Let’s hope they make it through the winter without going moldy or being eaten by hungry little rodents in the shed.

So, today I want to share some of the events of the last 8 weeks.

My tomato plants grew to about 8 feet tall, I was so pleased and they even had enough time to produce some fruit. Not many, but any of them were a small little victory for all the sweat and tears it took to put the tunnel up before the end of the growing season.
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I got a present of a dwarf variety of tomato plant. It produced a surprising amount of little tomatoes and because I had the plant standing on my kitchen windowsill for quite some time, it was the first to produce ripe tomatoes in the tunnel, too.
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I don’t think I would grow these myself though simply because they are such small plants and so close to the ground, they are more likely to be affected my mildew etc.
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I had to pick nearly all of the tomatoes green to avoid them from going off ad or brown and black. In the end most of them did go red on my kitchen windowsill. The most successful crop besides the lettuces were the carrots that I’m still pulling every couple of days. I’ve been pulling carrots from the beds for weeks and weeks now.
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These were the first couple of tender delicate roots.
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And this is the normal kind of crop yield every couple of days…

Some plants only produced pretty flowers like the courgettes and the cucumbers. They were just too late this year and didn’t get enough direct sun or heat anymore.
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I did plant and harvest some potatoes in a bucket this autumn, too. I didn’t wait for Christmas this year, I had sprouting spuds, a bucket and soil, so I let them do they did their thing and we enjoyed them.
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And then there was a good supply of other outdoor crop, like onions and lots of different kinds of lettuce.
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The onions didn’t grow massively big, and somehow the lambs lettuce tended to be competing too much with the weeds. But what we got surely tasted nice!

Inside the tunnel I’ve sowed some winter greens, mainly more lettuces, cauliflower, broccoli and more carrots. We’ll see how they will work out. At the moment the slugs are the only benefactors of said seedlings.
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I also decided to plant about 100 set onions in the tunnel (about of third of them from this years seedlings). I recon I will have some nice fresh onions by march of next year.
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I decided to save some seeds this year. I made a little collage of the process with my phone apps.
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And that rounds up all that’s happened in my vegetable garden over the last two months.

Thank you for taking the time to read though this rather lengthy post. I hope you enjoyed your stay and do like it when people leave me comments to let me know they called.

I also pulled the first lot of the onions. They will be all coming out over the next couple of weeks. These were the big, pretty ones which are now in the shed drying for storage (though i don’t think they will be eaten before the storage bit really features).
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Being away from home I missed my garden sooo much I actually sat down and painted a picture of it on a mug in a street café that offers that kind of thing. They sell plain, unglazed pieces of pottery and provide ceramic paint and glazing and kiln firing as part of the package when you buy one of their products. So, I sat down in the late August heat and painted what was on my mind while I was over there, my very own gardener’s tunnel time coffee mug.
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I’m glad to be back home, thank you for reading and visiting my blog.

It’s brilliant I I spent all of Sunday evening until lights out and even Monday morning before I went traveling putting my ailing pot bound vegetable plants into the ground. I’m back home tomorrow and can’t wait to see how everything has grown.
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We finished securing the sheeting on all the wooden framework late Sunday afternoon and at 6 pm I loaded the wheel barrow and got these moving:
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Look at this wonderful new soil. I hope it’s as good as it looks.
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It was too dark to take a picture by the time I had finished.

I really miss being home looking at these photos just now and will update you as soon as I get back. Let the tunnel times begin

Three days ago the basic wooden structure was put up. J helped me drive in the uprights with a sledge hammer just before it was dark.

The next morning I tried sorting through the wooden pieces from the old tunnel trying to figure out what goes where. It was a a bit of a jigsaw puzzle. Here are the pieces:

By the end of the day I had figured it out.

There is one improvement to the old poly tunnel, I put in two high beams to support the pipes which will hold the plastic. Last winter we had a lot of snow and I decided to reinforce the tunnel to allow for the strain of a heavy snowfall.

Yesterday morning I hung the doors.

By the evening I had all of the hoops up. It’s finally taking shape!

Today I spent the day fixing the smaller pieces of PVC plastic on both ends and getting all the lats ready that are needed to fix the big PVC sheet over the hoops and onto the wooden frame. Let’s hope there will be drier weather and little wind tomorrow.

There you go, besides the building and digging and weeding there is a little bit of vegetable harvesting done or to be done soon, too.

Right, enough time spent blogging, time is galleons and I’m racing to put my sorry looking tomato and cucumber plants into the ground and seed some winter vegetables, but to do that, I need to finish this poly tunnel before the end of this week.

Hope you’re having a good summer and thanks for reading.

I’ve spent another week clearing away more of the jungle past the fence and in the process the boss (that’s the bit that holds the blade on the underside of the engine) on the new mower broke! I was absolutely furious with myself because, well, I blamed myself. I used the mower to run over the areas of the back behind the fence that I had cleared to help me clean away any remaining loose organic matter and simultaneous mulch it for better bio-degrading but I guess it’s not the same as cutting grass when you run a mower over an area that is covered with the remnants of nettle, bracken and bramble growth.

Here the broken part.

I am lucky, the mechanic from the service company was kind enough to post me out a replacement part free of charge when I rang them and explained and asked for the parts I need instead of driving 60 miles south to my supplier who would have then sent the mower to the service company (120 miles/60 miles north of where we live). It would have meant a massive round trip for the mower and another two trips for me and no mower for a minimum of two weeks.

It arrived by post 2 working days later and we fit it no problem. The mower is fixed and from now on I will only cut grass, promise!!

Overall the vegetable beds are starting to take shape now.

I have to terrace all the beds because of the slope. I use the big rocks I dig up when turning the soil to make a small wall and then sit the wooden frame on it. Then I fill the bed with the turned soil, add compost and plant whatever sad looking seedling has survived in various containers until now into the new raised veggie bed.

I used some netting on one of the first bed I made to cover the lettuces because there are a lot of rabbits in the garden. But the rabbits are not interested so I haven’t bothered with the other ones, yet.

There is one area just to the right of the gate that is level so I thought I just put a few of the bigger rocks around the area and make that a regular kind of plot. But when I started to turn the soil it revealed an unmovable obstacle.

It’s a big, massive rock that wouldn’t budge no matter how hard I tried.

So I moved all the slightly smaller (movable) rocks to the side and filled the bed with compost and soil around it (more photos to come).

Preparing the ground has been an almighty job with only a couple of hand tools. The amount of bio-mass forced me to make another composting waste heap underneath the gorse bushes to the left. Can you spot the wheelbarrow?

I’m getting there and am now staking out the area for the tunnel. The new tunnel will be only about 2/3rds of it’s old self but that should be big enough.

P.S. Sorry this post is up on the blog late again. Somehow I haven’t got into a new work-then-blog-routine yet, better 11 days later than never, I suppose.

In my last post I had just about managed to clear away the growth on the far side of the gate. We have since continued cutting back brambles, bracken and gorse bushes beyond. J has been given me a hand at times, still, it seems like a shear endless task and any help I can get is much appreciated.
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I only do so much at a time, I am a firm believer in the need to enjoy tasks like that and if you overdue it, it can turn into a detested chore. So there have been days and possibly a whole week gone by without me claiming back more of the wilderness.

The gooseberries didn’t seem to mind being confined to the tubs for over 6 weeks before they made it into the ground.
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I’ve picked these since and want to make gooseberry and lemon curd with them.

Before planting berry shrubs I wanted to get the onions out of the cardboard boxes I had temporarily moved them with and really needed to plant out the sweetcorn because those plants have so much growth to do before they develop cobs… So I built my first raised bed. It’s terraced into the slope and I used the rocks I dug up turning the soil and working some compost into it as a support for the wooden frame.
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I’ve built another raised bed just like it for more onions and my lettuces and I have the wood for frames ready for two more beds like those.
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In the above photo you can see just how much of the land beyond is now cleared. And if you turn around by 180˚ it looks like this:
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And then you wonder, is it going to rain? And it suddenly goes dark and you start putting away the electrical tools, wind up the extension lead but then it goes sunny again and decides to rain over there and it just looks stunning…
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A couple of days after I built the beds I spent an entire day planting out 20 fruit shrubs towards that other end of the newly cleared garden.
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That was a long day, I didn’t finish up outside until sunset.
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That’s it for today, thank you for reading my rather long post. I will do my best and try to post here more often again.