Saturday, August 02, 2003
I really have to try and update this more often, but I haven't been doing very much in the garden recently.
I've been having a big problem with my courgettes, they've been getting to a couple of inches long and then shrivelling up and dropping off :o( I asked around on some of the Home Education mailing lists (where you can usually find the answer to just about anything!) and it's been suggested that it's because they haven't been pollinated. This makes sense as the pots containing the courgettes were in the wendy-house greenhouse, and I've been forgetting to unzip the door; I doubt that any bees/wasps/whatever have been able to get in there to do the job. I had two choices - fiddle around trying to pollinate them myself with a q-tip, or take them outside to be pollinated by insects. Not knowing whether the courgettes were consenting to me fiddling with their fertilisation ;o) I decided to take them outside and let nature take it's course.
They've been outside for around a week now, and seem to be doing OK.
Of course everyone else is in the throws of a courgette glut right now, whilst mine are still virginal and fruitless *sigh* On Thursday I went round to a friends house in the morning and came away with a marrow (she'd left her courgettes way too long and they'd got enormous!), and then another friend turned up on the doorstep virtually begging me to take some courgettes off her hands as her allotment was overgrown with them. Not one to turn down free, home-grown organic veggies I was happy to oblige! You know who you are courgette woman, and now everyone else will as well ;o)
At long last the tomatoes have started to ripen! Only the Tomato Tumblers in the hanging baskets so far...
but the Budai Torpe plants are smothered in green tomatoes so I hope the sunshine this weekend will ripen them up.
Here's our first tomato picking of the season. Yum!
It's fairly obvious that I've been mean with space whilst planting the tomato plants out, they weren't far enough apart. These ones have become so lush I'm worried that I'm not going to be able to find the tomatoes in amongst the leaves! They're also taking over my poor Crystal Lemon cucumber plants space too. It's too late to move any of them, but I'll know for next year.
Whilst Karen (courgette woman) was round I decided to investigate the compost bin, as I had somehow managed to get a potato plant growing out of the bottom hatch! We opened the cover and found that the bottom compost is really lovely, but the shredded something or other that Karen gave me a while back isn't breaking down very quickly. I got my short fork out and gave it a bit of a turning over in there, but with these purpose-made plastic compost bins it's not very easy to actually get at it. Ah well, hopefully it will have helped a bit. I'll just have to get more compost activator in there...which just happens to mean dangling my six year old daughter over the top of it for her to wee in there ;o) I had asked for volunteers to pee in a potty for me but none of them would, but as soon as I mentioned actually weeing directly in to the compost bin Trinity was there like a shot. Adventurous, our Trin!!
Bearing in mind all the wee that goes in to the compost bin the girls (9, 6 and 3) are reluctant to eat the three potatoes I dug out of the bottom. I explained that there's poo and all sorts in the compost that we usually put on the plants, but they remain unconvinced!
