Fruits of our labour

I have just returned from a week long retreat in Sicily, so my husband took care of the garden on his own. I didn't feel comfortable to leave him alone with so much work, but when the opportunity came I couldn't say no to it. I will talk about the retreat in another post though. Today, I will show you some updates from our garden.

I came back home to tons of large ripe raspberries. They are so delicious! As you can see I had a little accident which resulted in a lot of blood and a hospital visit. All is good now, but I might have lost the feeling in my finger. Honestly, I have never had such a deep cut, but my teacher reacted quickly and made sure that I was alright. The wound is healing well, and I hope that I can start working in the garden again soon.

The progress in the garden over one week is enormous. Normally, I don't notice it as I go there twice a day, but I could see a huge difference when I didn't go there for a week.

Zucchini are living their best life. I have checked for aphids or other pests, and luckily didn't find anything. I will keep checking them again to avoid any disasters.

They yellow ones started blooming already. I hope that they got pollinated well and we will be able to enjoy our first zucchini in a couple of weeks.

Baby zucchinis on their way...

Cauliflowers are growing well even though they are attacked by white flies. I sprayed them with neem oil before I left, but they are persistent and just don't want to die. I will spray them again, so that the infestation doesn't grow much as it seems that some amount of white flies doesn't hurt the plant that much, hence I will try to coexist with them.

Swiss chard makes me happy as it just keeps growing and doesn't give me any headache. We will start harvesting the outer leaves soon.

The flea beetles returned on the Pak choi, but the plants are big enough now, so the beetles don't hurt them so much.

We harvested some leaves yesterday...

They might not look perfect, but they still taste delicious.

Our poor beans look horrible, but a few of them are showing at least some signs of growth. I will see what will happen, but I will also plant another batch to make sure that we will have something to harvest. They are my nemesis this year.

Corn plants more than tripled their size in one week. I hope they will keep growing at this speed.

Lettuce will be ready to harvest soon. We planted seedlings in three spots, and so far we have great success.

We planted potatoes very late which seems to be good because so far we don't have any potato bugs. They grow slower than what I would like, but it's more important what grows under the ground. Maybe the plants are putting all the energy to the tumblers which would be great.

It took a couple of weeks for the beetroot to perk up after transplanting, but it looks like all of them survived and grow well.

Our freshly transplanted chilli seedlings survived the first few nights, so I believe they will start growing well. We have covered them with fleece to protect them from the rain. Once they are bigger we will remove it and add some construction to support them against wind.

Look at that baby kohlrabi...

Yes, we still have tons of sweet peas pods...

We keep harvesting it almost every day...

Lettuce in our raised bed looks like a jungle...

Thai basil is ready for harvesting, so this week we will have some curry for lunch 😊

My husband calls one of our greenhouses an oasis, and it truly is. I planted various plants that like to grow together, and it looks so beautiful now.

The tomatoes are slowly taking over, but the other plants grow well too.

We have some baby tomatoes already!

I have always thought that tomatoes all bloom in the same way. It turns out that it's not true as our yellow zebra tomatoes have different kind of flowers. So pretty!

Peppers took off in the greenhouse. They look so much better than the ones that we had last year outside. Some of them will start blooming soon.

Of course the slug didn't leave them alone. Some of them are destroyed, but I'll wait a bit to see if they will perk up. If not, I will plant some eggplant instead.

We have enough red currents for at least a month 😊 They keep coming and coming, and we love them. They are on the sweeter side which is unusual for this kind of berries.

We're also enjoying the wild raspberries every day.

Calendula will finally start blooming too. I have no idea why it is so slow as our neighbours have many of them blooming already.

We leave some corners wild for the bees...

And look at our hydrangeas! Again, we have various colours on each bush, so beautiful!

The snowballs will bloom too! This is a big surprise as my husband cut them to the ground in the spring.

I have no idea how, but this year we got the Japanese astilbe. I might have thought that it was a weed last year, so I removed all buds before flowering and never found out what it really was 😊

English roses are at their best. I might take some of them home as we have more than enough.

It's so great to see how much our plants grew in only one week. I might go away more often as it feel rewarding to see the progress on such scale 😊

Happy garden and see you next time!