Blog by Pictures

Not so much a day by day post this time more like topic by topic.

So plant or crop/s progress:

Sweet corn tassels are turning brown as of 23/08/09

The French beans are starting to slow down but there are still a fair amount of flowers so I’ll leave the plants alone till autumn.

The borlotto beans were slow to start cropping but there are all manner size beans on the plants now some are ripening.

The dwarf ying yang beans I’m growing to harvest the dry beans which are under the outdoor tomato shelter are starting to dry.

Monday I planted out all the plug plant size Chinese leaves, mizuna, turnips, pak choi and kohl rabi seedlings which were sown about three weeks ago.

While I was out planting out the young plants Monday I saw the following critters:

Lots of froglets were in and around the vege beds but they were generally to quick for the camera but this bigger frog was in the boggy area under a log which I moved when I almost got distracted from the job I was doing. I soon got back on track as I didn’t want to disturb the frog so left the boggy area alone.

This little footnote is for Maureen you may not want to see the following pictures/ video attached so I have written the caption before the pictures and video so you could get the opportunity to scroll pass.

While planting out the pak choi I saw some movement out of the corner of my eye, it was a caterpillar wriggling strangely, on closer inspection I realised it was caught by a centipede which was trying to subdue it and drag it under ground. The following pictures and video spell out the DRAMA for you all to see, my kids were well impressed my the centipede’s strength and tenacity. The caterpillar did succumb in the end to the centipede’s poison. And internally I cheered the centipede on as it meant my soil was healthy with pest catching predators Yeah!!!

A male Orange Swift ‘Hepialus sylvina’ he’s a beauty. It was resting on the brassicus netting.

Freyer's Pug ‘Eupithecia intricate’ sorry about the photo quality but the light was shining from behind and when I disturbed it to hopefully encourage it to land on a better surface it flew away.

What’s still flowering;

New sunflowers are still opening.

This heartsease popped up in the asparagus bed.

The weeks harvest to date:

Monday.

Wednesday.

Oh dear there are now two bowls of tomatoes to get through, I‘m not ready to make sauces or sun dried tomatoes with them as yet, so thanks goodness for Allotment 2 Kitchen post on tomatoes last night. As it gave me the inspiration I needed, I hunted down some vegan tomato tart recipes and will be trying one of them tonight for dinner.

The tomatoes are really doing well with no signs of blighted foliage now for two days. All twelve varieties have ripening fruits on them now. And look at the size of the Japanese black trifle I picked yesterday.

I have also been cooking:

Monday night the yellow cherry plums (2lbs worth) I foraged last week was turned into jam using this recipe but I also added cinnamon, cloves, bay leaves and ground nutmeg to spice it up as these plumes are much tarter than the red varieties, I got three and a half jars.

I also got round to turning the harvested basil leaves a full nine cups worth into vegan basil pesto. I found with 3 tsp of salt it was a little salty so I’ll probably only use half the salt next time, oh and I didn’t have any pine/ walnuts so used sunflower seeds instead. It tastes great and I froze quite a bit in ice cubes to use in future pasta dishes.

Dinner last night was rice with split peas dhal and curried vegetables - perpetual spinach, patty pan squash and sweet peppers (see picture).

There has been increased bird activity in the garden of late. A large mixed flock of mainly long tail tits, chiff chaffs and blue tits have been visiting the tall pine tree and apple trees over the last few days. The pictures are not great as they are so fidgety its hard to get a good shot.

Long Tail Tit.

Chiff Chaff.

Blue Tit.

There has also been more magpie activity as well.

Here is a juvenile blackbird taking advantage of damaged ripening apples.

Well that's it for now I'm off to the garden to do some pottering.

Free Food

Had another lovely day out with the girls today, the weather was cooler and a lot less sunshine. I was able to get them out of bed early so we went arts and crafting at the museum again. Before I left home though I was able to water half of the vege plot and will do the rest this afternoon.

I saw these critters early this morning before going out:

He popped his head out of the pond as I walked by.

Mid instar nymph of a Hawthorn Shieldbug 'Acanthosoma haemorrhoidale'

Recently on the way into town I observed some trees were full of some type of fruit but not being from here I didn’t know if they were edible or not. But last night while checking out other blogs I came across one where the gentleman talked about foraging recently for cherry plums (sorry I forgot to keep the link for his blog). His pictures looked very much like the fruits I saw on the trees from the bus. So with this in mind I took along some plastic bags and after the museum we walked the bus route to the trees (which was about a third of the way home).

When we got there I could see quite clearly that they were indeed the same fruit and a taste test revealed that they were indeed plums.

We had a great time picking them and stuffing our gobs which was about thirty-five to forty minutes, then as the bus stop was literally right in front of the trees we waited for the next bus home.

In all we got 8lbs of fruit, I plan to make jams, pies, syrups, tarts, muffins, cakes, you name it I‘ll try to make it. The yellow ones were not yet ripe so we’ll check them again next week.

The area is on the bus route and it is a strip of land that sits between the main road and a smaller residential road with houses all around (the picture with the girls waiting for the bus shows this). It is such a pity the people in the area allow such a bountiful harvest to go to waste, there was tons rotting on the ground from some of the trees whose fruits had ripened earlier last month. The fruit wasn’t even hard to harvest as most of the trees branches were on the ground (if you click on the last photo you can see the grass in between the branches).

Last night I made a promise to myself to create a calendar specifically to mark the dates/ months to harvest wild free foods. I’ll also attach a local map to it and mark areas where I have seen fruits to be harvested. So that I can remember where I saw them when its time to go a picking.

Finally Getting Back in the Swing of Things....

I haven’t taken much pictures of what I have been up too but you will have to take my word for it. A couple months ago I blogged that I was going through a bit of a down moment which left me feeling a little lacking in motivation to do much of any thing and this included gardening. The result of this lapse in attention has been the reduced produce I have not got to harvest this month. I simply didn’t water enough or didn’t act quick enough to halt differing early pest infestations and as for successional sowing of seeds??? Which means that my beetroots and carrots are really small this year, when I harvest my last ready lettuce I have none waiting in the foreground (they all in the seed packet) and my brassicus have been decimated by whitefly.

Well late last week I finally started to feel like my old self was coming back to the foreground and started by cleaning up some of the neglected beds and happily found the kale growing new leaves now that the lady bugs have wiped out the whitefly, there was some Chinese cabbages ready to be harvested under all overgrown cabbage leaves and the beetroot is finally getting bigger.

I also got some more seeds sown kohl rabi, swede, mooli radish, fennel and some mange tout peas (yep I know its late in the season but I‘m hoping the autumn will be mild which should hopefully give me a late crop of peas). The spring onions and beetroots I sowed back mid July are making an appearance but the beetroot seedlings were mucked up a bit by birds scratching in the soil so I may throw a ‘handful’ seeds in the area and thin them once they have germinated.

The over wintered chard plants that I have left to go seed are like I said before a great attractor for beneficial insects, the area was a real mess all falling down into the foot paths and onto my celeriac crop. Well I have tidied it up using lots of canes, I don’t need the area as yet so now its been tidied I would leave well alone for the hoard of ladybugs and hoverflies visiting the area and maybe I would also get some seeds off the plants for sowing in the future.

Other jobs I got done over the last few days was watering undercover plants such as the tomatoes, sweet peppers, aubergines and plants in the greenhouse. Some weeding of the foot paths was also undertaken. The celeriac plants that were uncovered from the flowering chard and poppy plants were tidied up as well, following from advice I gleamed off of the web I removed some of the lower leaves and gave them a really good soaking as they have not really been watered by me. The area they are growing in benefits from a little shade so the soil in that area rarely dries out. But I think I will be watering them more often from now on to help them put on more size.

Some of the harvests over the weekend and the later part of last week were prepared for the pot before I realised I didn’t photographed it (see second pic), so you will just have to imagine the ones you don‘t see here. The later past of last week more runners and French beans were picked along with my first ready sweet peppers and spring onions. Over the weekend more courgettes, two Chinese cabbages, my only two kohl rabis to grow from spring sowings, spring onions, and other herbs were also harvested.

Today I’m afraid its teeming down with rain so I’ll have to delay my lettuce and carrot seed sowing till tomorrow afternoon after I return from taking the girls out. In the mean time enjoy the photos taken since my last posting.

Crop Progress

The first chillies to start ripening.

The male (see above pic) and female cucumber flowers of this variety 'Burpless' are really big and blousy, the varieties I have grown in the pass are normally much smaller and nondescript.

The Invertebrates

Beetles

24 spot ladybird 'Subcoccinella 24-punctata'

Cream spot ladybug 'Calvia 14-guttata'



There are three variations of the 10-spotted ladybird here are two of the guises they present themselves.

2-spots getting it on.

A pollen beetle an important pollinator.

Female Migrant Southern Dragonfly 'Aeshna mixta'

Female Parastic Wasp 'Gasteruption jaculator (L.)'

Lygus cf. pratensis. Family- Miridae

Field grasshopper 'Chorthippus brunneus'

Male Speckled Bush Cricket 'Leptophyes punctatissima' in his mating colours.

A couple posts ago it showed you what a hoverfly pupa looked like this is the larva which is a voracious aphid feeder.

Lacewing 'Chrysoperla carnea agg'

Well a picture speaks a thousand words, I didn't realise that pond skaters were carniverous till I saw this mass gorging on a dead wasp, blech!!

Garden Spider/ Garden Cross spider

Haven't shown much of these for a while but they are around and very busy.

There are so many butterflies and moths in the garden this year, it makes the place so much more cheery. At the moment the most dominant are the gate keepers and cabbage whites but there are still the odd early spring species to be seen like the speckled wood (see pic below).

I think this is a: Large Yellow Underwing 'Noctua pronuba'

Male Vapourer Moth 'Orgyia antiqua'

Medium Size Wildlife Seen

Friday morning when I went out to put tiles under the young squashes and pumpkins to keep them off the damp cardboard and hopefully away from the slugs, I checked a hole my husband dug for a fence pole to see if any frogs had fallen in as they sometimes do following a night of rain. Well I didn’t find any frogs but two young hedgehogs, I’m afraid its not all nice as one was dead DAMN!!! So I fished out the living put him in an enclosed place with some water and donated raw mincemeat from my neighbour. The dead one was well… thrown out and the hole was dutifully covered as it should have been (I did check it Wednesday but was out all day Thursday so I assume it died from dehydration???). Happily the little one recovered ate all the meat and drank all the water, then escaped.

Saturday must have been frog finding day as I found one in the pumpkin patch, one in the flower beds, another under some sticks in the vege patch, a medium size froglet in the boggy area around the vege pond and an injured frog in the vege pond.

Still a few fledglings around from time to time, saw this young blackbird calling it parent/s.

What’s Blooming

I found this plant growing in one of my raised beds. Its called Small Toad Flax ‘Chaenorhinum Minus’. From my research it doesn't appear to be rare in the UK except NI and less common in Scotland or up north but did find out due to modern farming methods it is starting to decline. So I'm loath to yank it out. I will most likely let it set seed but will sprinkle seed on the edge of the foot paths and in my flower beds. I haven't got a clue how it got here but one probable way is; the bed I found it in was bought top soil, that bed is also full of field poppies so maybe it came from a farmers field.

Coriander seed heads.

Hollyhocks

The buddlia I'm attempting to grow as a standard is beginning to flower.

Still have some california poppies, this sef sown one is in the raised bed with the cucumbers, onions and celeriac.

Not sure what this is but I planted them out along with other summer flowering bulbs that I got free through an internet promotion in the spring from J.Parkers.

I sowed these rudebeckia seeds in the early spring but by the time i got round to planting them out they were terribly root bound in theie individual cells in the seed trays but they have begau to fower at about a foot in hieght. I hope they survive the winter and are able to put on a spectacular show next year.

The sage in the herb patch has been flowering for months now, just thought I would share.