Evenings are drawing in quickly now.

We have to come earlier in the evening for our garden tidying, but the low sunlight makes everything look beautiful.

An evening glow in the garden.

Yes, the Jerusalem Artichokes did flower!

Heliathus tuberosus

Seen in close-up it is obvious that they are a species of sunflower.

The Asturian Tree Cabbages are growing well. Their pale green leaves look good and do not seem to attract pigeons.

Pick one leaf at a time from this unusual Spanish cabbage.

Another colourful leafy vegetable is our chicory. The leaves can be bitter, but become mellow in the colder weather.

Italian chicory or Radicchio

The radishes have almost finished flowering, and are producing succulent crunchy green pods, a tasty addition to any salad.

Radish pods can be eaten even if the radish roots are disappointing.

A Feast of Flowers!

Rain and early Autumn warmth have helped to give everything in the garden a new lease of life. Flowers are still providing lots of colour.

Clary Sage and Marigolds

Sunflower with Penstemons

The radishes, which suffered in the drought and produced few edible roots, now have a froth of beautiful white blossoms to compensate. These should be followed by tasty seed pods.

Radishes in flower

The Jerusalem Artichokes are in bud and look dramatic silhouetted in front of the pale buildings. Will they too manage to flower before it gets too cold?

Jerusalem Artichokes are still growing taller.

A sunny evening in the Garden

Sometimes it's good to sit and look at the garden as a whole. That way we can see things we hadn't noticed while we were busy doing the obvious jobs.

Taking it easy before work starts

                                                                 

From our seat, this flower bed makes an attractive picture.

  

 One of our apple trees has been leaning over badly. It needs re-staking and so it can be pulled upright.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

Hammering in the stake.

 

 

Job done.

September already

Our last two Monday session were rained off, but eventually we managed to find a dry(ish) evening later in the week when we could catch up in the garden. The main job was cutting the grass edges and then general tidying.

The rain has encouraged our annual rocket seeds to germinate - in abundance!

Rocket seeds germinate quickly in the right conditions.

We also have some wild rocket in the garden. It is a perennial which we don't remember planting, but it is a tasty addition to salads, and very hardy.

Wild rocket

The Broad Ripple Yellow Currant tomatoes, which come up every year with no help at all from us, are ripening now. Tiny, but very tasty.

These plants will go on producing little tomatoes until the frost comes.

Late summer tasks

We have planted out some chicory (radicchio) seedlings.Their green outer leaves can taste bitter, but we hope they will heart up over the winter to provid succulent red and white inner  leaves for salads.

Tiny chicory seedlings.

 Dead heading flowering plants is always worth doing, to promote more flowering and to keep the garden looking tidy.

Dead heading can be quite a relaxing activity.

Salad burnet is a useful winter salad herb, as it is perennial and very hardy, almost evergreen. The young leaves have a cucumber taste, and look very attractive, as do the clusters of tiny red flowers.

Salad burnet (sanguisorba minor)

Summer days

Things seem to be rather quiet in the garden at the moment.  Runner and French beans are maturing and being harvested.  Grass edges have been neatly trimmed. Watering is still a big concern.

All hands to the tap!

The sunflowers are looking their best now.

Bees love sunflowers

Borage is a herb that self seeds so readily that we can have two crops in the same summer. Young leaves can be added to salads, where the flowers also look wonderful.  Borage is said to be the herb that was given to young Roman soldiers, for courage and comfort.  Gerard's Herbal (1597) states that the flowers "drive away sorrow, and increase the joy of the minde."

Borage - herb of courage.

After the rain - new growth.

No watering needed this week, thank goodness!
We were pleasantly surprised to see that our broad bean plants, which were almost dead after drought and black fly, are producing new growth, and maybe we'll get some beans after all.

Broad beans with a new lease of life

The flowers of runner beans "Celebration" and "Saint George" are looking very attractive at the moment.

Flowers look good, and beans will taste equally good.

It's time to pull out the old dry growth of plants like land cress which have dropped their seeds by now.
These seeds will germinate to give us salads in autumn through till next spring.

Self-seeding salad crops make life easy for us.

Watering is still our main job

We arrived at the garden this week just after a heavy shower, but we spent most of our efforts on watering once again. Happily, the padlock which allows access to the water tap is now easy to manage, after the generous application of WD40!

Looking around the garden this week, we noted that....

Sweetcorn is doing well

Courgettes do not hang around for long before being picked

Similarly, all the globe artickokes have been harvested.

The lemon balm is now in full flower.  A delicious tea can be made from the leaves of this plant, but the flowers are also very important for bees. Its binomial name, Melissa officinalis, comes from the greek word for honey bee, and it is a good source of nectar, blooming for 45 - 60 days, and continuously producing nectar throughout the day.

Lemon balm is a tough herb which seeds around easily

More rain needed!

Although we have had some rain recently, it has not been enough to soak into the ground, and we are still having to water beans, tomatoes, courgettes, etc.

Our self-seeded sunflowers are coming into their own now.

Sunflowers always make a good display.

 
Jerusalem artichokes, a relative of the sunflower, are  putting on some height too.

Jerusalem artichokes to the left of sunflowers

The Good King Henry is flowering. This is an ancient herb, the young shoots of which are said to taste like asparagus.  The leaves are a spinach substitute, and the flower buds can be eaten like broccoli. However, the plant can taste bitter, and the leaves apparently benefit from being soaked in salt water before cooking.

Good king Henry in front of marigolds.

Our creeping thyme has been covered in flowers, to the delight of bees and butterflies. This is not the usual thyme for culinary use, but it is still quite acceptable as a seasoning herb.

Creeping thyme at its best.

Promise of Harvest

Our dwarf beans (Purple Tepee) are flowering well now, and the climbing beans are also looking good.

Dwarf beans with pretty purple flowers

Climbing beans doing just that, among the marigolds.

Loganberries are beginning to turn colour and will soon be ripe. They are in a fairly shady position here, but they can cope with that.

Thornless loganberries doing well against a wall

The large shiny black seeds of Sweet Cicely are quite noticable. They will germinate readily all around the base of the plant, even in grass.

Sweet Cicely seeds

Ladybirds, blackfly and bees.....and bean poles.

Insect life was particularly noticeable this week in the garden.  Ladybirds feasted on blackfly, so helping our plants to survive.

Ladybird and blackfly on borage

More ladybirds on swiss chard

 Bees were everywhere, enjoying the echiums, borage and phacelia, and pollinating our veg as well.

Spot the bees on phacelia

Some of the phacelia has finished flowering, and is being removed to make room for sweetcorn.

Making a space for sweetcorn.

We have experienced some irritating vandalism since last week's efforts with the bean poles - one of the wigwams was pulled up and left lying near the plot. So we hope we have fixed them in even more firmly this time around.

We've been here before!

Bring on the watering cans!

At last it's time to plant out the tomatoes and courgettes.
However, some of the ground is so hard and dry that it needs watering before any planting holes can be dug!

Tomatoes need a lot of water after planting too.

We bought new hazel rods this year to make the bean wigwams.

Wigwam under construction

Here's one we made earlier

In our fruit area, the thornless loganberry is doing quite well. We have fixed some wires onto the wall behind it so that we can fasten it back tidily.

The loganberry needs support

We have a fine show of californian poppies at the moment. They don't mind the dry conditions at all.

Californian poppies with phacelia behind to set them off

Donations gratefully received!

While we were working in the Garden this week, Daniela & Ella, Cheltenham residents originally from Romania, very kindly gave us some seedlings for the Garden:

Daniela & Ella with capsicums, squashes & tomatoes for planting in the garden

We are always happy to receive plants for the garden, we like to keep the planting as diverse as possible.

The garden is looking very pretty at the moment, with many plants in flower ~ amongst the most spectacular are the rhubarb plants:

Rhubarb flowers in the foreground, with yellow mustard flowers behind & the silver leaves of a globe artichoke at the rear of the planting

Rhubarb doesn't really thrive here in the garden, as it's a plant that likes cool conditions & plenty of water (cultivated rhubarb is derived from species originating in Siberia) ~ the Annecy Gardens being iu the middle of town & surrounded by buildings are warm & dry & the rhubarb tends only to make skinny stalks. But the flowers are still beautiful.

We have planted some lettuces:

Red salad bowl lettuces

Lettuces are quite hardy & are unaffected by the cold nights we have experienced recently ~ we are waiting for the warmer weather before we plant out seedlings of tender crops such as runner beans, climbing french beans, squashes, courgettes, tomatoes & sweetcorn.

Last year some of the most striking plants in the garden were the Echiums by the main gates ~ these plants are monocarpic, meaning that they died once they had flowered. But there are plenty of seedlings now appearing in the beds. Slightly less showy than the Echium pininana x wildprettii we had last year is this:

Echium x scilloniense ~ I collected seeds of this plant in September 2013 from plants growing on waste ground on the island of Tresco; this is the only survivor, most of the other seedlings we planted of this died during the winter

We will be having a plant sale on this coming Saturday morning (23rd May 2015), between 10am & 1pm ~ please do come & say hello if you can ~ there'll be a range of vegetable plants available, as well as a wide variety of wildlife-friendly flowers for your garden.