Time....

Sturon onions

    Time. How it flies. Two weeks more or less since my last blog. Somehow I missed a week. I put it down to the weather. Sunny and hot.
    So what has been going on in the last two weeks. Well mowing grass for one! That aside the vegetable garden is beginning to produce and plants are really starting to take off. The bit of rain we had certainly was welcome and certainly encouraged the plants to get going. Courgettes, spring onions, onions, peas, potatoes, a little haricot vert and a little mange tout have been harvested. Oh nearly forgot there has been a couple of ripe tomatoes! Least I got to those before the chickens.  Plenty of weeding done and more to do. More lettuce sown, cucumbers transplanted to an outside the poly tunnel bed, more beetroot transplanted and resowed lettuce and swede where seed had failed to germinate. Another small row of Swiss chard sown. Not my ideal vegetable but my daughter wants to try it. Volunteer (not deliberately planted) violet potatoes dug up. One of the Wautoma cucumber plants has a cucumber growing on it. In the poly tunnel the cucumbers are in flower and they are growing rapidly. The three chili plants look good and I am hopeful that I will get something from them. Having decide not to plant tomatoes in the poly tunnel I have now changed my mind and have been taking side shoots from other plants and growing them on. I gathered beetroot seed from the plants left in the tunnel. Gathering vegetable seed is very satisfying. The parsnip seed is all but ready to gather.
   On the animal front the last sheep has been sheared and normal maintenance completed (cleaning out coops). The hens continue to lay well, between seven and ten eggs a day!  Over two hundred eggs laid in June. Mrs Buffy has not yet hatched her egg (she only has one left out of seven) and I suspect it will not be viable. Our four Ixworth chicks are growing fast and the first two are now seven weeks old.

Squash patch

Parsnip gone to seed

First tomatoes..Gardeners Delight and Jens orange