Freshly Picked Lunch

There's nothing quite like picking your lunch fresh from the garden.

- A few home grown mixed salad leaves.
- My interestingly shaped carrots.
- A handful of cherry tomatoes which just taste so sweet.

Pesky Snails

My broad beans have been savaged by slugs and snails - the mix of warm and wet weather seems to have brought them out in plague like proportions and they're happily stripping whatever plants they can fit into their hungry little mouths.

They can be found clinging to the leaves of both broad and runner beans during the day - lots and lots of small ones hiding in curled up leaves, those that are left and aren't full of holes, or stuck to the stems and poles.

I also bought a dwarf sunflower the other day - having failed to grow any of my own from seed only to find it stripped back to bare bones (or the plant equivalent) including the petals.

Carrots - Seeing Double

I wasn't intending to cultivate a crop (slight exaggeration) of double carrots but that's what I appear to have done.

My extensive crop of three carrots was plucked from the ground this evening, just before I watered everything this evening as their tops appeared to be extruding even further out of the soil, so I guessed they might be ready.

Highly amused to find I had three interestingly shaped carrots.

Rootin, Tootin, Beetroot

Finally decided to take a look at the beetroot, which I'd sort of forgotten about even though I've been watering it each evening along with the other veg and picked a very impressive one this evening, so feeling very pleased as I've not grown them before.

Not that they're very difficult to grow - just a matter of getting them to sprout in the first place. There are a couple more to go but they A decent size, nicely red and a good shape, if you ignore the split on one side (that you can't see). Lovely red stems too, which if the leaves hadn't got so burn't can be used like chard.

First Runner Bean

The square foot garden is bursting at the seams as everything is really growing with all the recent sunshine. I actually found my first, solitary runner bean but a fine, foot long specimen. The bean poles have taken a bit of a battering from the wind and although I'd placed the runners at the back of the bed, being the tallest, but now that they're bushing out, it hasn't made it easy to get to them now that the plants on the fence have also grown out. No wonder I missed the runner bean. I'd normally pick them a lot smaller. I suppose I could pull up the dwarf french beans - they've finished now. Not particularly successful, I have to say.

The tomatoes are going equally potty. As usual I missed pinching out a few of the side shoots so most of them have two growing stems, as you can see. I'm feeding them like mad to make sure they have enough water and nutrients to get a decent crop out of them later in the year. Won't be too long now, as there quite a few green tomatoes forming and the ones in the hanging basket are starting to get some colour. That one really has been left to it's own devices with no pinching out as I thought it was a hanging variety and then realised it wasn't!