Tag: courgettes

It’s alive!

Sweetcorn

I’ve been a teensy bit busy lately, and that’s meant I haven’t had much time for blogging. Plenty to blog about, but no time to sit down and write about it! I haven’t had much time to pay attention to the garden this week, and I’ve mostly been watering it in the dark, so somehow I hadn’t noticed quite how many things are just about starting to grow!

Above, you can see what will eventually become sweetcorn. I’ve got four plants and two of them look like this, so that seems quite hopeful.

Teeny Tomatoes

Teeny tiny tomatoes. These are Sungold, and there are a couple of fruits on the Moneymaker plants as well. My other six tomato plants are considerably smaller, and really need separating into six separate pots. That means a trip to the garden centre, so they might have to manage being a bit crowded until the weekend.

Almost Aubergine

Look! The World’s Smallest Aubergine! It’s currently about the size of a blueberry, so I’m hoping it’ll survive and grow a little bigger. I’ve only managed to grow one solitary aubergine in the past. I had to harvest it when it was about the size of a tennis ball, before it was eaten by insects. And I still ended up sharing it with a woodlouse.

Proto-pumpkin

Hopefully this will grow up to be a pumpkin. I have four pumpkin plants, two of which are absolutely bursting with flowers. I’m kind of hoping that most of them are male flowers, otherwise I could end up with a lot of pumpkins!

Almost courgettes

This is quite exciting – there are about half a dozen budding courgettes on this plant. I’ve grown courgette plants before, but never managed to harvest an actual courgette, so I’m really pleased to see these.

Courgette!

And then I spotted this! A whole, real, actual courgette! So exciting! It needs to be a teensy bit bigger before I harvest it, but look!

Ahem.

Sorry about all the exclamation marks. It’s just that I’ve put a lot of time and effort into this, and I’m really excited that I might actually get some food out of it!

Benign Neglect

Courgette

When I came out of hospital I assumed that most of my vegetable seedlings wouldn’t have survived. I forgot to ask Paul to water everything for me, and although he did take care of the pots in the garden the ones in the Shed were left to their own devices. So you can imagine my surprise when I went out there yesterday evening and found that some of the seedlings had actually thrived on a week’s total neglect!

I have three courgettes like this, two pretty impressive pumpkins, and the sweetcorn and tomatoes are starting to show signs of life. No such luck with the peppers, or the tomato plants that I bought from the garden centre, but everything else in the garden seems to be doing okay.

Yesterday afternoon I popped the larger seedlings into some little pots, and decided that they were probably big enough to survive out of doors.

This morning I woke up to the sound of the weather report on the radio telling me that the temperature had fallen to -2° overnight, and that there’d been a frost.

This morning Paul woke up to a cry of “Oh no!” and the sight of me leaping out of bed* and dashing down the garden in my dressing gown to make sure that my seedlings had made it through the night.

The pumpkins seem fine, but the three little courgette plants were looking a bit sorry for themselves. They’re all now residing on the kitchen windowsill, just in case. Fingers crossed that they all survive!

*Turns out that leaping’s quite difficult when you’ve just had a hip arthroscopy.