It was very windy yesterday, so only one plot day this weekend. Still pretty breezy, but nothing much out of place, just a bunch of sticks and leaves blown out of the elder.

I stirred up the leaf bin and disturbed a bunch of ants. I’m not sure any birds were around to be helpful, but I left it open for a few hours in case. The two remaining sacks of leaves – wet leaves from Mrs J and dry oak leaves from home – have now been added to the bin.

We did a good job of training the cucumbers upwards and adding more supports. Suddenly I can see the two huge marigolds again and I don’t need to wonder about needing to move one. There a lots of fruits coming, but nowhere near ready to pick yet. Thanks to all the successful backup sowing, I’ve gone from having no plants to too many, all in the smallest bed.

I’ve also tied up the JBL better for their increased growth. Only a couple of females so far. The sweetcorn is still weirdly short, but now has tassels and tiny signs of silks showing. No idea what it’s doing.

In order to keep a better eye on their growth, I’ve measured the pumpkins from stalk to base: 1 – 39cm; 2 – 36cm; 3 – 32cm;  4- 19cm. They were getting admired for their speedy growth by Ms D today. Number 1 has thrown out a new arm of growth.

I strimmed all the edges before lunch. The grass itself is keeping pretty short at the minute, which is helpful.

After lunch I did some concerted deadheading, pick weeding and tidying. That involved things like cutting back the apple tree a bit, properly cutting down the geums and finally ripping up all the grass that had filled the back of the front border. There’s still some bed to bed work I need to do, but I’ve made a good difference with buckets of deadheading and buckets of rubbish this afternoon.

The garlic’s getting towards harvest time. It’s a little rusty, but not all that yellow yet. A few of them have bolted though, so I’ve cut off the scapes and hopefully we’ll get a bit more growth from the bed before harvest.