It rained and rained and rained yesterday! Hooray! We haven't had rain like that for months.
Everything has just perked up and looks a lot happier. Here is one of my leeks which is sending up a flower spike. Any day now and it will be a mass of flowers, covered in bees!
Whilst at the Chelsea flower show, I made a few purchases! I bought myself a new trug. Just the thing for bringing back fruit and veggies from the allotment.
My eyes were drawn to a stall selling hand made, carbon steel gardening tools. This is a right-handed hand hoe. Hand made by
De Witt in Holland. Just the ticket for weeding between delicate plants!
You would never get this quality from any supermarket.
It is a really good year for fruit. I think the long, hard Winter ripened fruit buds on fruit bushes and trees. Look at all these apples on the end of one branch. If left like this, I would end up with a large number of really small apples.
A difficult job to rub off most of these little apples but in order to get much bigger apples they must be thinned.
So I thinned out each bunch to just one or two apples. I chose the best one on the branch and discarded the rest.
A strange phenomenon in my greenhouse as I look at these tomatoes developing in the greenhouse. This variety is Pink Berkeley Tie Dye, an American beefsteak variety sent to me by Dan on his Urban Veggie Garden. It looks as if 3 tomatoes are developing from this one flower. It also looks like they are all joined together! Siamese triplets! I wonder what will develop?
Finally, I managed to get most of my courgettes and squashes into the ground. I have Black Beauty and Defender courgettes. This year for a change I am trying to grow them through black plastic. These are just compost bags split open. I hope this will warm up the soil a bit more and keep some of the weeds at bay. Fingers crossed.
