Weeding friends, rampant artichokes and ladybird families
I'm looking at what edibles to start in my garden at the moment. Mark and Joe, a friend visiting from the US, very kindly weeded over half the jungle and covered it with a tarpaulin Easter weekend. That kind of friend definitely has a price beyond rubies (or more appropriately, emeralds) in my opinion! So I now have a blank earthen canvas to play with, and it's time to get planting.
The remaining part of the garden is still a tangle of weeds and wild mint, plus two very large and one small globe artichoke plants. Last year the two large plants produced three artichokes. I didn't harvest them however and the small plant has obviously grown from fallen seeds, which is rather cool - no maintenance proliferation!
Mark & Joe and the fruits of their labour
However I'm off to New Jersey for a week's visit to Jenny on Thursday, so buying seedlings will have to wait until the beginning of May. At the moment the only thing I'm definite on is lots of cooking herbs and some strawberry plants to fill the beautiful blue-glazed strawberry planter I bought last year (if you squint, you can see it under the table in the photo). So if anyone wants to offer suggestions to the Black Thumb Gardener here, speak up.
My sole surviving apple tree, the 'Reverend Wilkinson' (the one almost in the middle of the photo), has bloomed its little pink buds into lovely white apple blossom this weekend. I'm hopeful that as it's a self-fertilising variety I will get small apples this year. If nothing else however, it's a magnet for the ladybirds and housed a little colony of them last week; with lots of parents carrying around the tiny babies on their backs. The warm winter was good for ladybirds in general and the garden is full of little red five-spots and one-spots now, always a welcome sight. I'm going to make a ladybird house later in the summer. Hopefully this will encourage them to overwinter in my garden and come back next year to continue combating the aphids.
Ladybirds on the Reverend Wilkinson apple tree
The remaining part of the garden is still a tangle of weeds and wild mint, plus two very large and one small globe artichoke plants. Last year the two large plants produced three artichokes. I didn't harvest them however and the small plant has obviously grown from fallen seeds, which is rather cool - no maintenance proliferation!
Mark & Joe and the fruits of their labour
However I'm off to New Jersey for a week's visit to Jenny on Thursday, so buying seedlings will have to wait until the beginning of May. At the moment the only thing I'm definite on is lots of cooking herbs and some strawberry plants to fill the beautiful blue-glazed strawberry planter I bought last year (if you squint, you can see it under the table in the photo). So if anyone wants to offer suggestions to the Black Thumb Gardener here, speak up.
My sole surviving apple tree, the 'Reverend Wilkinson' (the one almost in the middle of the photo), has bloomed its little pink buds into lovely white apple blossom this weekend. I'm hopeful that as it's a self-fertilising variety I will get small apples this year. If nothing else however, it's a magnet for the ladybirds and housed a little colony of them last week; with lots of parents carrying around the tiny babies on their backs. The warm winter was good for ladybirds in general and the garden is full of little red five-spots and one-spots now, always a welcome sight. I'm going to make a ladybird house later in the summer. Hopefully this will encourage them to overwinter in my garden and come back next year to continue combating the aphids.
Ladybirds on the Reverend Wilkinson apple tree