Year: 2008

Good weather and crop updates Amazing weather these last three days, it was a pleasure to be outside and I took advantage of it to finish digging my last but one bed, and to plant spinach, some more cime, turnips, salad and barbe di frate. Hopefully tomorrow there will be a good shower and then…

Wildlife pond, slugs, crop updates, self-sufficiency and stocktaking. I have finished working on the pond: now it has a toad cavern, a sunbathing platform for frogs, and waterplants in it. For the rest, nothing very exciting: the herb bed needed weeding before I cover it up for the winter – it seems it won’t be…

Male or female asparagus, slugs, wildlife pond, crop updates. I was all set on pulling the female asparagus plants today: my plan was to create a separate bed only for them. However, when I got there no sign of either berries or yellow flowers (that yellowy thing in the picture should be one). Now I…

On watering and rain, pumpkin or squash, male or female asparagus. I hate watering, and last summer I had to do quite a bit of it, hence my raindance, which incidentally seems to have worked far too well! It is incredible the amount of rain that has poured in the last few weeks, and it…

Autumnal mood, wildlife pond and gardening, wind and staking. My visits to the allotments in the last couple of grayish days have thrown me in a blue mood: the lush green – both vegetable and weeds – is receding, bed by bed, and quite surprisingly it is affecting me! I do not know why, it’s…

Tomato diseases, millipedes v centipedes, crop updates, cabbage white caterpillars. The other day I was browsing the BBC’s gardening site and my eye was caught by the problem solving homepage on Tomato leaf mould… doubts tormented me about some yellow spots I had seen on the tomatoes in the greenhouse. Confirmed today: leaves wilted, and…