I’ve been a little slack posting here, so by way of a couple of videos, here’s an update on some of what I’ve been up to. I hope to have some news on the job front soon, and will cover that separately when I do.
We took the dogs to Emsworth for a swim yesterday. Only really the first time that Ruby has properly been swimming. The video is fairly low quality as I didn’t want to take my expensive camera out over the water with me, so I was using an older one, that I was less worried about dropping, but the quality isn’t as good.
Our garden seems to have become quite popular with a certain juvenile magpie, he’s taken a shine to one of the fatball feeders (rain or shine) and his acrobatics trying to get to the fastballs is quite entertaining. He’s fascinating to watch, particularly recently as he’s been trying to work out if he can dislodge the feeder from the tree branch to forgo his acrobatics (he hasn’t succeeded yet).
I wasn’t going to grow any tomatoes this year. The previous couple of years, have resulted in such a dismal crop of fruit, that it really wasn’t worth the effort, so I thought I’d take a year off from tomatoes and just grow cucumbers instead.
That was until two separate people offered me a couple of plants. I changed my mind, not because I was particularly expecting any greater success, but because I thought I’d just give it a go, and I never like to turn down a gift of plants.
Now the first lot had the label in the picture to the left, not very revealing. The second, the person who gave them to me was honest and said, he had no idea what they were, but he knew he’d sown a cherry and a beefsteak variety, so they would be one or the other. So I took them, grew them on, and eventually planted them into their final spot, when the first flowering trusses appeared.
They’ve grown quite successfully, and I now have green fruits on both plants. It looks as though the cherry / beefsteak are in fact both beefsteak, or some kind of weird heirloom beefsteak, as they have grown some interesting fruit.
Weird Fruit
The others are slightly more interesting. They rapidly grew fruit, and at first I thought they were going to be the good old gardner’s staple, Moneymaker. However, something weird started to happen. The fruits grew to a standard tomato size and started to ripen, turning from green, to yellow. They did not however reach the red that you would expect from a tomato. Instead they seemed to hold as this golden yellow for days. Eventually I realised that perhaps this was their final show, so I picked one. Now slightly over-ripe, they were a great tasting tomato, but they were never going to be red, only ever a golden yellow.
Never Going To Be Red
I’ve still no clue as to what variety they really are, just that they taste great. Always a bit exciting to grow a new plant, even when it’s only the humble tomato!
I paid an early morning visit to the allotment today. It’s the first time that I’ve made it down there since last weekend, due to other things going on, but everything at first glance looked okay. Or at least so I thought, because then I noticed that there were a few potatoes sitting on the surface of the plot, when really they should be still buried under ground. It looks as though something, my guess would be a fox, has been digging them up.
I don’t really mind sharing some of my crops, however they haven’t been taken away, just left on the surface, so obviously they’re not tasty unless cooked!
I think tomorrow, I will dig up the remainder, which is a job I need to do anyway, as I don’t want to loose the crop, from an over curious visitor 🙂
Cabbage White ButterflyI spent this morning on the allotment as I hadn’t spent much time there yesterday with having to pick Ruby up from the vet. As she was clearly much better I took a couple of hours to do some weeding and watering, as well as harvesting a few things – broccoli, red gooseberries and loganberries in particular.
It was an overcast morning, which thankfully kept the temperatures down, there were also a number of birds about, in particular blackbirds singing and my robin friend was back, keeping a check that I was doing the weeding right and uncovering insects for him to eat.
Checking on insect provision
Last year we had both black and pink Hollyhock in our garden. This year we have neither but we do have the red one pictured above. I can only assume that it is a hybrid of the two former colours.
The Robin in our garden is still faithfully sitting on her eggs. Having done a bit of online research I now know that it is the female that sits on the eggs alone, and it takes 13 days for them to hatch. So assuming that when we first noticed her was last Saturday, 6th June, we are likely to have baby birds sometime this week.
As she is so exposed, we’re keeping watch but from a distance, so as not to disturb her. Her preference for this nest is completely different to the blue tits who we had nesting earlier in the season. They managed to find a gap in the side of the garage, and chose to nest there. It means we have no idea how many young they had, as other than the chirps of the young, and the parents tooting and froeing you wouldn’t have known they were there, unlike the blue tits from last year, who used the sparrow box, and you could see the young, sticking their heads out, now and again.
Electronic Scrapbook 