Spem in Allium

I must get better at watering the garden, particularly the veg patch.  The weather has been mostly warm, dry and breezy, and thin, poor soil like ours dries out very quickly in conditions like that.  The shallots, which hadn't made a lot of top growth, were looking very parched, and the garlic tops had started to fall over; I noticed that other blog posters were lifting theirs, so I did likewise and let them dry off for a day (now moved into the greenhouse in anticipation of rain).  I have to admit that I grow the edible alliums more in hope than expectation; they don't do particularly well in our dry conditions.  I gave up growing onions - the sets tended to come out of the ground not much bigger than when they went in, and good onions are easy to come by - but have persevered with shallots and garlic (and leeks, but they were sown late this year and are still very small).  The shallots are always small, but that suits my cooking style, and I can live with small garlic bulbs.  Actually, this year's garlic (Early Purple Wight) has produced a couple of decent-sized heads, so I'm quite pleased with that.

The broad beans, now de-topped, have fewer blackfly, but the pesky critters are appearing everywhere - on the runner beans, the parsley, even some of the poppies.  A few borlotti beans have gone in, as have a couple of the plants from the second sowing of the courgettes.  In the greenhouse, the tomatoes and aubergines are in their growbags and doing well.

Earlier in the year, I took advantage of a non-windy day (we don't get many of those) to use up old weedkiller sitting around in the garage and sprayed the overgrown half of the veg plot.  I have finally started to clear the dead grasses from this, starting with a space for a rhubarb plant ('Timperley Early') bought during the winter and languishing in its little pot since then.  The existing rhubarb plants are very elderly, seriously overgrown and in poor soil, so this is by way of starting again.  The prompt to plant the rhubarb was actually the need to bury deceased wildlife, always a bit of a problem in shallow soil unless the dear departed is quite small.  I once had to bury a fully grown rabbit found dead on the front garden path, presumably left there by a fox as rabbits don't usually expire naturally outside people's front doors, even in the country.  My usual practice is to put them under a plant which isn't going to be moved for a very long time, so that they don't get dug up by accident (my squeamishness rather than respect for the creature, admittedly); the rabbit went under a hellebore at the side of the house, which responded by growing extremely well.  The soil in the rhubarb patch is relatively deep (a full spade's-depth), so it was a good spot to dispose of the latest carcasses - the remains of a pigeon found under the aquilegia on the edge of the patio, and a squirrel found under the big ash tree at the bottom of the garden.  I'm guessing that the pigeon may have been an old bird that chose the shelter of the plants as a place to die - pigeons do seek out a sheltered spot when their time is up - although there wasn't a great deal left apart from the wings by the time I found it under the leaves.  The squirrel is a bit of a mystery; it looked like a young one, and it was almost under the bottom fence, which would have been a strange place for a cat to have left it.  There was some dead wood from the ash tree nearby, so I suppose it's possible that the squirrel's weight brought down a rotten branch and it was killed in the fall (do squirrels ever fall out of trees?).  Anyway, both are now contributing to the fertility of the soil under the rhubarb plant, and I hope it thrives.

The raspberry suckers have started bearing fruit (they're always well ahead of the 'official' plants), and there are lots of gooseberries, mostly on the old plants that I haven't dug out yet.  My pruning of the plants I want to keep was obviously too severe; there are a few, nice big, fruits but not many.  The blackbirds are very partial to them but fortunately are focusing their attention on the smaller fruit, which are easier for them to get at; I picked one side of the bush while my friendly female blackbird picked the other side.  The newest blackcurrant bush has some lovely strings of fruit on it, so it has been fleeced up to keep the birds off.

The sunny and dry weather is to break down into rain from tomorrow - a chance to do some potting up and sowing in the greenhouse.  It has been a bit too hot in there to do much of that lately, although it has been ideal for drying off the bulbs lifted from the patio pots.