Tuesday 28 June 2011

Tomatoes and carrots


I can't remember if I mentioned, some time ago, that I had experimented with rooting tomato sideshoots as cuttings. Anyway, these are the results of that experiment. I don't think they're ever going to amount to much - they are not nearly as vigorous as the parent plants, but they are growing, and they have got little flowers and fruit forming. They look as if they're going to be very small fruit though. Anyway it was interesting to try, if only to satisfy my curiosity.




And this is my first carrot harvest of the year. I'm pretty chuffed with these! I do like the ones that twirl around each other!


Monday 20 June 2011

Weedybeanz lives up to its name...


Until I took it in hand yesterday. Weedy beans became....



...neat and tidy beans!

Weedy onions......


Clean and spotless onions!


Most of the red onions had flopped over, which made it very difficult, particularly as it was too damp to hoe and I had to crouch down and pull them out by hand. It took hours.

Weedy squashes....


Spick and span squashes !



Here I did use the hoe, but most of the weeds ended up buried and will probably regrow, but at least they look nice in the picture.



My tomatoes are behaving very strangely. The leaves are unusually big and there are sideshoots growing between the leaves as well as between the leaf axils. And a couple of trusses have just carried on growing a stalk out of the end, which have grown sideshoots and flowers of their own. I've never seen the like.

The cabbages have been attacked by caterpilars... I don't know how they got to them, they have been covered in netting from the moment I planted them, but they have been munching away undetected for a while. I found cabbage white caterpilars first, and I thought I had removed them all, but I could see that something was still eating them, and it wasn't until today that I found a different sort of caterpilar, plain green ones. I don't know what they are, they are not quite as voracious as the cabbage white, but they are harder to spot and they get right down in between the leaves. I need to keep checking as I have probably missed a few. I don't think cabbages are going to be my best crop this year.


We had a little visitor in the garden recently, quite a young hedgehog, which seemed to have an injured foot. It kept stumbling over, poor thing.