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What an odd gardening year it has been so far: The long sunny days in March and April brought everything on early and I was eating Asparagus at the beginning of April over four weeks early. However as we reached May the weather turned and we had a month of rain, June was a little better and so far July has been more normal. As a consequence of the weather I found great difficulties getting any of my beans to grow. It took four plantings of runner bean seeds to get a reasonable covering of the frame. My onions suffered from mildew and consequently died off early and were a small fraction of their normal size. I hear up North Old blightly has been attacking Tomatoes and Potatoes, I am not sure if this is a consequence of the weather or refound UK Nationalism as a result of leaving the EU The good news is that we have been enjoying beetroot, courgettes, new potatoes and courgettes for three weeks now. Of course the cucumbers finish about the same time the tomatoes start which is not very useful for doing salads. One of the oddest growth of crops is the peppers: They are going red two months early than last year but the early heat caused some of the larger ones to not form correctly Round the remainder of the garden the flowers are also confused with the weather as a consequence I have left many of them to have that slightly unkempt look, which has been helped by the blackbirds flicking the wood chippings all over my paths and it doesn't matter how often you sweep it up they think you are trying to hide something and five minutes later are back tidying up again. I have a pair of Song Thrushes that have moved in and a cracking job they are doing on the snails The compost heap is once again populated with grass snake eggs, I know this because for nearly a week a huge female grass snake was sunning herself by the compost heap, this means I have had to move over to using a different bin to throw my waste in for the next three months and around the end of August I will have to be careful for little hatchlings which will be found all round the garden. I have no problem with grass snakes (as long as they don't eat the compost heaps resident slow worms ) but where I live we also get smooth snakes and Adders - neither of these are egg layers so any eggs found in your compost heap are Grass Snake Once again this year I have been finding teeth marks all over my beetroot: I thought this might be rats but having put a couple of rat traps out (under that cardboard box in the pic) baited with peanut butter I found it was actually mice. Clearly the neighbours are feeding their cats too much and they are getting lazy. While I do not appreciate them digging up my beds to poop in, at least they used to keep the mice down The apple trees are equally confused with the weather and while apple day is the second week in October you can see I have a good crop of apples which are nearly sweet enough to eat (the wasps already think so)Looks like I need to do a bit more weeding Jo
Well, no need to think what name to call my one and only plum - it's gone. Some thief had it away during the night. Hope it choked it.
But what is the secret of growing basil and coriander outside? I've got some basil in pots sort of thinking about growing, but the coriander, well.