It's all kicking off here

At last...

The sun has arrived and everything seems to be loving it. We have more strawberries than I know what to do with :

I already have a jam making session's worth in the freezer, a couple of frozen desserts and the start of a rum pot well, I say rum it is actually 38% alcohol for fruits and can be bought here for about 10€ per litre so here's hoping it isn't too disgusting.

Remember the pathetic fig tree that I was so excited about last time - well, it took offence and just to prove me wrong went off on one - look at it now - actually this picture is about a week old and it's even bigger than that and growing fast in the sun.

So far (touch wood) the blight has stayed away. I'm being quite vigilant and spraying every couple of weeks with Bordeaux mix and crossing fingers. The grapes are starting to show - let's hope they loose their blue haze when they are ready for winemaking though eh?

I feel like a proper gardener now - walking along the plots, hands behind my back looking lovingly at everything that is growing.

The sweetcorn and broadies are romping away in this sun. I gave them a feed of Phostrogen which they seemed to like and we picked our first broad beans on Monday. Not quite enough to keep a sparrow alive but, hey, this is our first picking.

In the fruit "orchard" the red and black currants are ripening up and nearly ready for harvesting - that is, as long as we can get to them before the birds do. The apples, goosegogs and 2 mirabelles are also doing well so we may yet get a pudding out of them this year. Next year - organic or not, I am going to spray with every pesticide known to man in the hope of getting a little more fruit from the trees.

And lastly, we have been thinking that the outside of the house is a bit flat and boring so with that in mind Keith has kindly made me a frame for a raised bed so that I can have some climbing things in it that will grow up the wall and as soon as Flash heard the word bed he thought, that would be a good idea for a lie down and, as you know, it's best to let sleeping dogs lie :-)

Don' it make my brown eyes (and potatoes) blue

Spotted the first tell tale signs of blight on my potatoes today. The great potato famine that wiped out the entire crop in Ireland was caused by blight and I ain't taking no chances. It is a real bugger, we had it last year, consequently we had hardly any potatoes and NO tomatoes.

I spent a very happy? hour with my sprayer and covered all the at risk plants with Bordeaux mixture - a copper sulphate concoction that is meant to prevent blight if you don't have it and slow the deterioration down if you already have it. It is meant to be organic although some people much cleverer than me don't agree but I think it is better than having no vegies to show for all the hard work. Quite a fetching blue haze now adorns the potatoes, tomatoes and grapevines don't you think?


It's not all bad news though. The forecast is for sun over the next couple of days and the barometer here at home seems to be bearing that out. We need a good bit of sunshine for a couple of days to dry everything out so that we can get to cut the grass which, at the moment is threatening to take over the whole veg patch. I have been planting, potting on and sowing between showers and the greenhouse is choc-a-block with things waiting to go out once the rain stops.

The great success story at the moment is the strawberries - just look at that!


And the fig that I thought had fallen at the first frost last year has started to sprout new growth so, I have been "fussing" over it in the hope that it makes it through the summer so that I can get another chance at over wintering it.

This is it, close up:

And this is it in its pot just to give you some scale:


Huge learning curve, this good life lark!