7 days, 7 harvests: no. 3

China Central Television has produced a short video showing the plant experiments growing on the Tiangong space station. The Shenzhou-16 crew has been in orbit for almost three months, and says their space vegetable garden has given a good lettuce harvest.

Day 3 started with the delivery of the aggregate and sand, and ended with quite a lot of the blocks being laid. We’re not allowed to walk on them yet, though!

Every month this year I’ve been trying to read one of the unread books on my shelf, and to then decide whether it gets to keep its spot or needs to be set free to find a new home. For June I chose Nature’s Wild Harvest by Eric Soothill and Michael J. Thomas. It was published in 1983, and has been sitting on my bookshelf for three years, since I bought it in our local secondhand bookshop (which only opens on Wednesdays).

Last Monday evening I wandered out into the garden to shoo off a pigeon that was wandering around in my leek bed. On my way back inside I noticed the first flowers were appearing on my courgettes, and I did a little happy dance. Then, because this is the 21st century, I took a photo and posted it on twitter.

Header image: Tokyo Bekana Chinese cabbage leaves prior to harvest aboard the International Space Station. Photo credit: NASA

Well, it’s the last day of National Gardening Week, and I hope you’ve been enjoying the vicarious harvests from my garden! I have enjoyed really focusing on what’s in season, and what we should be (and are!) harvesting and eating. It’s easy for me to forget that this garden is still very young, and it’s still maturing and I am still learning its quirks.

A couple of weeks ago, I was looking for some statistics about the average UK garden size, and I found some interesting ones. According to the 2015 media pack for the RHS The Garden magazine, a document that is aimed at attracting advertisers to the publication, the 380,000 RHS members the magazine is sent to have gardens that are 10 times larger than the UK average, covering over half an acre.

Work started on the garden yesterday, and involved digging out where the paving will go, and removing the soil. The paving blocks were delivered and the spoil (very stony soil, I am keeping the best stuff to reuse) has been removed. Two fence panels and the gate have been removed temporarily, for access. The terrain looks very different now.

I didn’t get outside much over Christmas, as the weather wasn’t really conducive to gardening and we were happy having some quiet time indoors. But as harvesting the oca and ulluco was long overdue, I went out to do it yesterday afternoon. The photo above shows what the bed looked like at the end of August. The oca were clearly happier than the the ulluco by this time; they were always more numerous in terms of actual plants, so they had 2/3 bed.

This is what the wild, self-seeded comfrey plant outside my front door looked like last week. It doesn’t look like that now, though, because I have cut it back and put the leaves to rot in one of my comfrey buckets (they have lids and taps). First, though, I had to empty out the last lot of comfrey liquid. I can’t remember when I made it – I don’t think it was last year, I think it must have been before that – and I harvested 3 litres of comfrey liquid from my pair of bucket. That’s certainly enough to keep my tomatoes and peppers happy this year!

Here in the UK it’s traditional to take a couple of weeks off work over the summer and head off to somewhere with better weather – or at least somewhere that you can get away from it all for a little while. It’s one of the ironies of life that this takes you away from the garden at a time when it really could use your help. If you have a gardening neighbour then you can rely on them to take care of your garden while you’re away, but if you don’t and don’t want to come home to dead plants, weeds and giant marrows then there are a few things you can do to prepare your garden for your absence.

Earlier this year I was absolutely horrified when the flat footed fence fitters trampled all over my wild garlic. It was just starting to leaf out, and I don’t know why the sudden garlic smell wafting up from their feet didn’t give them pause, but it didn’t!