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With all this wet weather and warmth, the garden is heading for overdrive. I did a little stock-taking tonight, and was pleased to see that the beans are having a mini renaissance, although there’s still not enough there for more than a few plates, and of course the dwarf French beans we planted at the weekend aren’t popping any heads up above the soil just yet.

I have one solitary red tomato in the greenhouse, but it’s amid a veritable forest of green ones. I hadn’t really thought through the implications of hanging on to so many good plants rather than throwing out all but three or four when they all germinated, and now I have a dozen sturdy specimens simply bristling with fruit.

If each plant were to produce only 40 tomatoes (and believe me, there are far more than that on some of them) then I would have almost 500 fruits. Can you imagine how many quiches, jars of tomato chutney and pots of tomato sauce that would make?

Reckon I’m being over-optimistic? Not at all. Here’s a truss hanging from just one branch of the least-developed plant at the cooler end of the greenhouse.

The carrots are now tall and tufty, with their green leafy stalks waving around in the breeze, just below the cultivated bramble, which is pumping out fat juicy berries almost as quickly as they can be picked. Tonight I plucked off 52 of them to add to the sizeable bag I’ve already thrown in the freezer.

And the last real development of note, not already mentioned here somewhere else, is the pepper trees, which although small are now starting to flower. I had thought that the buds were actually small peppers already starting to form (which, I suppose, they are), but now that they’ve beefed themselves up a bit it’s more obvious what they are. From this picture, though, you can see why I got it wrong.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 25th, 2007 at 9:29 pm and is filed under Garden. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.