Spring is in the air

It has been a long, wet winter, but things are starting to look up at last. The mountains are still covered in snow and we are forecast some icy wind and rain for the next few days, but at least today was warm and sunny. The daffodils are showing themselves, the cherry trees are in full bloom, and the weeds are growing like crazy.

We have what I believe is a greengage tree in our garden. It is attracting bees at the moment, which I love to see. Bees are great.

We also have some variation of box tree which smells like cocoa butter when it's in bloom. Yum.

This chocolate-smelling-tree (as I call it in my head) is a real indication for me that summer isn't too far away, and if I get the chance to sit out on our deck in the sunshine and smell it wafting over me then I'm going to do just that. I've managed it for the last two years so let's hope I manage it this year as well. I can hardly wait!

Ugh

It has literally not stopped raining since last weekend, meaning we have had six days straight of rain of varying degrees of heaviness. Most of the week was made up of heavy downpours, but today we have upgraded to light drizzle interspersed with showers. I suppose that's an improvement.

Since it's too miserable to go outside, the garden has officially gone to rack and ruin. There are orange and green tomatoes still on the plants, and the last of the apples still on the tree, but I can't face going out there to rescue them. The birds are having a great time of it though! They will keep coming to the apple tree all winter, and I like to think that my laziness will play a part in keeping many birds alive through the tough times.

Regular visitors to our garden include:
Silvereyes:

Blackbirds:

Greenfinches:

Thrushes:

Goldfinches:

I did see a tui recently but can't remember if that was in our garden or in the park nearby. Probably can't claim it as a regular visitor!

The garden's a mess

The whole garden is a mess. Not just the Square Foot part of it, but the whole lot. Fallen leaves everywhere. Unkempt flower beds filled with the browning remains of summer flowers. Straggling rose bushes and untrimmed hedges. Shrivelled cucumber plants (still with a couple of remaining cucumbers) and tomatoes (still with green fruit). I don't even know what's happening with the pumpkin or the butternut squash since I haven't been out there in days.

I can say, however, that the leeks are doing well and looking healthy. The ones we planted last spring are pretty much ready to eat, and the baby leeks I put out there a few months ago are looking more like onions than grass, so they're on their way too. But the only way I know they're doing well is by looking out the window. Indoor hobbies have kept me away from everything else for the last few days. I've got to get back to the garden soon but it won't be today.

Summer ain't over yet, after all!

Much to my surprise, our strawberries are still going strong, and I picked a large bowlful of them today, including one absolute whopper. Will have to make sure we eat those tonight, as they go mouldy very quickly (which I found out with the last bowlful I picked).

I also found a couple of small but perfectly formed Green Zebra tomatoes, my first all season, and a good few almost-red Early Girls. I'm taking the tomatoes in before they're red, just in case we get hit by an early frost or a downpour of rain that's going to make them swell up and split.

Oh, and I found a lovely ripe Chocolate Beauty capsicum in the conservatory, so that has been added to today's harvest as well!

Pre-winter planting cleanup

I haven't quite given up on my green tomatoes and peppers yet, but the garden was well overdue a clean-up so we gave it one this weekend.

Out came the gone-to-seed lettuce, the non-performing green beans, and the dead sweetcorn. The purple climbing beans were harvested, as were the butter beans, the carrots, and the potatoes. I haven't weighed any of the weekend's harvest yet but we took in several large tubs of food.

The cucumbers and strawberries are still producing, so they will stay where they are. And, as I said, I'm still holding onto hope for the tomatoes and peppers to turn red.

Freaky carrots

What do you get if you don't thin your carrots properly, and let them grow pressed right up against the side of the raised bed? Freaky carrots, that's what.

Front (for reference, that's a 12-inch ruler in the photo):

Back:

I know it's probably fine, but I really don't want to eat something that looks like this. Would you?

Summer is nearly over

The weather has been getting cooler, and we're forecast to have temperatures of 2c (just above freezing) tonight, so I think our garden won't be producing its summer goods for much longer.

Cucumbers are still arriving thick and fast, and we have more than we know what to do with. We've harvested 12.5kg of cucumber so far and there are lots more on the plants in various stages of development. Not bad at all for about three square feet of bed space! Of course they have totally overrun their trellis now and are sprawling into the neighbouring bok choy and all over the path, but that's not a huge problem.

Tomatoes didn't do well this year at all. It's only now that we're getting green ones appearing, and I really don't have much hope of those getting the chance to ripen before the first frost arrives. I've gathered a handful of Golden Nuggets, three Aunt Ruby's German Greens, three or four Better Boys, six Black Krim (none of which I got to taste - they were badly split after being overwatered by accident), four Juliets, and maybe a dozen Moneymakers. Oh, and one single Red Pear. The rest of them - Green Zebra, Black Tula, Sungold, Brandywine Red, Cherry Sweetie, and Baxter's Early Bush - haven't produced a single ripe tomato yet. In fact a couple of the plants never grew more than a foot tall! If it wasn't for the Early Girls we'd have had hardly any tomatoes at all this year.

I've done a ruthless clear-out of any tomato plants in the conservatory that don't have flowers on them, and the indoor Early Girls that are persistently producing tiny, tough-skinned fruit (could be a fertiliser issue but it's too late in the season now to fix it). I intend doing the same outdoors, and after that I'll take stock. I know that this year has been a bad one for tomato growers all over the country, so the poor harvest hasn't put me off trying. At least I got to try my first ever green tomato! I will definitely be growing Aunt Ruby's German Green again next year, as they were just delicious. I'll grow Better Boy again too.

We did have a good haul of peppers this year compared to last year. Even the outdoor ones are producing well, although they're still green and therefore quite bitter. Indoors we got a few chocolate peppers and a good crop of sweet banana peppers, so I'll be growing more of those indoors next year too. I didn't have much luck with ordinary capsicums indoors but that's possibly down to the size of their (teeny tiny) tubs. Will try larger ones next year.

Hmmm, what else went well? We were thrilled with the huge amount of sweetcorn we got from our 12 squares of corn plants. Lettuce grew well, and there's more bok choy than we need. Red onions did great (I've pulled about half of them and will pull the rest at the weekend, now that the tops have fallen over on them). We've got a great crop of gherkins on the go, and I'm still getting a handful of strawberries every couple of days.

My potatoes-in-bags experiment didn't work so well. I harvested the whole lot of them a couple of days ago, resulting in about 1.5kg of spuds not much larger than marbles. They didn't have much growing medium and were rather neglected as far as watering went, but I'm not sure whether that was the only problem or if the weather/location/seed potato choice also played a part. Will try again next year, but with larger containers and better watering.

Our pumpkin and butternut squash plants are only flowering now. Since the supermarkets are now full of pumpkins for sale at low prices, I have to assume that ours should have been ripe by this stage. Bah. The courgettes are way behind too - we just have one courgette between three plants so far, and it's not even fully grown yet.

That's enough for now. I'm going to tackle the garden at the weekend and give the whole thing a bit of a clean-up, then see what I should be planting for the winter. It's all good.