleared the Summer PSB after cutting the last few spears

Lots of weeding.

Harvested two more courgettes, french beans and aforesaid PSB.

What is PSB, Perpetual Spinach Beet?
Does one just chop it back, or what?

[veggiechicken]

Purple Sprouting Broccoli

[hamamelis]

Went to plant some green manure mix at the lottie. Got there, realised I'd left the seed at home...

Did some weeding, picked some beans, fussed over the pumpkins, and dug out the first 3 of the cypress trees the ...mumble... previous owner had planted on the new half plot. There's still 2 more 6+ foot ones to go (honestly, who tries to plant a cypress hedge on an allotment? We're only allowed 6 trees, and there's about 12 on there- 5 of which were cypress!), but the rain started closing in.

I think I'll leave the hazels and buddleja until later- the butterflies are loving the buddleja, and there's nuts forming on the hazels, but there's far too many, and they take up half the plot.

[binley100]

Gave my fruiting veg a feed of comfrey tea, weeded the strawberry bed , added a bag of lawn clippings to compost heap , harvested , covered my leeks .....no not against allium leaf miner but against the chuffin' wabbit that gone along them like a pair of scissors......

[bramble]

Me and grand daughter picked 5 lbs of blackberries and put them in the freezer until we gather some more. Hugh crop this year so things are looking good.
pulled out the last of the weeds and planted out my last row of peas.
Tomatoes are coming in so fast this year. Have eaten several cucumbers.Peppers shaping up well with a really good crop of green ones already.

[Nes]

Picked lots of stuff, ate my first four raspberries - there are 5 of us at home, so not enough to take back and share , weeded brassicas and watered almost everything.
Spent half the evening preparing french beans for the freezer .