Invaders!!!!

1
Potatoes, Carrots, 5 small pepper plants & tub of lettuces.

Rhubarb plant & furry buds just appearing on pumpkin plants.

Runner beans

Large juicy cabbages

Our 1st green pepper (teeny weeny)

Cucumbers new home!!

We have some invaders in the garden, namely black fly!!! They seem to be making their home on everything - carrots, spuds, runner beans, cucumbers and even the pumpkins!! Now some sites suggest pesticides, soapy water and other 'sprays' but some also suggest leaving nature to take it's course and leave them to the ladybirds. Now we do have ladybirds in the garden and I shall be taking the girls for a long walk along the canal to 're-home' (i.e. kidnap) a few more, but we also have ants which eat the ladybirds to protect the black fly!! Apparently the black fly produce a sweet sap which the ants love to eat and so they will 'kill' any predators of the black fly to protect their sweet juices!!

So, as the plants they are on are all quite well established, we've decided to let nature take it's course and hope the ladybirds win through and conquer the enemy!!

Apart from the black fly, things are ticking along rather nicely. We have our 1st green pepper growing and I've been told to give the plant liquid tomato feed as soon as the peppers appear so I will be out buying some at the weekend.

We've also had about half a dozen strawberries from one of our 'Alice' strawberry plants - very nice they were too, and there are more growing at the moment.

Some of the cabbages are now big enough to eat so we had some at the weekend and the guinea pigs have been getting their fair share too!!

The runner beans have loads of flowers on, so we should start seeing some beans soon. We've got them in 2 tubs and although they've both been grown and treated the same way, one tub is much more lush than the other i.e. one has more, darker leaves and the other has fewer much paler leaves, not sure why there should be a difference between them, hopefully it wont affect how many beans each lot produces.

The potato plants are monsters now, they definitely needed more room, can't believe how much they've come up - just hope the spuds growing the ground are as good. And also the carrots have shot up recently, we can see a few tops of the carrots starting to poke through the soil - have managed to resist the temptation to pull any up yet though.

The rhubarb plant which was near to death that we got from a boot fair a few weeks back has totally taken off - from having 3 stalks (one badly damaged) when we bought it, it now has about 12 and still more leaves poking through the soil.

As we ran out of room in the garden, I thought the cucumbers would be OK being grown in a trough, but they've not been doing so well the past few days, the leaves are turning yellow etc so I've now removed them from the trough, pulled up some of the smaller onion plants near to the fence and I've put them in there. I need to get some plastic netting for them to grow up and hopefully they'll be much happier and will give us lots of lovely cucumbers.

The pumpkins have got lovely fluffy buds coming on them, so hopefully we should have a good crop there by the end of October (Milly will be disappointed if we don't as they are 'her' plants, bless).

The only other thing we are still keeping an eye on are the small pepper plants which we grew from seed and seem to be taking forever to grow - might end up losing patience with them and chuck them on the compost heap, lol. Will definitely be buying just the pepper plants next year, wont bother with the seeds.

So that's how the garden is at the moment. Looking back on previous posts and photos I cant believe, in only a couple of months, how much things have come up - I'm really proud of how we've done so far and when we go out in the garden in the evening and water everything it gives us an enormous sense of achievement that everything growing out there is due to our hard work!!! :o)