Potager progress

Morning watering. It’s a bit repetitive right now. Seeing as we have had an entire month of 30C heat and only 5mm of rain in that entire time.  But in the early morning cool it’s a pleasure.

I haven’t taken pictures of the potager in ages and wanted to update on its progress.

The narrow rows are working brilliantly. My favourite ones are mixed with flowers and carrots and parsnips. It’s hard to photograph them but the zinnias and the dahlias and the calendula are just starting to do well.  And the comos are doing their wonderful romping trick.

Double click cranberry and rose bonbon are doing the best of all the new varieties.

But I have hopes for the double white one too.

And the yellow achillea lift things nicely.

But back to the potager: salads are about to bolt so I have to water as much as I can under the shade cloth.  And I had my very first runner bean of the season so that’s great.

And this afternoon I get to harvest the first courgette / zucchini.

I also need to build up a proper bowl for these courgettes so they can be watered properly in future. I’m pulling off the male flowers and mechanically pollinating the fruit. I’ve learned you have to give nature a hand  in matters veg.

And I have to accept that my dreaded enemy – the mole rat – is hard at work underground. 

There is one in the cabbage patch and is munching away at the roots of some of my precious brassicas. So I need to either take action or just accept that he is harvesting plants and I just follow behind and get the leaves he leaves.

He (or she) also eats lettuce and has taken out two of my precious runner beans under one other row.  And I suspect it will be thus all season.

So you can boast that you keep deer out of the garden with a natty fence, but the enemy is within.

And one of the most suprising plants in the potager has to be a brand new one to me: quinoa.  It’s over two feet all now and I can clearly see the grains that will become quinoa when I harvest in the autumn. If they last that long.

I watered until I really had to excuse to keep going and went and grabbed a rake and bags.

Raking the grass on the lower terraces. Anyone would put that job off. 

But I had to get a move on before the sun blazed down and turned me into a melted ice cream puddle.

And the main task I have on this huge bowl of meadow is to nurture the little self sown oak seedlings.  Seven oak trees. That’s the plan.  And I have cleared each little plant, put up a support, and then mulched around each one with the rakings.

You can barely see them in the picture, but the small hummocks in the long grass represent young oak trees.

But in the heat and with me flagging I had to get a move on. So I bagged up the rest and trudged up to the potting shed.

I’m not sure what I’ll do with all these grass cuttings but they will do as a mulch for the shade garden.

Right now I need to take another antihistamine and endure this hayfever attack. Job done.