Outdoor Tomatoes

I have tried growing tomatoes for the first time this year. Unlike a lot of gardeners out there I don't have a greenhouse, I have a weird plastic tent thing that I used to start some of the seedlings off this spring but that is no use for fully grown plants. And isn't very good in strong sunlight as it seems to melt slightly.

So I have had to grow my tomatoes out in the open and hope that they didn't get hit by blight or anything nasty like that! This does mean that my garden seems to be slightly behind other gardens as I have not had any ripe fruits yet.

But I do have my first ever green tomatoes growing nicely :D Happy days!

I do have my tomatoes growing slightly weirdly, I haven't taken out all the side shoots as I didnt have the support to grow them that high and am more interested in number of tomatoes than the size of each of them. 

I may yet regret this decision :p

 

And yes I do have bright orange nails!

 
Fruit on the golden cherry tomato plant still very deep green but hopefully lightening soon :D

Fruits on the Beefsteak tomato plant, some have started to lighten already but some are still a deep green colour. The fruit on this plant came out first and so is further along in the ripening process than the other plant I believe. 

The only down side is where the plant is located this one gets a few hours less direct sunlight than the cherry tomato plant. 

Only time will tell me how this will actually affect the fruits.

Coloured Lavender

Today I have been lacking in motivation. Im not 100% sure why but it is turning into one of those weeks. From Friday onwards I am going to be super busy, with my results coming out on Friday, then having to be at the boat for 4:30 in the morning on Saturday to go sailing :o then either travelling to Oxford for a family reunion or travelling to Falmouth for work! 

Busy busy busy...

But for now I am taking it slow, too slow if anything. So to kick start myself I went to Portswood (the local highstreet) today and went charity shop touring and was good and only bought books (ok and one necklace to cannibalise) and met with a friend for coffee.

This trick seemed to have worked for a little time, and when I got back from town I headed out into the garden to do a little work. On the way into the garden I stopped to look at the Lavender bush that is starting to block the steps...

There are the typical Lavender flowers (deep purple casings and flowers) 

 ... and flowers which have pale casings on the flowers. Taking a closer look at these I have found that the inside flowers appear to be both pink and purple, although they have not really started to open yet.

I appologise for the quality of the photos my proper camera has decided to stop talking to my computer so I have to utilise the mobile phone camera for this.

Pink:

and Purple:

You can see the purple better in the close up:

I will have to look into taking cuttings of Lavender and glowing some new plants from them as I am planning on moving the Lavender hedge next year and having different colours in it would be wonderful.

Stawberries

I have inherited some strawberry plants from my mother.

Well Technically my sister inherited them, but the care of them seems to have fallen to me...

The first strawberry has turned red, and smells ever so yummy :D

There are more on that plant which have yet to ripen:

 This is the one 'proper' strawberry plant we received, all the rest were alpine strawberries.

This one plant has purple flowers on it instead of white:

I have spent some of the time 'planting' the runners so that hopefully next year we will have a number more strawberry plants. Fingers crossed.

Latest Arrivals

It seems that its not only my Gran who knows me well but so does my Mum.

When she and my father came by the other day she brought with her a new plant :D my very own Lilly of the Valley

its really nice to have this now as my other scented flower is starting to die back now.

Onto the seedlings and not so much luck here this time... I planted a number of squash seeds (again taken from a store bought squash I liked) but only one seems to have germinated. But here he is starting to poke his head through. Not much to see yet but fingers crossed.

Now this lovely bloom I do not know what it is yet. It was a plant that I believe made its way into my garden from my mothers. it has been hiding away and has only just shown that it is a flowering plant. But isn't it lovely...

More of these primroses (?) they seem to have been flowering constantly for the last few months. Much to my pleasure. But they are being attacked by slugs or snails :'(

My one long flowering daffodil in the front garden. It is currently much to close to the drive so will have to be moved but I am waiting for it to be over as I don't want to disrupt its lovely 'spingness'. Hopefully I will have more flowering soon but as of yet the only one to have opened is the one that was already in the garden, the ones I planted are a bit reluctant to shine.

Febury in the Garden

I had not expected to have been able to do much work in the garden this month as I have a VERY busy schedule at uni at the moment. We are doing what are classed as "short fat" courses because of the way they apear on our timetables as a 3 week long block of lectures lasting all day every day. Or it is possible for them to be that lecture intensive... Luckily mine have not been 9-6 every day and have given time for us to do their assignments fairly easily. 

Anyways enough about lectures. I have managed to get out in the garden a little this month as my photos of spring appearing proved, but this time I actually managed to do some garden work. 

In the second week I planted some seeds and used the space under our stairs to germinate them as it is usually nice and warm in there. 
I planted some tomato seeds bought from Thompson & Morgan and placed them where it was nice and warm, on top of the radiator covered in a plastic bag (as it said to on the packet) and I only got two rather sickly seedlings pop their heads up. 
On the other hand my butter nut squash seeds which were taken from inside a squash I cooked for dinner last year have come up brilliantly. There was possibly one seed which didn't produce a seedling and two are a little weaker than the rest but all in all I am very happy with these seeds :D
In addition to this I planted some mixed salad seeds in a planter to be able to have some fresh home grown produce soon.

A week on and the Butter nut seedlings needed potting on so my collection of sauce pots and bottoms of milk cartons finally had a chance to shine and became a selection of small containers (after having poked holes in the base of them). 
I also found a plastic 'greenhouse' in town for a fiver so decided I would have to try this out and see if it worked or not. It is a similar size and shape to a traditional cold frame with a zip opening at the top to be able to put the plants in and then close up again. I have decided to put this on the roof area that I use to pot up plants because it has a much higher chance of getting enough sunlight to heat up during the day here. After being up for one day I ventured outside this evening after uni and found that it had blown over, unsurprisingly since I did not fix it down at all. It now has two bricks to hold it in place and we will see how this works shortly I expect. 

I have placed the salad container and most of the butter nut seedlings under the protection of this device, but have kept a few in the kitchen incase it doesn't work. 

Today I actually did some physical work in the garden by de-weeding and de-creepering  the bed I plan to try and use for veg. 

Here is a basic drawing of the bed in question. I will point out that it says newly FORKED bed and not anything else which it may be read as... 
This bed has been left from when I moved in to see what would come up over the year and not much did, there was the odd plant in the front of the bed, otherwise this section was bare. 
The back of the bed contains a Jasmin and a few other unknown (at least to me) plants and a very strange rock feature (pile). The very left of the front section of the bed has quite substantial ivy covering with a well established tree so I have limited the edge of the soon to be veg plot to where the tree is situated. 
Today I dug this over and removed all the ivy and Jasmine creepers along with a large number of stones! I was very heartened to see a large number of worms in this bed considering how little has been growing there. I also mixed two bags of soil, which have come from my nans garden, into the bed to raise the soil level. 

Now all I have to do is to wait and see if I have the same level of success with the second set of squash seeds and see if the plants survive the 'greenhouse' experiment... 

New Arrivals

New arrivals to the garden lately have been yet another mint plant.
This mint was ressurected from a 15p reduced mint plant from asda and is still going strong. It was re potted into a larger pot and has been going since then.

Posher plants to have made their way into my garden is a Japanese Acer, a small Olive tree and a Geranium.
the acer arrived shamefully not from a garden centre but from B&Q... My mother decided that she couldnt pass by it with out buying it, the same with the other two plants. My olive tree is about a foot tall and I am unsure how it is going to survive and grow in my mini, english weather garden but only time will tell.

In addition to these plants a number of additional herbs have congregated 'in' my garden. They are living on the front drive at the moment waiting for me to plant them in the main garden but the bed is not ready yet. Although one of the lemon thymes has been planted in the gaps at the edges of the steps where I have pulled back the 'weeds' that was there originally and I am waiting to find out if it will take before I add the other pots I have.