Things That Grow: Garden Update

Our mulberry tree just finished fruiting after a felt 20kg of fruit and the remains are under the tree rotting happily away, staining the ground black. With the beautiful sunny weather this year and some better knowledge of how to keep our plants happy and healthy, our garden is growing like it has never before.

Here you can see the herb snail with the rucola bed behind it, which also has leeks and spring onions plus six pink fur potatoes planted inside.

The garden bed on the left in the front has our desiree potatoes, which have just started flowering (so pretty!) and behind them, which can't be seen, a number of peas producing fruit after fruit like a machine. Also in that bed towards the right we have our last spinach (most of them have bolted by now) and the garlic we just harvested this week (see below). We planted some dill and a single salad in there aswell, unfortunately all the other salads died due to a aphid invasion...

The Bed behind has our tigerella tomatoes, which since I took this picture (I think last week) have grown another 15 centimeters! They are producing their first fruit and I think our harvest will start in about two weeks *yay*. To the left of the tomatoes, with the closed a-frame, we have two zucchini plants. We had to close the shade cloth, because birds apparently are crazy for zucchini plants and flowers. This is how we lost all our plants last year and almost this one. So the a-frame will remain closed and we will hopefully harvest our first zucchini someday. Behind the zucchini plant we have a number of bean plants, two types whose name I forgot though. They also have just started to flower.

Not to be seen in the picture are our 4 Capsicum plants, which are in a box covered by a shade cloth, also because of birds. And we have four melon plants: 2 rock and 2 eater melons. The water melons I will feature in one of the next posts, because their leaves are beautiful! Also the rock melons keep producing flowers, which unfortunately just keep falling off due to lack of pollination. :( I have tried hand pollinating and will try once more once we have our first zucchini flower.

Our herb snail, by the way, is just starting to be growing to its full glory again. In the front we have moroccan mint and spearmint. The parsley behind it will be replaced by new already germinated plants, once we could save the seeds of the flowers. There is a little marjoram plant behind, which I am not sure, whether it will make it, and a few basil plants, which self-seeded from last years plants. Then we have a lemon basil plant (smells delicious!!), dill, lemon balm, chives, thyme, lavender, sage which just starts to grow, oregano and rosemary! The spearmint has started to grow many shoots and some of them pop out between the rocks, which I think looks awesome! You can see one in the very front between the rocks.