Mmmm, strawberries

The garden's going great. I just gathered a bowlful of strawberries for dessert:

There are lots more ripening on the plants outside.

 The broccoli is enormous, taking over the whole bed and dwarfing the poor little tomato plants in the back.

 

The silverbeet has grown completely out of control and I doubt it's fit for us to eat now - it's going to seed - but the chickens will enjoy the leaves.

 The sweetcorn and purple beans are getting there, slowly but surely.

And the onions and leeks are doing well too.

Even the spuds are coming along nicely in their plastic bags of compost (as are the weeds running rampant behind them).

We have had almost no weeding to do in the raised beds, which is fantastic - weeds only grow in the soil that we haven't yet levelled and covered with weed mat. The only problem so far is that the plants (broccoli and spinach) in one of the beds are not thriving, and some weird fungus has been growing in that soil. I think there was something funny about the compost we put in that one, but unfortunately I have no idea what it was. It's annoying, and honestly I am not terribly keen on eating anything that comes out of that bed because I'm not sure what it's growing in. Fortunately I do no not eat green leafy vegetables anyway so I don't have to worry about it right now!

Onions, onions everywhere

Well, not quite onions everywhere, but I have high hopes for the future. Eighteen red onion seeds, 18 white onion seeds, and 18 spring onion seeds have just been potted up in some lovely damp seed-raising mix, along with half a dozen chocolate pepper seeds just to fill up the rest of the tray. In fact I planted a whole lot of seeds today:

• red onion (sweet red)
  
• white onion (Kiwi gold)
• spring onion
• pepper (chocolate beauty)
  
• swan plant
• gilia (bird's eye)
  
• marigold
• mint
  

My Meyer lemon got re-potted too, as it's looking a bit under the weather at the moment. It was sadly neglected for the last few months, and when I finally took a proper look at it I discovered that it was infested with greenfly and most of its leaves were yellow or dropping off. Poor lemon tree. The last few weeks I've been spraying it with insecticide, feeding it, and trying to clean the sticky honeydew off its leaves (with limited success, it has to be said). Hopefully it will perk up a bit now.