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Comment by Andrew Fereday on June 13, 2008 at 21:00

Grrrrrr! We have a pair of blackbirds nesting in the pollarded Hazel in the front garden. I've not seen much of them for a couple of weeks but over the last two days they have made a right mess of the small half seed trays which were merrily growing away with Mizuna and Rocket. I have had to take everything in the three trays that have been attacked and start again. I did manage to save a small handful of leaves but I'm hoping that the rest of the leaves don't go the same way. I tried to find a couple of hanging baskets which I could use upturned to protect the rest of the crops but I didn't have anything suitable in the cellar and Wilkos had sold out.

Comment by Andrew Fereday on June 11, 2008 at 20:55

A little more of the update:
The Mizuna is doing well and we have been beginning to crop it this week - it's more a case of thinning the seedlings out at the moment to let some of the rest grow on but I suspect that by the time I have thinned them out to my satisfaction, the remaining plants will be near to bolting! Our first lot of runners are fruther into flowering - the pot at the top of the steps is doing better than the rest and is actually flowering from the base. The others have the first few buds on them but haven't properly flowered yet.

The two pots of mangetout both have quite a few flowers on them now with three pods on the higher of the two pots and just one on the lower. It looks like we might get quite a few pods out of them though, as they have plenty of flowers just about opening. I've never grown mangetout before but i had imagined they would be a little taller than they are - the plants are only about 18" tall but that may be because they're in pots. If anyone can tell me whether this is the usual course of events I'd be grateful.

The rest of the salad leaves are doing well but not yet ready to start harvesting. The lamb's leaf lettuce seems to be quite quick to begin germinating but has slowed down enormously. It's still growing but is just so much slower than everything else. Considering that I sowed one trough with half lamb's leaf and half spinach, the comparison between the two is quite marked. The spinach has its baby leaves on it and would be ready to harvest if I didn't want to grow it on a little bit further but the lamb's leaf has only small leaves on it so far. I guess I'll just have to be a bit more patient. I have plenty of other leaves growing on to keep me busy at the moment anyway.

As for the little bits of fruit that we have in the garden, the first strawberries are almost ready (or should that be that the first strawberry is almost ready). The patio apple tree has some fruit beginning to grow and the blueberries are coming along quite nicely - they're not quite ripe enough for the birds to pick yet. Incidentally, my neighbour has a couple of blueberries in pots so between us we might not lose all of our fruit to the birds. If I do manage to get anything from them before the birds get in, I'll try to share them with the neighbour - might be enough for a handful on some icecream later in the summer.

Well, that's probably about all for now. Things are growing well, so I should have more regular updates soon.

Comment by Andrew Fereday on June 10, 2008 at 11:19

Ah, thanks for the post Phil.

I'll have a look in some of my books of words this evening and see what I can find out about Dill.

We've had a minor catastrophe with our Dill - they were left in a propagator yesterday which sits on a cast iron bench which gets full sun during the afternoon. I hadn't expected the weather to be as hot as it was yesterday and the two small pots of quite young Dill just couldn't cope with it. They didn't even wilt, just got completely scorched it was that hot.

Anyway, luckily the neighbour who kindly gave us our beans & sugar snap peas had pricked out the dill that we had given her and potted them onto two pots, one of which is now very carefully being looked after on the front doorstep out of full afternoon sun!

PRO Member Comment by Phil Voice on June 8, 2008 at 10:19

"I'm particularly looking forward to the first cuttings of dill on a salmon fillet with some salad from the garden."
Andy, I was going to post this before but it was pouring with rain and I didn't want to wade through waist high grass to get the picture.

Dill grows freely in the fields hedgerows where I live and this clump is growing just behind our Gite.

Does it have any kind of medicinal purposes do you think?

I know that Chives are deliberately grown where free range chickens forage because it is a defence against disease 9although I cannot back this up with a link).

I wonder if Dill has a similar effect with cattle because this has been traditionally a milk and beef farm in recent years.


There may be a more simple explanation because we had a row of Garlic growing in the grass above where I took this photo so it may well have been the farm vegetable patch and the seed from cultivated Dill may have been blown around.

Comment by Andrew Fereday on June 8, 2008 at 8:45

Just a further little update:

One of my neighbours has very kindly given me a load of sugar snap pea plants and two varieties of dwarf runner bean plants, which I planted up yesterday. Tim & Sarah grow quite a lot of vegetables, having a much larger garden then we do; they dug over their lawn a couple of years ago and put some very tidy raised beds in. Tim was thinning out the bean and pea seedlings and asked whether I would like any. I'm really quite pleased as I had been looking for some beans from a street-trader plantman but I suppose it's really just a little bit too late.

Anyway, I ended up making a wooden trough to sit on the middle of one of the walls around the garden and planted them all out yesterday. the position should be perfect for the veg as it gets sun almost all the way though the day. I've planted them in the ubiquitous multi-purpose compost witha bit of fish blood & bone mixed in the help get them off to a good start. The weather's much brighter today than it was yesterday so hopefully I'll be able to get a couple of pictures taken and get them up here as soon as I can.