The garden in May

Our gite is now open for business. These are the photos I took of the garden last week to help promote it.

The greenhouse is being productive. After last year's tomato disaster I decided to keep two tomatoes growing under cover. The rest are in the veggie patch. The lettuces will be reay next week.

Celery to keep Max happy.

Last year a friend told me that you can keep weeds down by mulching with (untreated) grass cuttings so this year we decided to try it. I have them around the toms and lettuces in the greenhouse and around everything in the veggie patch that doesn't have a plastic mulch.

I DON'T like weeding!

 

Generous friends

My husband came back the other day with boxes full of seedlings. He works sometimes for an English lady not far from here and she is an amazing gardener. This year she has a surplus of seedlings and instead of throwing them out she threw them, metaphorically at least, into his car. But not only that - she took the time to write instructions for each lot. And better still, clearly knowing how instructions tend to go missing (the washing machine does wonders for instructions in back pockets!) she wrote them on the boxes! Tomatoes, celery, brassicas, chard (which I'd forgotten to sow this year) - not to mention a huge bunch of beetroot and some rocket.

I potted on some of the tomatoes and they are very happy in the greenhouse until they are big enough to go in the garden - we also need to clear a space for them but that's in hand. The rest of the seedlings are waiting outside the kitchen next to the hosepipe so they get a decent water quota in this hot weather. They will be planted out when they've grown a little bigger. I've also asked Max to build some sort of frame over which I can put cabbage white proof netting - I am DETERMINED not to eat any more caterpillars this year! A huge thank you for your generosity.


I'm excited about the tomatoes (Gardener's Delight). For the past two years we've had a pretty measly crop of tomatoes and with the wet weather just about gave up. Hopefully this year the weather will give us a couple of dry days at least and with all the tomato plants in the garden we should get a decent crop. Quite apart from using tomatoes in salads I love having too many as they get cooked up and frozen for future tomatoe sauces. I also try to make a few pots of tomato ketchup - you will never buy ketchup again once you've tasted home made...even my children say so!
You can see a couple of melons growing next to the tomatoes in the greenhouse - we bought four at the local market and as an experiment I planted two in the greenhouse and two outside. No prizes for guessing which ones already has little tiny fruits on them.

Sex in the greenhouse

After the total washout of last year, when the only successful tomatoes in the area were the ones grown in greenhouses, I decided this year to do the same. It was partly because I had too many successful seeds and it just seemed to make sense to leave some where they were! So, I have six outside that I bought (Coeur de Boeuf), another four outside in a small corner of the veggie patch that I grew from seed, the three in the greenhouse and three more that I scattered around the flower beds because I had to take some of the seedlings out of the greenhouse and it seemed a pity to waste them. On the whole, I'm glad I did all this as the six I bought all seem to be in a bad way. I suspect it's either mosaic virus or some sort of wilt but I don't know. They all have tomatoes on them so I will wait and see what happens. The greenhouse seedlings are a mix of small salad tomatoes and larger standard ones (I MUST start noting the varieties that I plant!).

Anyway, what's this got to do with sex I hear you ask? When I started work many years ago I used to have lunch with my wonderful grandmother from time to time as she lived just round the corner. She lived in a very sunny flat and grew tomatoes on the window ledge in pots. One day I arrived and she was shaking them, albeit gently. I couldn't understand it.

"Sex darling", she said. I was fairly sure that she wasn't asking about my private life although she could be fairly direct. I asked her to clarify.

"Sex, sex - you know, they have to what's it called? Pollinate, that's it." Hmmm, still not quite there. More clarification please.

"Up here there are no bees to do the sex for them so I shake them and the pollen from the top flowers falls onto the ones underneath." Ah, right.

I don't know if there was any scientific truth in her theory but why not? Yesterday I was in the greenhouse and just thought I'd give it a go. But I sneaked a look around first to check no-one was watching!