Its nearly all growing..!

It's addictive. Planting things that is. I bet that every gardener out there gets the same itch that I do, to constantly check on your seeds to see if they are sprouting, to see if your plants have grown an extra inch or another leaf. To see flowers start to appear and then the fruits and vegetables forming, growing, destined to end up on your dinner plate.

Every day I get home from work and give Phillipa a good kiss and a cuddle, and then off I pop into the garden. I get really excited looking at how the potatoes are growing and checking the broad beans. The few carrots that have remained in the soil are looking better and better each day that goes by. The strawberries have gone wild in their pots. So much so that I think they may be a bit crampt and may well need to be divided out into more pots for next year. They are now showing signs of strawberries forming, so we may well be eating them in a few weeks time. The gooseberry bush is looking magnificent, but it makes me sad to think that we wont get any fruit from it this year, but at the same time makes me excited thinking about the fruits it will bare next summer. I then get to check on my beloved tomato plants and lovingly remove any new growths that are coming out from between the stem on the plant and the leaf joints.

We have also planted some pumpkin, butternut squash and other squash seeds, and only a week later there are signs of growth in the pots. Nothing has quite broken through the surface, but the white stems of an emerging plant are breaking through the compost. Exciting times...!

These evening rounds of the garden aren't always joyous occasions. The runner beans and peas seem to have been attacked by slugs, and whats remaining of the plants aren't looking too good. I shall endeavour to save them, but I think we may have lost this crop.
Two of the broad beans have a black fly problem. We first noticed ants climbing the plants, and then noticed that the tops were covered in black fly. I have done my best to squish off what I can, but have far from removed the problem. I will not use any chemicals in the garden to stop these pests as I want to grow as organic as possible, but have read that you can spray the plants with a mild washing up liquid and water mix which should kill them off.
A few of the onions have also decided that they no longer wanted to be onions, and that they would instead tun into flowers. Huge stems shot up with a flower on the top. This sounds lovely, but the onion puts so much effort into growing its flower, that it takes all of the energy in the bulb to do so, and you are left with an empty squishy bulb. I can't complain though, out of over 100 onions, only 3 so far have gone over to the dark side.