The flourish of mid-summer was afoot here. With harvesting started and tiny strawberries coming out as you can see above, with an happy accidental reflection of me in the window of our shed. The strawberries are organic ‘European Woodland’ variety from Seedaholic sown in 2019 in this hanging planter that lived on the balcony. They suffered from aphids, so I misguidedly planted some mint in there as I had read that mint oil scares off the aphids. The mint is now rather taking over! I left these strawberries for the birds.
In the vegetable beds
The promising start of the second bed, 7 beautifully laid rows, measured appropriate to each crop, reusing ice cream sticks as plant labels. I alternated giant red carrots from Irish Seed Savers with Nantes 2 type, which are said to be resistant to carrot root fly; peas from Grow It Forward; seedlings from my friend’s spinach and the final row of Giant Virofly Spinach from Irish Seed Savers. What had already happened to the carrots at this point, before I re-defined the rows here (the day I transplanted the right hand half), was a visitor to the garden, the feline type, digging in the bed, dislodging the fragile seeds from their straight rows.
Broad beans and kale were doing really this month, I supported the beans with bamboo stakes and neglected the kale a bit by not harvesting it, I like it, but my partner doesn’t, I grew a bit too much in that sense, however, this did leave vegetation for snails and slugs and there was definitely something munching on it, so it didn’t all go to waste. Living up to the ‘greedy’ part in the name of this blog, I also grew too many broad bean plants, with not much space, I think this left them vulnerable to pests a little bit, easily passing from one plant to another.
I harvested some kale, and some young broad beans, the kale was perfect, the broad beans were a picked a little too early, they should have been left to get bigger.
In the greenhouse
These Klari Baby Cheese Peppers were sown in April and came out with these chunky little flowers this month, so pretty! Still giving tomatoes away this month and was battling with blossom end rot, as can be seen in the picture below right. Blossom end rot can be caused by numerous things – inconsistent or innappropriate watering for one and calcium deficiency is another. I had to be honest myself when thinking about the possibilities, and I had got lazy with the watering. I got more organised, putting this to the test and a lot less suffered from this affliction.
Our beloved, reliable chilli pepper seeds – another kit from my partner’s cousin, grew well in the greenhouse, this was sown in March. Another reason I suspected my carrots weren’t doing so well was the tilth of the soil not being quite right, the soil needs to be loamy, sandy and loose. The mix of composts I used with the recycled garden waste meant the compromise of not quite an appropriate soil for more fussy crops. I tried to the experiment of using cardboard tubes from loo roll and starting them off in the greenhouse protected, in Klasmann potting compost, before transplanting them the next month, giving them a head start. The coriander was doing well, very easy to grow, I neglected it as I did with some things this month. The coriander bolted as it was too hot in the greenhouse and I hadn’t picked much of it, it sprung up really tall and grew lovely flowers, I sowed some more and it germinated quickly.
Flowers
More lovely alliums popped up and flowered, these ones were round-headed leeks, Allium sphaerocephalon. And the mysterious pink flower I sowed from seed from a friend turned out to be lupins, I was delighted! The humble nasturtium next to the broad beans was continuing to flower and bring vivid colour to the garden. And this was the month our adventurous little cat, Alice, managed to get on top of the shed roof, and foxgloves still going strong too, there were even some creamy coloured flowers as well as the deep pink.
The Greedy Herbivore 