A tomato called .............?

With the rain being virtually non-stop on Saturday, I didn’t get down to business at the Hill until Sunday morning – & that only after a trip to Wilko for some canes, chicken pellets & some 75% off flower seeds.

The comprehensive weeding of the roots in plot C in the week has paid off as I didn’t have to do anything there, so straight on to plot B to dig up the remaining twenty garlic bulbs – which are a perfectly respectable size – a thorough weeding & feeding with the chicken pellets & then I could plant out a mish-mash of ten various tomato plants which have languished at home in the rain in pots for quite long enough.

Sadly, one of the butternut squash has not made the grade, but the other two look great & if we (ever!) get a bit of sun, I’m sure they’ll romp away. I thought that I’d had a brainwave by using the labelled tomato pots as cane protectors, and it wasn't until later in the day when I came back to pick some peas that I realised that they would be blown off in the wind.

After I collected the pots from way over in the gooseberry bush, I played a not entirely successful game of ‘name the tomato’. A little lesson learned there, then.

So that just left the legumes in plot A – the first job was to collect the last of the BROAD BEANS (aguadulce) & chop the plants off (left the roots as they something something something to the soil, which is apparently a good thing).

They’ve cropped for 7 weeks, have tasted delicious & I even have a small amount in the freezer. The two lots of twenty seeds (comprising a 20' double row in total) were sown a month apart, but the second lot caught up, so I’d not bother staggering them next year.

A satisfying job – working down the row with the secateurs, I bade David-other-half’s relatives a cheery good morning as they came to collect vegetables (presumably) for lunch having come (presumably) directly from church. They weren’t hugely chatty, but that may have been due to the all pervading niff of garlic which threatening to overwhelm all within 50 yards.

Cutting down the beans has left the peas flopping about (very aggravating, but – my – the peas do taste good!) & the dwarf runner beans with elbow room to spread out. They look rather spindly to me, but we’ll see how then get on now they have some light.

I fed the rest of the bed, & was contemplating planting out the celery, & sowing a couple of short rows of turnip & kohl rabi when the heavens opened. By the time I walked up to the car & the club I was utterly drenched, so went in for some shelter. I felt that a cup of tea was in order, so I decided to call it a day. Of course by the time I drove home the sun was blazing down … summer, eh?