Rain or Shine
The excellent growing conditions continue to benefit the plants and seedlings on our plot. A bit more sun would be nice, but that’ll probably come later. Won’t it?
Our strawberries are plentiful but are currently all bright green. At this stage it’s nothing to be concerned about – we’re sure they’ll ripen up in good time – but visions of a million green tomatoes from last year still haunts our minds.
A fellow plotter claims to have picked and eaten their first strawberries of the year. Picked from the shelves of Sainsbury’s? No, definitely not.
I Will Remember You
Our long-running obsession with slugs seems to be abating. There just aren’t as many of them around nowadays. That’s excellent news for our plants, of course, and we can now concentrate on deterring the rabbits, birds and butterflies.
Perhaps it was the slug pellets that did the job; the drier soil; or perhaps they’ve overheard us continually moaning about them and decided to move on.
The only slugs we saw last week were a couple of fat ones in the coldframe. They were found dangerously close to our gherkin plants. No! Not the gherkins!
New Blue Moon
We were given a Guatemalan Blue squash plant a few days ago. It reminded us that we were planning to grow a selection of bizarre squashes this year but never got round to it.
Still, this blue Guatemalan number should go some way to rectifying the situation. We’re hoping that it really is blue but a spate of Googling hasn’t proved conclusive. Greeny-blue might be more accurate.
Having said that we also found an article stating that these squashes form the basis of the Smurf’s diet which has made us more confident that we’ll get the colour we’re hoping for.
Private investigations
Our radishes have grown extremely rapidly over the last week. Surely they must be ready now? A quick subterranean investigation on one plant didn’t prove reassuring – a rather feeble red lump was found.
But that was only one radish from the whole bed and, who knows, all the others might be perfect specimens. Probably best to believe that fairytale for now. It’s sometimes better like that.
