7.5.14

Steadily growing

One month on and I've spent a lot of hours in the garden so far. Mainly weeding and watering. It hasn't rained since the greenhouse went up.
We had to pump water from Crazy Neighbour's pond into our water tanks just to do our daily spraying.

Luckily, it rained last night! About 7mm for a prolonged 20 minutes or so.
Phew!

So we haven't kept still all this time. We did get the odd spell of frost, which killed off an aubergine, some marigolds, basil and some Blue Mink Ageratum which I planted a few days prior. The courgettes also turned black, but they came through all right in the end. Also my hortensias (a blue and a white one) weren't too happy about the cold spell. I hope they will eventually pull through.




I've already harvested all my raddish. They were extremely tasty. A second batch are already sown and growing.


Our greenhouse has so far provided us with the perfect seating and drinking opportunity. It was an investment well worth the hassle. Just for the added pleasure of a prolonged evening under the glass roof. It's our own little drinking parlour, the table is my birthday gift from last year.Glad we decided on the 9 meter version of greenhouse, not the 6 meter. The price difference wasn't that great anyhow.



We have planted a number of seedlings that need to evolve into yummy veggies. 


From top to bottom we have three different tomato plants (I think Roma is one of them), a yellow and a red paprika, a cayenne pepper, more cherry tomato plants (about twelve of them!), cucumber, and two Frankenthaler grapevines. Also passiflora, kiwi, Van der Laan grapes and some salad are in the greenhouse.



Dr Livingstone bought a drip lead, which we snaked around all the things in the ground, so we only need to turn on the pump to water everything in one go! He also hooked the gutters up to a drain that in turn empties into a water butt which in turn opens up in a trench to get rid of excess water.

Outside I made beds for all of the strawberry shoots I managed to transplant. I also got in some three other varieties of strawberries which gives us a grand total of 5 now.
They are already yielding copious amounts of sweet fruits, which is exactly what I wanted.
Alas the beds look like I've buried the Belgian Red Devils there.


We made two veggie beds in front of the greenhouse, it is filling up with stuff as the time is right to put more things out. 


I leave you with a picture from the stable side of the garden. I'm trying to build some form of wild garden (managed of course), but due to lack of time it's not yet finished. The bulge with slates on top is the bee hotel facility. The trench I was talking about is seen on the right hand side. It's a kind of cloaca for the drainage system we had put in under the meadow (them orange things sticking out).