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:
Gayle Souter-Brown said
I love the photo of the hedgehog. Unfortunately they don’t seem to find their way into our garden. I have only seen one locally in the 3 years we have lived here, crossing the road late one night.
Our garden is rabbit proof – we let ours run around like telletubbie land. Does anyone know of a way of letting/encouraging hedgehogs in but keeping the rabbits safe inside the garden at the same time?
Phil said
Gayle
Thanks for the comment. There’s been more hedgehog activity recently if you look at the posts and I’ve included a picture today of the hedgehog taken only lat week.
As for encouraging – while your garden is ‘rabbit-proof’ then they won’t get in. However, I guess in winter & spring before it gets warm you might not let the rabbits out much If you can keep them inside for a few weeks and create some holes in your fences/hedges to alllow hedgehogs to get in, that might help. You also need som farily dense indergrowth along the hedge/fence bottoms so they can move around without being seen and also be a good source of food like slugs and insects. We only knew we had a hedgehog when I found some droppings on our patio – they are quite unmistakable, black about the sixe of a medicine capsule and full of insect remains such as beetle wing cases.
Good lukc!