It’s been a busy couple of weeks in the garden. Aside from the mammouth tasks of weeding, watering and generally tending to our plants that are already in their final positions, we’ve also planted a lot more out. Our most noteworthy achievement in the last fortnight is probably that we cleared the remainder of the pumpkin patch. We have now, for that whole square area that was lawn, removed all of the turf, turned the soil, forked in manure, made ridges for the plants, and planted out something into all but two of the positions. These final positions will be filled in the next couple of days when we decide which of our last five cucurbit plants in pots to plant in this bed.

We’ve also got almost all of our legumes into the vegetable patch. This involved creating structures for climbing beans (an X-frame and a teepee), and some staked netting for the Champion of England peas. We’ve also planted some more cucurbit plants out into the miscellaneous bed of the vegetable patch; namely a cucumber and a squash plant. The only cucurbit there before this was a solitary courgette plant, which had a mass of flower buds on, so I felt it was a priority to get some pollination partners near to it. I also spent an hour or so planting some more beetroot at the other end of the row of parsnips. Just as before, I dug a deep trench and then sieved the soil back in to remove the roots, stones and sticks from the soil. It grieves me to see beetroot so cheap in the supermarket, after all the effort I’ve put in to get probably a maximum of six or seven vegetables (assuming the slugs and snails don’t eat them!)

Still a few more climbing beans to go out, but most of the legumes are now in position.