Growbags and Greenhouses -The WB Garden Blog

Yes we have had out first harvest of Broad Beans today (see pic below) just enough for our evening meal. Small and sweet they were as well. Mind, the dreaded blackfly has appeared on the beans, though  not too seriously yet. However, some of the bean plants don’t look as if they will produce many bean pods - but we’ll see…

Broad Beans - on the plants

The First Harvest

The tomato plants outside the greenhouse are in flower now, so despite the weather they are still managing to grow reasonably well. Speaking of the weather, we still have showers with brief sunny intervals really more like April should have been - and it is going to get colder this week.

Tomatoes outside Greenhouse (yes they need better support)

The lettuces are about big enough to eat, or take leaves from at least. I finally managed to spend a couple of minutes in the greenhouse, so I sowed a new tray of lettuce and some basil (I did plant some before but only three seedlings appeared - and they were just big enough to put into individual pots today).

Lettuces (and some of the ‘CD bird scarer’)

We found we had visitor to our garden today - a hedgehog (we have seen evidence before - droppings - but never the animal). See picture below:

The weather has been going through a period of very heavy showers and thunderstorms with periods of sun between. We’ve had local flooding - a foot of water down our street for instance, and more serious flooding elsewhere. What it has meant for the garden is damage to some of the plants - like the tomatoes outside, and of course soil splashes over things like the lettuce. Just doing anything in the garden has been affected - all the ground and undergrowh is wet, and even if it is sunny there is usually a shower about to appear.

To cap it all, work has meant I haven’t been able to get into the garden much in any case. However, some positives - we have had the first things to eat from the garden. We had a couple of radishes and some lettuce and rocket leaves in our salad the other day.

The broad beans are close to producing enough to eat, though I notice blackfly has appeared on some of them. The French beans are coming on and have needed canes to support them, but no flowers yet.

The tomatoes in the green house are now flowering (well two of them), but rather strangely one of the peppers inside now looks as if it isn’t - more on that when I’ve had a chance to look at the plant carefully.

The potatoes are now really big, and some look like they have flower buds on them, so I guess the early varieties should be close to harvesting - if I could remember which row they were…

The lettuce are coming on ok, but still not terrific, and the rocket and other salad crops still don’t seem to be growing very well apart from the radishes, which have really appreciated the rain.

The lawn and hedges have been growing apace thanks to the rain and sun so any spare time will need to be spent dealing with them …..