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We had a little rain overnight, but it was still very hot and stuffy today, which made it harder to motivate myself to go and Do Stuff on the allotment. But I got my backside in gear eventually and filled Roley Poley Oley,(my rolling water barrel) and trundled him down to the plot to supplement the rain barrels. They'd been topped up a little by the rain, but not enough to make much difference.
So as well as feeding everybody with Wazza Whiz, today did a bit of hoeing and now my herb beds look like actual beds again rather than outposts of the Great Weed Empire. My purple sage has gone bald in the middle though. Plenty of healthy growth on it, so time to take some cuttings to replace it with if I can get them to root.
The first flower buds are appearing on the runner beans and the broad beans have started producing pods - better late than never I guess! Artichokes will be ready any day now.
So as well as feeding everybody with Wazza Whiz, today did a bit of hoeing and now my herb beds look like actual beds again rather than outposts of the Great Weed Empire. My purple sage has gone bald in the middle though. Plenty of healthy growth on it, so time to take some cuttings to replace it with if I can get them to root.
The first flower buds are appearing on the runner beans and the broad beans have started producing pods - better late than never I guess! Artichokes will be ready any day now.
working
Heh :-)
The ones on my allotment don't do peace :-) If I leave them too long they'll mount an armed attack on the shed. And I mean armed - those brambles are sharp!
I hope your sage will survive. Many years ago, I put some ordinary sage in our front border; it thrived for several years, then died off very quickly, over only a few weeks.
May your beans crop well, too. I wonder whether there will be any edible runner beans in the shops this season? - in recent years, most of them have been left on the plants far too long, until they're a foot or more long, and tough enough to tow a battleship with.
We've got some raspberries beginning to develop, and there are enough brambles in flower around the garden to hope that we'll get a reasonable crop of those too.
I think the plant itself is Ok, I just should have cut it back more regularly to keep the new growth in the miggle. I'm not all that good at getting cuttings to root though :-(
Probably because they're marketing them to folk like my mum, whom I love dearly, but she boils her runner beans until they look and taste like seaweed. No wonder I grew up disliking vegetables!
Wouldn't it be handy if I could poke some beans down the intertubes to you! - we nearly always have more than we can eat ourselves and though I freeze the excess, they're never as good as the fresh ones of course.
I must get some raspberry canes for next year. I think I said that last year too :-)
There's a massive blackberry tangle at the back of my allotment behind the shed which generally gives us several pounds of fruit in exchange fo much swearing and a few bits of skin :-)
I sometimes wonder whether I should have done something like that with my rosemary; looking down on it from the window, it does seem mostly wood and little green in the middle. It's fine when seen from the front or sides, though.
Ick! The worst of the shop-bought ones do need boiling a bit longer, but like you, I've suffered wet-green-paper stylee veg, in my case from the school dinner cooks. These days, I have to strike a balance between Geoff's preference, which is for longer cooking, and mine, which is for brief cooking leaving the veg reasonably crunchy.
It would indeed - and I could post some plums and apples back!
Geoff brought some home several years ago, IIRC from someone who had too many in their garden and dug some up. We stuck them in, and they've grown perfectly happily among the various wild plants at the east end of the orchard. They look as if they'll be a bit later this year, but there are quite a few in their green stage on the canes.
I'll be making a similar sacrifice later this year :-)
I remember taking a trip in September 2005 on the Wells and Walsingham Light Railway, and passing what must have been a ton or two of lovely ripe blackberries growing untouched alongside the line. If I lived anywhere nearby, I reckon I'd have been out there in the evening with a few carrier bags, after the trains had finished for the day.
Couldn't hurt to take some cuttings anyway, I suppose. I tried that with mine earlier this year, but they stubbornly refused to root, as did the lavender and curry plant ones. Still, the curry plant is doing rather well, considering I originally bought it from the "sad corner" of the garden centre where it was cheap because it was poorly :-)