The salad box is coming on very quickly, aided no doubt by the sunshine and showers that are more redolent of spring than flaming June.

I have had another bout of weeding the vegetable beds and planted out the remaining minicole cabbages and the marigolds for the rose bed.

I also got a Borlotti bean kit going that I’d bought for a pound in one of the local cheap shops.  These shops are offering a lot of gardening kits – including grow your own stuff – so I thought I’d see how they work.

Salad Box 23 June

The black bucket that I planted up on Saturday is already showing good progress.  The sunshine and showers have no doubt helped.  The mooli and rainbow radishes were the first to sprout, followed swiftly by the turnip and radiccio.  There are only the carrots left to come.  The plan is to use the first thinnings as micro salad, then the later thinning as baby veg, leaving the last plants to mature out properly, alongside the tomato and pepper.

Salad Box 10 June.

Lynn has been away for a golfing girls weekend and with some half decent weather, I have made a bit of progress in the garden.

I have cleared the corner bed in the back garden, moved the carnations from a planter to the wisteria bed, planted out some of the dahlias we’ve grown from seed and potted up the newly liberated container with chilli peppers.

I have also planted up one of the old recycling buckets with an assortment of crops to show how small vegetables can be grown in small places.  The varieties are carrot (parmex and rondo), turnip (snowball) mooli radish (Tsukushi Spring Cross), tumbling tomato, sweet pepper (capapoca yellow), radish (rainbow, lettuce (butterhead and something from a mixed leaf selection and raddicio (Treviso Precoce Mesola).

In preparing the flow of plants I have potted on the first batch of melons, the next set of dahlias and some escallonia cuttings.  I have also got some more dahlia seeds into the propagator and taken some rosemary cuttings.

A combination of poor weather, golfing and of course work commitments have meant that recent progress in the garden has been limited.  We have been potting on some of the seedlings and lettuces dahlias and marigolds have all moved to individual pots.

We have also planted out leeks and some lettuces and cabbages as well as getting some melon and pepper seeds going (these were seeds saved from melons and peppers that we’d eaten just to see what will turn out).

We have a couple of beds either side of the back door, which have become rather overgrown.  One is the home for our wisteria, which has been great this year, albeit rather early.  There were also some very straggly hebes that we have cleared out to allow some more decorative planting.  We have bought some hardy osteospermums and gazanias for the cleared beds by the back doors.  The colour schemes are yellows and oranges to reflect the morning sunlight we get on those beds.

Despite the small amount of effort, the main focus this week has been on the vegetable plots.  I weeded all the vegetable beds (where seedlings are starting to emerge), prepped and planted the brassica bed with red cabbages and purple sprouting broccoli, planted out some of the red onion seedlings and pricked out the green cabbages.

Cabbages Kalibos and purple sprouting broccoli in the bed at home / Carrot seedlings Early Nantes 2

Parsnip seedlings Gladiator / Cabbage seedlings Minicole

Whilst weeding the asparagus bed, which is not yet showing signs of life, I discovered that most of the weeds were in fact self-seeded tomatoes.  As we were growing Marmandes and Sweet Olives in growing bags on that site last year, these seedlings may be interesting crosses, so I potted on some of them, to see what they turn out as.

Tomato seedlings (self-seeded)

We have also planted out the Mediterranean vegetables (tomatoes and aubergines – some in beds and some in pots so that we can compare progress.  The weather has been fairly grey and drizzly day so we have only had to worry about watering in new plants, leaving nature to take care of the established ones.