Surprise tomato!

Surprise tomato!

When we discovered that we were buying a new house, the first thing we needed to do to sell ours was to sort out the garden. A few weeks after our friend Dan had miraculously transformed it for us, Paul spotted a tomato plant growing in one of the borders. It was swiftly followed by another, on the other side of the garden!

It’s possible that they were seeded from fallen tomatoes grown in previous years, or more likely from the the partially-processed contents of the compost bin. Either way, we figured it was much too late in the year for tomatoes to develop, but we decided to allow the plants to grow in the flower borders anyway.

Imagine our surprise when Paul went out this evening and found this little tomato! It’s the only one so far, although there have been quite a few flowers, so perhaps we might see a couple more.

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!