Things are going well ….

There’s nothing like the feeling of holding fresh picked garden produce and looking forward to not too far off moment when you can taste it.  The other day I gathered a bunch of mixed greens comprising wild rocket, chives, Welsh onions, land cress, beetroot leaves and lettuce.  The latter two are growing in pots and the others in the perennial veggie polyculture beds.  

Even in pots I am mixing things up to make small scale polycultures.  There is lettuce and spring onion, parsnip and beetroot, carrot and spring onion and a number of larger pots with a series of trial mixtures of green leafy plants, beans and roots. 

I had a lovely morning in the sunshine and have dodged rain showers this afternoon but nothing can damp down the joy of being outside and tending to my beloved plants, watching bees on the flowers and getting caught up with birdsong floating on the wind.  Here is a moment in time in the sunshine, dandelions and all!

I don’t do a lot of normal garden maintenance tasks but today I have removed some forget me nots that were coming to the end of their lives and a few other ground covers to make space to plant out more oca, Jerusalem artichoke, sorrels, spinaches, onions and herbs.  any other plants are growing happily in pots waiting a little longer before being planted out.

One thing that has not gone so well is a batch of seeds and young plants sown / planted into a compost that has proved to be rubbish.  It proclaimed its organic / peat free credentials and excellence on the outside but in fact using it has resulted in a number of failures.   Some seeds did not germinate, some have not grown above 1/4 to 1/2 an inch and others that did grow a little have turned yellow at the tips.   Comparing these poorly specimens to others sown later in a different brand of compost there a huge difference.   The photos below show the difference.