My garden has really come into itself this month. Most flowers are in full bloom, making me realise that I need to do some research into what I can grow to fill the gap between my spring bulbs and mid summer when my garden was so bare! All my herbs are in bloom too, making the front garden gloriously fragranced.
It's also a little wild though! I am regretting growing so many nasturtiums. They are drowning out my opium poppies which have decided to flower for a second time this summer, as well as the more delicate but no less prolific Californian poppies.
The veg patch is doing a great job of keeping the food bills down (and we all need that right now!!) as we have been living off salads and snacking on the peas on mangetout, which are still fruiting happily. I'm still throwing bags of lettuce over the fence to neighbours, and made a huge batch of lovely lettuce, apple mint and pea soup to deal with the remaining surplus. I've also been experimenting with thinnings, as I'm so reluctant to throw any thinned seedlings away I've been replanting them elsewhere and giving them to friends. We've decided that salisfy does not appreciate being moved, so in future the weaker seedlings shall be resigned to the compost heap.
I have new seedlings sprouting up to see how they fare being sown mid summer. To be honest I also wanted to use up some of the packets of seeds. That's another lesson learnt this year - stop buying so many seeds!
The flowers a the end of the patch in this photo are the radishes that I let go to seed. I remember Alys Fowler doing this in her programme The Edible Garden, recommending that they go rather well with beer, sounds good to me!
You can just see two scrawny courgette plants at the bottom of this photo - I managed to rescue these after being almost decimated by slugs a few months ago. One of them is thanking me by starting to fruit at last!
The asparagus pea plants are still tiny, and took an age to germinate but what pretty flowers! I'm really looking forward to tasting these. It has been hard work keeping the slugs away from these guys and munching on my beautiful curly lettuces edging the pot. The effect is somewhat ruined by the smattering of bright blue slug pellets I ended up having to buy in bulk.
I've started planning a winter veg patch too... but we'll go into that at a later date. Right now I need to go pull up some greedy nasturtiums!
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