Tag: fruit

First Fruit

First Fruit

We’re finally in to the new house, starting to get settled. Things have been a little more difficult than we expected. The previous owner was a smoker, and also had a great big dog. This has meant that we’ve had an awful lot more cleaning to do than we anticipated. We’ve already cleaned the place once, and had the carpets shampooed, but the entire house is still covered in a layer of nicotine and dog hair. Quite disgusting, and I’m beginning to despair of ever getting rid of the smell that’s still coming from the living room carpet.

But!

One of the reasons I wanted to buy this house in particular is because it has the most lovely garden. (Well, it will be. Once we’ve got rid of all the dog mess and cigarette butts. And pruned all the abandoned shrubs.) It’s much bigger than our old garden, about thirty metres (100 feet) long, and it already has a vegetable patch and some fruit trees. The pear tree is very young, and hasn’t grown any pears at all this year. The apple tree is also young, but has managed to produce about a dozen little Braeburns! Most of them are still hanging on very tightly, but we’ve picked these three which look lovely. Yes, a little nibbled in places, but we’re thrilled to have lots of wildlife in our new garden too.

We also managed to grab a couple of handfuls of sloes from the well-established blackthorn tree at the bottom of the garden. Although the tree didn’t seem to be excessively full of thorns, which makes me wonder whether they might in fact be damsons. More investigation necessary, I think!

It’s going to take a couple of years to get the vegetable patch sorted, I think, though there’s a greenhouse and a shed and a nice big rhubarb plant to get me started. It’s going to be a lot of work, but I’m really looking forward to it.

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!

First Strawberry

First Strawberry

The first (almost) ripe strawberry of the season!

I have seven strawberry plants tucked into this little terracotta planter. There are several different varieties, but I didn’t manage to keep the right labels with the right plants, so I don’t know which they all are.

This one’s definitely one of the little alpine strawberries though. It’s very tiny – not even an inch long – but I’m hoping it will taste delicious.

I plan to leave it on the plant until it’s fully ripe – and hope that the blackbird doesn’t eat it before I do!

Preparing the garden.

Trachelospermum jasminoides

Yesterday I forked over the area behind my Shed, dug three enormous holes, and planted the Trachelospermum jasminoides (Star Jasmine).

*fingers crossed*

The lady in the garden centre said not to release the ties that are holding the plants to the sticks until they seem nice and happy in the ground, so I’ll check on them tomorrow and see what’s going on. I need to run wires or string all across the back of the Shed first, as the plants aren’t self-supporting, but I’ll probably need an extra pair of hands to get that sorted.

I could have done without finding half a woodmouse floating in the watering can though. That wasn’t the highlight of my morning.

I had been planning to prepare some containers for planting vegetables today. Unfortunately my back is still so sore from yesterday’s hole-digging that I think it would be a really bad idea to go lumping containers and compost around the garden. As long as I can get the pots ready by the weekend, then I can hopefully convince Paul to drive me round to the garden centre and buy a bunch of plants. (Maybe next year I’ll get myself organised in time to plant seeds. Maybe.)

Don’t know what to plant. Tomatoes, definitely, but maybe a plum type rather than a cherry. Peas, would peas be alright in a pot? Apparently you can grow potatoes in a bag, maybe I could try that. I’d like to have a go at blueberries and cranberries as well, if I can keep the birds away from them for long enough to actually pick the fruit. I remember my Dad’s ongoing battle with the blackbird who was determined to eat his raspberries!