Its been a long time.......

since I was last here, Mr B dying has hit us all really hard and still we have a few moments where its still too sad for words. 

But in the garden life has continued be it plants or weeds and they are all growing at an alarming pace, especially now we have had some rain. Its odd that as a gardener I can irrigate my plot yet in some parts of Norfolk farmers aren't allowed to take water from the rivers and drains and yet we still use clean, drinking quality water to flush toilets.

We have had the best of the strawberries on the plot although the plants in the forest garden seem to be a bit behind and are just fruiting. We have noticed that in the forest garden the strawberry plants have grown taller and the fruit is larger than those in the cultivated plot.
 

Jarvis keeping watch

So much so that they have become a target for the blackbirds, I don't like to use a lot of netting in the garden in case the brids get tangled up in it although I do use it around the peas to give support and protect them.

Luckily we have our own security patrols, see left, in the shape of Jarvis and KC our two cats. They tend to be a better deterrent than netting or any of the flappy things I tie across the plot.

Brutus - as handsome as ever!

Brutus is doing well, his flock now numbers 8 since we lost a couple of hens to natural causes.

The eggs are still coming, but predicting how many we will get each day is a bit like picking the lottery numbers.  There were three today so the chooks have had a stern warning and been told if production doesn't go up there will be redundancies!

We have given the chooks a much larger run, they can wander about quite freely and in perfect safety.  I think this may be the reason the eggs production has dropped.  They get nosing about their run and forget why they are there!

Gooseberries

Cherries

Our fruit trees and bushes are looking good,
we have loads of cherries on the old tree and gooseberries on the old bush in the main garden.

The new gooseberry bushes are a little choked up by grass at the moment but its on my list.

White grapevine

We also have 4 grape vines planted in the plot and these have taken really well and throwing out lots of new growth so posts and wires will be needed pretty soon. 

We have two red grapes and two white so we will have to see how productive they are before we launch 'Chateau Southwellsi' on the wine loving public. 

Peas - the first pods!

Our peas that we started in the potting shed way back in March are now producing their first pods, we have planted some more seeds and these are now peeping through and will hopefully continue the crop for a few weeks.

We will plant another set of seeds in about three to four weeks time.

We have done repeated sowings with a number of crops by way of an experiment to see if we can gauge when we have stuff ready so that we don't get it all at once.

Radish

We learnt from experience with the lettuces not to sow too many at once as we had a whole row go to waste (although the chooks would disagree) because we couldn't eat them fast enough.

The same thing with the radishes.  I am the only one who really likes them but I just can't eat that many and I was pleased to give some away tonight to friends who visited.

I hope to get into the plot tomorrow and do some serious weeding and thinning out but we'll see what the weather has planned first.