This weekend has been more about maintaining the plants in my garden rather than sowing seeds and adding anything new to my little patio garden. This can be as satisfying for me as sowing seeds and seeing them grow from almost nothing-seeing tomatoes flower and produce little green tomatoes that then grow into some tasty food is the best part of growing food for me.
What have I been doing?
As my tomato plants have now got quite tall, most have them have been staked to prevent them getting the wobbles and leaning over.
My nasturtiums have had a bit of a trim. A lot of the foliage that went sprawling across my patio looks a bit battered, so it is time for a hair cut.
My second sowing of seeds potatoes has been growing really well, so I’ve added some more potting mix to the potato growing bags.
Some of my seedlings have been potted up into their final pots today too. This is mainly tomatoes, a couple of beetroots and some onions. My other seedlings are still too small to move-some of my brassica seedlings have been struggling in the hot weather, but I hope some do survive long enough to pot them up.
Yesterday, I added some fertiliser to all my pots to give my plants some extra food while they are growing. I use an organic pelletised fertiliser that can be mixed into the soil before planting or sprinkled over the soils surface when plants are growing within the soil.
How are my crops growing?
Many crops are growing really well, including my tomatoes, sweetcorn, onions and potatoes. I am really happy with how much I have growing at the moment compared to last year. I have had a fair few failures too, but that is gardening for you, and the subject of a future post that I’ll be writing at some point this coming week.
Dahlia dramas
Around the start of spring, I decided that growing dahlias would be a great thing to do, as I fancied having some flowers in my garden and in vases inside. I’ve had tubers that have failed and a plant eaten, which wasn’t ideal, but a certain little cat by the name of Cuddles decided to add to this by sitting on the smaller of my two remaining plants (and on getting told off by my husband promptly decided to carry on not giving a toss!). This dahlia was then a meal for some slugs overnight! Gutted doesn’t describe it. While this plant is not dead, I don’t know how well it will grow back at this moment, but I live in hope as it looks like new leaves may be starting to grow.
Of the dahlia that got eaten by snails, that is actually coming back. New leaves have started growing from the base of them remaining little bit of stem. While a snail could finish it off completely, I am hoping that they have decided to finally leave my dahlias alone.
My one dalia that has grown from its tuber is growing fabulously well at the moment, so I am looking forward to flowers from this one at least!
Weather over the past week
This week has been a really warm week. We have had a lot of high humidity as well, which as brought a couple of storms. Over the past couple of days, it has been hot and windy but a little less humid! We have had 19.1 mm of rain this week, our high temperature has been 32.8 degrees Celsius, our low temperature was 16.1 degrees Celsius.
That is my week in gardening. Busy enough and hot, but we are almost in summer and I have flowers on my tomato plants!