One big job today was staking. The quinoa is quite heavy-laden now and was leaning quite a lot. Fortunately the bottoms of the stems are pretty thick and strong, so nothing was in danger of breaking.

The pink bumblebee tomatoes had also been busy spreading themselves over the ground and I made huge improvements to their shape with better staking. They’re cordon plants and I’ve pretty much decided now that bush plants are more my style. Sideshooting is easy enough when  the plants are small and you can see what’s what, but when the plants get bigger, you don’t need to turn your back on them for long for it to become difficult to see which are the branches that should have been removed.

Having not been down the the plot there was also a lot of deadheading to be done, particularly with the cornflowers. I’m not letting the calendula go to seed, but the empty flower heads show the seed shape so clearly, like seahorse tails. At some point I guess I’ll have to see if I can leave things to gain some free seed for next year.

This is black nightshade, not deadly nightshade and must have come in my meadow mix seeds, as it’s in 1 and 7. My favourite new fact is that the easiest way to see that it’s black and not deadly, is that the berries are in clusters, not hanging individually.

Suddenly there’s a huge pile of self-sown verbena in the left-hand bed. I need to see if I can transplant a few plants to the ledge. A wall of verbena there might be helpful. All round, really!

The chard has really woken up. I need to (a) find out how it’s harvested (b) photograph the damn stuff. I’ve done a lot of flower photos, but I feel my veg photos are pretty non-existent this year.

The rain we’ve had recently has encouraged growth and new growth. I need to thin out the new beetroot still. And up on the ledge all those little seedlings are the damn daisies that I shouldn’t have introduced. I need to keep working on the gradual renovation. There are still some big daisy plants that need to be dug up, never mind anything else.

There were some cape gooseberries sort of ready. They’d either fallen or came off when touched, but none of the fruit is ripe. Some cases have been damaged and the fruit too. I hope I might get something at some point though, as there are certainly lots of fruit on the plants that I have hidden all over the plot. They’re oddly ground-hugging plants, which doesn’t help their chances.