Signs Of Life

Stop press, hold the phone. We have life of the fruity variety. Thanks to the warm spell we've been having recently the stuff in the greenhouse has really come on, namely the tomatoes and the strawbs.

We're starting to see the first of our tomato crop appearing. Above is the Shirley variety coming through. We're also seeing the cherry tomato plants start to fruit as well so the plans beginning to come together (the coriander in the tub's not looking too bad either).

On a less positive not, the pumpkins I planted a few weeks back have not exactly thrived. In fact they've gone downhill pretty disastrously. For some reason unknown to us, all the leaves have yellowed and curled up. From my limited garden knowledge I'm assuming this is because the leaves are getting wet and fungus is probably setting in. Therefore, my attempt at a fix was to remove the worst affected leaves from the plant and to put something underneath the plant to keep it up off the floor. It may or may not work but we won't know unless we give it a go. You can see the discolouration on the leaves in the pic below:

Just to add, the one at the top is mine and the one at the bottom is my daughter's

The slug trap Squirty put in last week(under the green cover in the middle of the bed) has now been topped up and seems to be doing its job as the brassicas don't seem to have been attacked again and we now have a slimy residue in the slug trap which I assume means we have payback. Boo-yah molluscs.

Our potatoes have also shot up in the past week. We didn't have enough soil in the beds to stack up over the spud plants so we bought some new compost and piled it on. We also went around picking the flowers off the top of the potato plants in order to stop them wasting energy on flowers and to get them to concentrate on the tubers.

We haven't bothered to turn the compost in as we might disturb the growth that's already occurred, instead we've dumped it on top of the soil in the hope that the rain will leech the good stuff into the soil.

In other news, here is the rest of the good stuff: