Peeking Potatoes

Hello everyone.

I hope you had a wonderful Easter and you are now making the most of you Bank Holiday Monday!

We have really had some great weather in the last week or so, but it has been balanced by a monsoon like thunderstorm on Saturday evening. It was rather odd. The smell of barbeques were lingering in your nostrils, the suns was shining on your face and then BANG! Thunder and rain, within moments there was about an inch of water on the roads! At least it saved me from watering the veggies.

The vegetable plants have been coming on at the rate of knots since the middle of last week. We've had to cover the potatoes we are growing in bags a couple of times and I noticed this morning that they are starting to peek through again.

We got some Strawberry plants last week from somebody who had them outside their garden and just wanted a donation to cover the compost and pots. We took 4 strawberry plants and they already have flowers on them which is amazing. I wasn't expecting that so quickly. I did also notice that Marks and Spencers aswell as Waitrose are now selling British Strawberries. Summer must be on it's way for sure.

I was really surprised at how well the mange tout is doing, it won't be long until they will need some supporting canes. Elsewhere, the courgette plants are massive. They won't stop growing and I did not remember how much water they needed! Blimey, talk about thirsty plants!

Amy made me laugh a little earlier, she asked if the courgette plants had grown since we bought them. If you remember the pictures of our weedy courgette plants a few weeks ago and you take a look at them now then you can really really see the difference. Outstanding progress!

The one dissapointment we have had is the sweetcorn, it hasn't even germinated yet. I'll give it a bit longer but I feel this is a lesson learnt from buying cheap seeds... I thought that the runner bean bushes had also flumped but I am glad to say that in the last day or two I have had 2 germinate and the plants are already about 1.5 inches tall.

Our good life is really taking off at the moment, and we are both interested in adding some insects to the whole project. Amy really wants a wormery.. I have been looking at making them myself from storage boxes but Amy is very keen to get a can of worms or similar. I am perfectly happy for her to get one because the composter we have at the moment takes a while to cycle from kitchen waste to fertile compost, hopefully the little worms will hurry along and we can also get a nice liquid feed for the vegetable plants too.
Although I am interested in the worms, I am interested in adding another type of insect. The type that go buzz and make nice yellow liquid to spread on my toast. Watch this space... *very excited*

Martin