My Garden: 19th June 2013

Spying slug damage starting to appear on some of my broad bean pods, I cut my losses and stripped the plants bare, blanching and freezing the remains of the crop. As we’ve been eating beans straight of the plant for the last six weeks, I’m pretty happy with the results. I strongly recommend planting your broad beans in Autumn [as is often recommended] because I shudder at the thought of how depleted my crop would have been if the young beans had to contend with the slugs and aphids of spring and summer.





Shelled beans ready for blanching and freezing. Time will tell how successfully I’ve preserved their taste…





In three weeks, my pea hedge has gone from this:





To this:

Branch parts stuck in the ground are proving good supports with a natural look.

Sweetcorn plants are almost ready for planting out. I’ve learned that the male flowers emerge before the female so to assist pollination in a small crop, collect pollen from the male flowers into an envelope and hand pollinate the female flowers when they emerge. Sweetcorn is naturally wind pollinated and best grown in blocks rather than lines, to assist the process.

Beetroot is coming on, and I’m planting a few more seeds every now and then. Looking forward to eating the young leaves

Radishes are protected by plastic bottles because it doesn’t take a big fat slug too much time to munch through a sweet little radish.

I hope the spuds look as good underground as they do overground

After a failure of tomato plant seedlings, I managed to salvage two plants so hopefully I’ll still manage to have a late small crop

Last year, we ate our first Brussel Sprouts on Christmas Day and they were beautiful so hoping for an even better crop this year.

And inside, my cactus is getting ready to flower its beautiful bloom that it bestows upon me once a year. It’s coming late this year. It has flowered as early as April some years.

This is how it looked last year: