We’ve made a bit of progress this week in the garden. It’s been spectacularly dry so a lot of time has been spent watering in an attempt to keep everything alive. We pulled our bolted chard, lettuce and radish up (at least making the most of the lettuce by turning the thicker leaves into pesto), and replanted the space with new lettuce and Chinese cabbage while we wait for the other chard seedlings to properly grow.
We’ve had issues to deal with this week too. The broad beans caught rust so we removed all the leaves and took out most of the more mature pods to give the smaller ones more of an opportunity to grow. The gooseberries have attracted the attention of a load of wasps – so we’ve tried hanging a homemade wasp trap to see if that acts as an effective decoy. We’d already netted the bushes to stop the birds stealing any more fruit so we’re hoping not to lose too much to the wasps now. And we cut back the peach tree pretty severely after we spotted silver leaf fungus over a large part of it. Our trip to our local vineyard actually made us think we need to change the way we’ve been pruning the tree (and the nectarine next to it) anyway. They’re just small trees on the side of the shed wall and there isn’t much space to grow fruits, so we’re going to try keeping to second year growth only, to see if that creates more fruit. We did manage to grow a small peach this year (no nectarines) but disappointingly on one of the diseased branches that we cut off.
John made repairs to both our raspberry canes and our first pea frame. Both frames were just poles in the ground with nets / wires between them and were bending together over time, so John put lengths of wood between them to make the frames more stable and hold the fruit / vegetables more firmly.
We’re starting to see some of our garden growing well – the cucumbers (for the first time ever!) are looking promising albeit are running out of space in the greenhouse; and we’re seeing pumpkins and squashes growing already. We’re trying to keep on top of tying them up along the vertical structures / arches this year so the space doesn’t get too congested and invite powdery mildew and an early end to the plants. It’s very exciting to see the fruits start to grow.
In our own back garden we made a tiny bit of progress – priming our new rendered garden wall. It’s not much but at least one step forward, and given we’ve had a full house this week with two changeovers, it’s better than we expected!
We also went for another trip to Dalwood Vineyard with our neighbours and another friend. It’s a decent walk from our house with some beautiful views along the way. We’re really interested to see the vines as they change throughout the year – it’s already incredible to see how much the vines and grape bunches have grown in just 7 weeks. And of course – we always bring back a new tip for our own garden. This time we were also treated to a surprise flyover by the Red Arrows! Very amazing since we we’ve tried to see them a couple of times since we moved and they’ve always flown over a different part of the Blackdown Hills.
Ley Farm Cottages 