More flying things

Another damsel fly; a shield bug; and, back to the actual gardening - my Golden Sweet mange tout producing nicely. Plus a pimpernel? I may be getting rather side-tracked into the micro-wildlife, but it's not all benign - I did get a couple of vicious little ant stings today. The ants think my beans are their aphid farm.

Critters

Variously: (possibly) a Queen Tree Bumblebee, an anonymous bee, a shiny green fly, a damsel fly of some sort, a Cinnabar moth, and a million baby spiders, hanging off the washing line.

The advantage when critters are emerging, is that they're a bit dazed and confused - the damsel fly and the moth were probably waiting for their wings to dry and their heads to clear. :)
The damsel fly was very aware of me, and kept shuffling behind the stem to try to hide - but it made no attempt to fly. The moth may have been asleep for all I know, it didn't move at all.

Overview, May 22nd

If you're thinking 'that base won't hold up that rotary drier!', you're right - it's too small, I'll have to think of something else or get a bigger one. :)

Things are looking more attractive now that all the polythene, bubble wrap, and plastic milk bottles are gone. Even the netting has been put away, which I hope won't prove too foolish. The white chairs do stand out as an eyesore, I may improvise some sort of cover for them.

The new bed is planted with Modus and Minidor bush French beans, a couple of stray Masterpiece Longpod broad beans, rocket, and Beetroot Chioggia. The new bamboo tripod has the rather ill-treated Feltham First peas planted at its foot - they waited a bit too long to go out, I'll see how they do.

I found a handsome ladybird doing her stuff. Ych, look at the state of my nails - that's gardening for you.

Flowers and beans, May 22nd

The scrambling rose bush turns out to have lovely soft-pink flowers with a delicate spicy tea-rose scent. The mange-tout Golden Sweet peas are flowering, and oddly, have two colours - pink, and blue. The Masterpiece Longpod broad beans are making pods, can't wait for some of those to mature.
The white dianthus is one of various patterns and colours that I got in a mixed pack, from white, white & magenta, mottled pink, to hot hot dark pinky-red. Perhaps I should make an entry just for the pinks.

Bed number Four, May 12th

... if you don't count the flower bed. This one for French beans. Those black bags on the left are full of couch grass clumps - there are another five or six bags around the garden. I'm going to add some yarrow (supposed to be a magically good compost activator) and some water, then seal them up and pile them in the corner for a year or two. Unless someone has tried this, and thinks it's a waste of time? I'm already regretting trying the couch-in-bin-of-water technique - I now have a very stinky bin of goop that I'm not quite sure how to handle.

Early May

Not much room for manoeuvre in the lean-to. I didn't realise quite how bad the fungus-gnat problem was, unfortunately - so a lot of my small seedlings perished. Most of the larger stuff did OK though.



















Happy chaos - all the greens growing away, though I did put far too much in the beds. Once matured, plants didn't have space and after the stage shown here, things started to grow too tall and bolt. I'm learning lots of lessons for next year. Still, if the nursery had sent me plug plants, like they were supposed to, instead of vastly more numerous seedlings, quantities would have been about right. I just wasn't disciplined enough to jettison half of the seedlings...















My Masterpiece Longpod flowers, very impressive! And my miniature strawberries, which got busy as soon as I planted them out.

April 15th & 29th

Showing slight differences, mainly my impressive flush of dandelion flowers (see bottom left, 2nd pic). You can also see a couple of Lidl aquisitions - a lovely jazzy windmill, to scare the pigeons, and a lurid yellow hose, sadly with no cable reel, I wonder if I can improvise something? I didn't get a picture of the cherry tree in fullest blossom - it was very windy, and the blossom only lasted a few days at its peak.

It's funny to look back at how slowly things were still developing then - it's all go now, pictures soon!