Back in the early spring, I put a new greenhouse up at the back of our garden - I wrote a post about it HERE
Well, my wife has been doing most of the work in it, and has planted all kinds of things that just never normally grow in England. She's been watering them regularly, adding fertiliser and monitoring temperatures. As a result, the plants have all done really well and are starting to grow edible things !
Price of place definitely goes to the aubergine plants, with this fine fruit coming along really nicely.
On this photo, you can see where the aubergine plants are making more flowers. We keep the greenhouse door open when it's warm enough, so the bees can get in to pollinate them.
If you look closely on this next photo, you'll see a really large green bell pepper as well as a smaller one behind it.
This shot is an overview of the peppers. Lots of flowers which will hopefully turn into more fruit. We've gone for bell peppers because last time I grew some peppers they were red chilli ones that turned out to be little sticks of dynamite so hot that we couldn't handle them !
This photo is a kind of overview of the left hand side of the greenhouse. Not sure what the other plants are, but I think they might be a different variety of pepper.
I've also grabbed a shot of the recently planted tomatoes in one of the raised beds. They're growing like weeds ! If you look on the right, you'll see some of the flowers are starting to turn into tomatoes, although they're about the size of a large pea right now. This is a variety that needs to be pinched out and pruned quite hard and then staked up high. That way, the tomatoes will grow to their full size and ripen rather than being hidden under leaves.
Finally, it's a bit hard to see what's going on in the photo below, but it's our coriander plants.
We had plenty of coriander leaves off them earlier in the year, but now they've gone to seed. Rather than pulling them up and throwing them away, we've allowed them to flower and grow the seeds. That way, we can gather them up when they are ready and it'll save us having to pay for seeds next year.
So all in all, things are going very well. We've had a couple of failures (and some very fat slugs & snails from them), but a lot more successes.
We're still very much in "experimental mode" as we learn what works in our garden, so at this stage we're growing small amounts of a lot of different things, then next year we can focus on growing a lot more of the things that give us good crops. Our garden isn't big enough to enable us to become 100% self-sufficient, but with any luck it will at least get us a decent amount of the way there, saving us money and building resilience.
All photos by me. Most of the hard work of actually growing things by my wife !
