Monday, August 04, 2008

Summer progress

Things are moving on quite nicely at the plot, I spent about 4 hours there today mowing and pottering about.
The beans are producing MASSES, I planted half the amount of runner beans this year and we still seem to be inundated with them. The french beans are also going mad but I prefer them anyway so I'm happy to have lots of those and please don't anyone mention courgettes!
I transplanted the different brassicas into the bed that the broad beans had been in and covered them with the cage. The ones you can see in the picture are Calabrese, Wok broc (summer sprouting stir fry broccoli) and Romanesco.

I decided to harvest one bed of onions as they had all had foliage die back and looked ready. They aren't the biggest onions you'll ever see but they will keep us going for a while. I have stacked them inside one of the plastic greenhouses at home to finish drying off.



One of the things we were keen to do this year was to grow our own flowers for cutting. We always spend loads of money buying flowers for the house or to take when going to friends that we really wanted to give this a go.
'D' planted loads of flowering plants on plot 2, the pics below show the sunflower bed, sweetpea tripod with cosmos and in the foreground you can just see the chrysanthemums starting to bloom. As plot no.2 has been work in progress this year we only have a small selection of flowers but still it provides us with enough for the house. Next year will be even better as we will have finished digging the new beds and borders.

The sunflowers have been fantastic, we've got several different varieties but I think the 'Velvet Queen' has got to be our favourite and mingled with the rust coloured chrysanths they look amazing!