I’m currently scoffing the rest of my growbag potatoes. I didn’t do anything too fancy with them this time round, I just roasted them and am eating them with a Yorkshire pud and some veg. Still delicious though. It was worth investing in all that soil and spending all that time fretting that the potatoes would never grow.
I went to take a look at the allotment on Sunday and was a bit sad, because they hadn’t done as much with it as I’d expected in the two weeks I was away. The nettles had been trimmed but other than that, not much else had happened, and I was thinking I’d have to turn it down if it was offered to me like that, because I’m only one small person, and I can only dedicate a couple of hours an evening to an allotment during the week, oh woe, etc. But then I rationalised slightly and thought that in fact, they’re probably just running behind schedule, especially as they’ve not been in touch to actually offer it to me yet. I’ll take another look this weekend and try not to obsess too much. It’d be silly to turn it down at this point anyway, and even if it does turn out to be in a state, I can get assistance.
So, more rational, I’ve been spending some evenings on t’balcony. The sweet peas are smelling lovely:
They’re completely insane, though, bless them. When they were growing, I constructed some kind of random weak trellis out of sticks and bits for them, and then they were all like ‘Yes! We’ll grow on that, no problem!’ And they don’t ever seem to stop growing. Or have any roots. There’s no order to them. I like them.
The tomatoes in my vertical planter are doing pretty well:
The planter itself is something similar to this, actually designed for peppers, but works well enough for tomatoes. I’ve suspended it from the balcony railings using an old belt, which is also useful for easily repositioning the planter/taking it down to add more plants, etc. The only drawback is that it’s a right pain trying to get new plants through those holes in the planter without breaking the stalks, especially for younger plants. Maybe it’s just that I’m clumsy, but I’m lucky that tomato plants are pretty resilient. I sometimes hang the planter the other side of the railings so the plants get a bit more sun throughout the day, but I became paranoid that it’d fall down while I was on holiday, and the plants wouldn’t enjoy that.
My aubergine population is becoming, quite frankly, a bit threatening, and I might have to look into giving a few more of them away to long-suffering colleagues. At least they’d be young plants rather than seedlings (the aubergine plants, I mean, not my colleagues), so I feel more confident in not accidentally confusing them with other plants, and less bad if I give away something that later dies. I need to examine the link between gardening and guilt in greater detail.
The Ginger Allotmenteer 