I had a nice day in the garden yesterday. It wasn’t too hot and I didn’t even look at the areas that still need clearing – just dealt with the plants.
First up I planted out my two Sunburst squash in the now-empty onion bed. I maybe started a little early in the morning and was a bit clumsy – I snapped one of the plants. It’s not completely leafless, so there’s still hope for it. I will have to see how it gets on. If it can’t grow then I can replace it with one of my round courgettes (which I’ve just potted on, along with the butternut squash). I’ve left the squashes under cloches (having removed the cloches from the courgette plants in pots which are growing nicely).
Having squished some more lily beetle larvae (they are noxious creatures) I moved the 4 minarette fruit trees from their cramped space on the patio to a new area by the fence. They now have more room and air flow and I can get in and around them. I’m hoping this will help the apple and the plum, which are suffering from aphids. I might get some grease/glue bands to stop the ants from climbing up and farming the aphids.
Fruit trees in place, I gave pretty much everything a seaweed foliar freed. I have a nice little pressure sprayer, so it’s quite fun.
I pinched out the tops on my broad beans (and had my first small harvest), planted up my late sowing of broad beans and the remaining carrots I sowed in roottrainers. Then I fed a few things with worm compost liquid (I never remember to feed anything, so I get brownie points for this one!) and filled up the plantpals on the fruit trees and bushes.
Lastly I pulled up my bolted (flowering) spinach and leaf beet and sowed some troughs for baby leaves – one lettuce, one radish and spinach, one leaf beet and coriander. I will have to remember to do that every couple of weeks as otherwise we don’t get anything to eat before they bolt!
I’ve started recording the data for my predator attraction experiment. So far the phacelia has grown very vigorously and swamped the coriander. It’s flowering prolifically and attracting lots of bees, but so far I have seen no predatory insects (ladybirds, hoverflies etc). Two corn marigold plants germinated and survived and are just starting to flower.
However, in one of my window boxes I have a couple of borage plants (this is the first time I’ve grown them. They’re really a bit tall for the window box, but they’re happy enough) and they’re flowering now too. They’ve developed a minor aphid problem over the last week or so and I’ve been keeping an eye on it. Yesterday it was being taken care of – by ladybird larvae! Both plants had several larvae that I could spot, in a range of sizes from barely visible to fully developed. They were having trouble with the hairs on the stem and leaves, but they were obviously feeding. Go bugs!