We’ve finally got every bed on the plot planted up!

Kale, cabbages, cauliflowers, broccoli, leeks are all in. We’ve also added trailing rosemary, ruby glow thyme, hot and spicy oregano and a mushroom plant to the new herb bed. We’ve got chocolate mint, morrocan mint, corsican mint and ginger mint planted in pots and three new lavenders (all edelwiess which is a white lavender) planted up. Why yes, I did have an early birthday spree at Urban Herbs last week, what of it?

We may not be doing very well on summer veg, the salad has bolted, the tomatoes have blight and I’ve still not had a summer squash, but I think we’ll be ok for autumn/winter veg, we have chard and turnips in already and all the autumn veg we’ve finally planted in, and we may get some sweet potatoes and winter squash, we’ll see.

We spent loads of time on the plot on Saturday and while we didn’t get to all the weeding and Ma needs to be watched because she was very proud of the bleeding heart plant (Lamprocapnos spectabilis) that she pulled up thinking it was a weed! I didn’t get to dead heading all the roses either but with all the plants in, there is now time in August to really get to grips with tidying and enjoying the space.

The next big project is the polytunnel and because of the hoo ha with whether or not we’ve cultivated enough of the plot we want to get it done this autumn. At the weekend we measured the space and had a bit of a tidy up. So over August, I want to get the trees trimmed and intensively weed the area where the apple tree is. Having measured, I will not be putting patio fruit trees in that space. I will be cutting down the apple tree, and our current two options are to move some of the gooseberries currently being threatened by the rhubarb or to finally plant the asparagus crowns, I’ve been threatening to plant for five years. We’ll see, plans change…

One of the weird things was that the cabbage bed grew something since last week. I removed it.

We’re about a week away from french beans and hopefully a couple of weeks from cucumbers and summer squash.

There is still work to do, but we can take a slight break from building and filling beds and do some gardening for a month or two…