Did some weeding, took some pictures

Today the weather has been much much nicer.

I woke at about 6am needing the toilet and just caught the sun coming up out the front of the house.

The view from out of my bedroom window this morning

I have then taken advantage of the weather to go into the front garden, around the pond, and clear some of the nastier weeds (I don't want to destroy the wilderness feel, but these purple flowered things are a real pain in the arse around the garden; they get EVERYWHERE).

I filled three wheelbarrows with weeds, pulled up by the roots but sadly leaving a lot of matting behind.

This is a picture of the complex root system of this particular weed; it is so multi-coloured and the fine filaments spread everywhere and, without removing all the stones, it is really hard to eradicate.

After spending about 45 minutes clearing, I decided to take the new camera around the garden, and the following pictures are the outcome.

Arty farty shot looking across the pond to the bench.

A brightly coloured leaf that caught my eye.

An old rabbit cage at the front corner of the property; the smell from all the pine needles that have collected in this area is delightful.

The external tomato conglomeration.

Yellowed old growth on one of the external tomato plants

Slightly battered looking, but still thriving; an external Chilli plant.

Chive Flowers

The apple tree, very fruitful...

Detail of one apple.

(click to see this in close up... you'll be pleased you did!) a spiders web with a fly caught in it, on the apple tree.

Seed pods on the Shallots arching over the grass, and some more of the interesting purple flowers.

Shrubbery growing across in front of the long shed.

Looking back a bit further towards the house.

A seed pod, very like a dandelion head, but not a dandelion.

A fern type thing growing out of a crack in a tree in the front garden.

I have no idea what this is, but isn't it pretty.

Another very pretty cloud of flowers on a bush along the front of the front garden, on the road side. The smell from all the flowers as you walk past this section of the garden is incredible.

Another of these really pretty flowers.

A beautiful spread of cornflowers(?) by the front gate - I can't shut the gate now obviously.

What are these? I feel I should know this...

The dead cedar tree in the front garden (taken with my lying totally flat on my back)

The excretions of some insect or other, foamed onto a plant branch.

Seed pods ready to burst and spread their burden.

An insect on a flower, having a nice long drink.

Close up of external tomato plant flowers, with a casing of some sort attached to the leaf in the foreground. Question: should I remove these casings? Are they caterpillars, and when they hatch will they eat all my plants?

This picture is taken with a zoom, standing in the patio doors.

Just before I took this picture, a robin was perched eating the berries. It flew off and didn't return all afternoon :(

The cabbage patch, taken with the zoom again, standing in the patio doors.

I have one other picture to upload from this set (ANOTHER, I hear you cry?! Haven't you put enough on this post) but I have run out of space on this blog! Apparently you only get 1GB of storage on Picassa for free. So while I wait for my upgrade to come through (all of $2.99 a month) I will be unable to put any more pictures on here.

First Tomato Appears!

I was just on the phone to my mother (happy birthday, by the way!) and while I was looking at my tomato plants inside and I suddenly noticed something that had missed my notice before.

I have my FIRST TOMATO!

I am very very excited.

So, for your excitement:

My first tomato. Get IN!

I have also started getting some buds developing on the chilli plants.

Nascent flowers on my chilli plants.

Hopefully I am going to have better luck with these than I appear to be having with the potatoes. The tomato plants are being very thirsty, and the plants outside are not as tall as those inside, but are looking squat and healthy with quite a smattering of flowers now.

In contrast, the Chilli plants outside are looking bedraggled and battered, but hey; with this weather can you blame them!

Finally, just for @ranty_pants:

My new camera :)

I think you have to agree that the quality of photograph from my new camera is really an amazing improvement!

Cheers

Some pictures on my NEW CAMERA!

So today's post is not really inspired by any progress in the garden, but by the fact that I have bought myself a nice new digital SLR and yesterday I went round the garden a bit playing with it.

So, without further ado, here are a selection of pictures I took yesterday.

Tomato flowers

The tomato bush inside

My drawing board, with more tomato plants next to it

Lily in the pond

Another of the lilies in the pond

Slightly different shot of the lilies in the pond

And again...

Clouds

Long distance zoom shot of a rose in the bushes outside the front of the house

The ditch at the front; needs clearing again ALREADY!

Honeysuckle close up

Honeysuckles again

Blackberry blossom close up

Blackberry blossom, and slowly developing blackberry fruit

Looking across the front garden wilderness (the pond is in there somewhere)

The front of our house

Our bench next to the pond.

So there you are, some pictures on the new camera and, while I have a LOT to learn about how it works, I think you have to agree the quality of the pictures has improved somewhat.

Digging up potatoes

Today I planned to have sausage and mash but, the kicker is, I was planning on making the mash with potatoes from the garden.

So, full of hope, I headed down to the bottom of the garden with my spade and my basket and looked at the main bed potatoes. Part of the thought here is that I know that the wet weather is causing tatties to rot in the ground around here, so I want to avoid that.

The main bed is looking a bit battered, what with the weather and what looks like quite an attack from slugs or snails or caterpillars. This highlights how little I've been checking on these plants recently

So I dug in, and what a disappointing experience it was!

I dug up two plants and all of them seemed to be very limited in their growth under the surface.

I have quite a lot of other plants in the bed, and I did select the smallest and weakest looking of the plants, but that above really is pathetic!

THIS is the one potato that I managed to extract from my brief dig.

That is about 10mm across!

So anyway, I'm not sure how you're supposed to dig these plants up as, digging the spade in made me worried about cutting through any potatoes (though with the size of them that would definitely involve more luck than judgement!) so I went to digging with my hands.

I partially uncovered some other plants just to check, and found some very small nodules like this so recovered them and left them alone.

I also found a white grub about 10mm long which I didn't get a photo of but squashed and threw out the garden, below the surface. Any ideas?

I hope the rest of my garden provides a better harvest than this!

Meandering around the garden

I do have some things that I need to do, which I will photograph and blog about, but for today, while the sun is shining (which does make such a change) I have just got a few random photographs of things I'm growing, both by choice, and in wilderness sections of the garden.

So, without further ado, here they are.

The forest of tomato plants inside; there are some peppers at the front, and three chilli plants in there too.

Shiny red apple on my lovely young Coxes Apple Tree

It's the Cabbage Patch, kids ;) little bit eaten, but still going strong

Slightly battered main bed potatoes, may need to harvest these soon..

Sweetcorn still growing well; though not as established as I hoped; may need to trim the overhanging trees back a bit.

On a walk around the garden, some beautiful flowers on a bush in the back garden. (Honesuckle - thanks @Clareyh) these are smelling absolutely incredible :)

Another beautiful flower. (A Briar Rose - again thanks @Clairyh)

The wilderness to the side of the main drive.

More beautiful flowers, this time on the other side of the drive.

Lilly plants on the pond

The wilderness by the pond; that big bush at the back is a massive blackberry bush and soon I will be able to start collecting fruit again.

The early blackberries... CANNOT wait!

Finally some strange looking flowers very low to the ground just in the wild area by the pond.

So there you have it, a few more photographs from around the garden.

I'm trying to buy myself a new camera (as these have all so far been taken on my camera phone) so hopefully the quality will improve once I manage to buy one at the price I want.

Coming up soon, I will be artificially inseminating my tomato plants. Oooh Errrr Missus!

Peace

Lettuce from the garden as a side

While I was weeding round yesterday I noticed that the lettuce was getting very crowded in one of the planters and thought to myself "I need to thin these out really".

Then, in the evening, while I was cooking myself a lasagne I thought "Oooh I'd love some salad with this, what a pity I didn't get any when I bought the lasagne when it hit me. I had the lettuce that I was planning on pulling out and throwing away.

As you can see, the bed is looking very congested, with a lot of small plants being smothered by the larger ones.

I pulled out the smallest plants; this is how your salad and vegetable should look just before preparation; with soil still on it.

My garden lettuce washed and ready to be plated up.

And here it is on my plate, barely 10 mins after it was growing in my garden.

I've eaten plenty of home grown herbs but this is the first of any of the "main crop" type plantings that I have harvested and eaten. It may seem like a small thing but I was so so excited! And it tasted absolutely divine, so well worth the growing.

I am considering starting another batch of lettuce off later today, to replace these as they are picked and eaten.

Weeding the Cabbage (and behind the shed)

The weather today has finally cleared up enough to get out into the garden and do some much needed weeding. It is windy, but sunny.

I have weeded all the beds and have noticed that, because I have been so disciplined in taking out even the tiniest of weeds when I am weeding, there are almost no weeds around the onions, garlic, shallots and parsnips. The cabbage, however, has not really been properly weeded so the bed was quite overgrown.

I had also, if you remember, covered the cabbage with bird netting. This has caused my grass cutting endeavours to not be able to get close to the edge of the bed where the cabbage is growing.

I didn't take a picture before I pulled the netting back and uprooted most of the foot high grass that was encroaching, but the picture below gives some idea of just how overgrown it was (if you look to the back of the bed, where I haven't yet removed the netting.

Pre-weeded cabbage bed

The interesting lesson that I have just learned today is, that really long grass was hiding a LOAD of slugs and they have been eating all the cabbages (well not all, but a lot).

Anyway, I think the lesson is, when the cabbages are no longer seedlings and you don't need to worry about the bird, take the netting off because you will NOT ever be bothered to pull out all the pegs and remove the netting whenever you cut the grass. If you don't, you are providing a perfect slug habitat.

Anyway, that's my lesson for the day.

Most of the slugs were at the left of the bed; where there are fewest surviving cabbages :)

Having done a full weed of the garden (about 25 mins of my time) I then decided to attack the waste land behind the shed, where the stingers and those horrible weeds with juicy purpley/red stems and roots which you can never get out. They are the bane of my life in this garden.

Anyway, three wheel-barrows later, and a completely full green bin, went from this:

To this:

Not bad going I think.

I now have to wait another two weeks before the waste of space, thieving git, council deign to come again to take away the pathetically small green bin that they charge me an arm and a leg to remove (when they can be bothered, or when it isn't 6 inches too far onto my property).

*breathes*

I was totally exhausted after all this weeding, as a lot of it was carried out kneeling down, or bent underneath tree branches.

Sorry there are no pictures of tomato plants; nothing at all has changed since the last time (apart from about 4-6" growth on each plant).