Wait! What? Now it's August - blimey, time is moving quickly these days!
What a great month July was though. The photo above is from 26th July and this photo below is from 5th July - such changes, with the help of a lot of sunshine and, thankfully, a final bit of torrential rain so we had a couple of days when we didn't need to water.
We've enjoyed our first meal using the Pickwick dwarf runner beans. The beans weren't as long as climbing beans, but were tasty and so many beans per plant - well worth growing to get a slightly earlier crop I would say. And Jamie thinned out the carrots - look at those beauties!
We've had a few more broad beans but there were so many weevil grubs that it put us off eating them. We've decided to stick with over-Wintered beans in future, which grew much taller and arrived before the weevil. Shame, as I was intending to make broad bean hummus with this lot. (Do you like my mini-shopping basket? Cute isn't it!)
At the end of July we finally attached the netting to our brassica cage - we've only netted half of it this year. It's a great cage, really sturdy and about 6m x 3m and just tall enough so that I can walk in it.
We have some space in there to plant some more stuff - maybe kohl rabi and some chinese vegetables for the Autumn/Winter. If we have time of course! We've lifted the shallots, which have finally bulbed up a bit more but they've been rained on so I'll pull them for storage on the next available sunny/dry day.
You can see the mole deterrent (the small green item to the left) it beeps every 30seconds or so. The mole didn't touch the shallots but burrowed through the runner beans, so not sure how useful that was!!
And here's another comparison from 26th July and 5th July - just 3 weeks, lovely!
This is a little movie of some ants dealing with a mealworm that was intended for the birds. I looked away for a moment and it was gone - I'm not sure where they moved it to, maybe down that hole!
Great song title provided by Muse - singalong, if you can hit those high notes :-)
And then the next day we actually planted up our brassicas - Autumn cabbage, Nelson sprouts and Amazing cauliflowers. They were looking rather sad in the polytunnel - a cabbage white had discovered them - so we'll see how they do.
Great song title provided by Muse - singalong, if you can hit those high notes :-)
Its wonderful to see your hard work paying off, your plot is looking very good. Interested in seeing your ants around the mealworm, we had some flying ants recently - eek. So wise to have a brassica cage, i am only growing pueple kale this year for obvs reasons, so many butterflies around. I have not been that pleased with our broad beans either, so am going to give it a think if its worth growing - broad bean hummus was on my to make list too - never happened.
ReplyDeleteSee my next post..
DeleteThe plot looks great. We've never had grubs in broad beans, I didn't realise that they were susceptible. Ants have reached plague proportions on our plot. I can't just sit on the grass to week now as they love biting me.
ReplyDeleteThanks Sue! We have noticed the weevil marks before but not usually as bad as this year - we should have picked the broad beans a bit earlier.
DeleteI always thought red ants bit, but now I know that black ones do too :-(
I see, I misunderstood, I thought that the weevils were in your beans. we have weevil damage to the leaves every year but they only seem to cause a problem if the plants are growing really slowly. I think I'm going to have to tie up the bottoms of my trouser legs.
DeleteNo, you didn't misunderstand me. Unfortunately the grubs were in the actual beans - yuk. Just had to be more selective for making the hummus!
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