If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!I had two companions while out watering the plot last night. Here’s one. The loveable lazy cat who likes nothing better than to be made a fuss of while slobbing out on the bed (the towel keeps his hair […]

Home-grown sprouts
Sprouts are the king of all veg, and if they’re associated with any time of year it’s Christmas. So we headed out into the garden to harvest the first of our crop this week, and served them up for lunch yesterday. They tasted fantastic.
Really full of flavour, and cooked to perfection after telly advice […]

The plot is starting to get a little bit rough around the edges. Nothing serious, but it could do with a little tidy-up, which is proving difficult now that the nights are drawing in. You can’t very well be rooting up your carrots or trimming back the wildest leaves on your cabbages in the dark […]

Something is up with the carrots. We pulled some to eat tonight, and when we peeled them they had black patches beneath the skin, almost like something had been in there eating them.
I don’t know whether it’s the whole run of just the ones we pulled today, but I suspect this is an attack of […]

The tiniest carrot ever
Everything we’ve grown and eaten from the garden has been nice so far, but I’ve doubted that in many cases they were better than what we could have bought from the shops. The strawberries (all 24 of them) were more strawberryish, and the smaller tomatoes have all been very intense. The broccoli […]

How can so much happen in a single week? When we headed off to Cornwall last weekend, the garden was happily pootling along. Today we come back, and a week of sunshine and some careful watering from the builder has seen the whole place go mad.
The greenhouse was laden with countless red and yellow tomatoes, […]

The first batch of tomatoes
Today was an exciting one, as the first batch of tomatoes was finally ready for picking. It’s a lovely thing to do, as the vines smell so good when you snip them, and of course you get the bonus of a colourful bowl of fruit, too.
In terms of the whole crop, […]

I’m having some problems with nibbling nasties on the plot. Something is eating my lettuces, and it certainly isn’t me.
Here’s what most of them look like:

And here’s what one once-fine specimen now looks like:

That was taken a couple of days ago, and now the tiny remnants of that plant have totally disappeared. And yet whatever […]

Freshly-pulled beetroot
Another two first-time harvests this weekend, after five and a bit hours of shovelling five tons of shingle from the front drive to the very back of the garden.
First was broccoli on Friday night. You cut it off as individual florets, rather than taking off the whole head in one go as they do […]

Squash saplings
We’re starting to run low on beans. We took another 580 grams from the runners and 225 grams from the French on Wednesday, and while there are a few slim pickings left on the runners, the French are pretty well exhausted.
I think that’s down to growing them in pots rather than the ground, as […]