The Garden Share Collective - October

  The Garden Share Collective is the brain child of Lizzie from Strayed from the Table. There are a group of bloggers from all over the place who chat about what is going on in their gardens, with hints and tips. Pop over to Strayed from the Table to check out all the others.

Well, hello!

Following on from last month, I have actually been working my way through what I hoped to achieve! I've got a lot of seeds planted and now also have a loads of seedlings in my greenhouse. The biggest problem I now have is that the greenhouse is SO good, a lot of them are growing like triffids but it's still too cold to plant them outside in the veggie garden!

In the greenhouse I've got the winter tomatoes coming on great. Still green, not turned at all yet. I'm hoping it's going to be soon, though.
I planted some beetroot seeds, rainbow chard and got the luffahs in.
I've also got seedlings of tomatoes ( yeah, more!)  courgettes, aubergines, and a couple of capsicums. I haven't done the sweetcorn yet, because everything is growing too fast in there - I'm still learning the timings!

However, it's looking good in there. The Chillies are all coming back with a vengence and looking incredibly healthy.  It's hard to get decent photographs in here, because it's so hot and humid my camera immediately steams up!

In the Veggie Garden. We now have lovely globe artichokes. I'm still rather overawed  that these were only planted from seed at the end of last summer. They have turned into the hugest, most gorgeous plants. I thought it would be 2 years to get to this stage!

There will be beans! Snake beans on the pyramids and in between them some dwarf butter beans, for a change!

Nothing to see here!    but there will be soon!

This is Cavalo Nero - for Lloyd. He loves it, I hate it!

Asparagus season is going great guns.  The skinny ones I'll let turn into ferns to get some goodness back into the corms.

The alderman peas are all but eaten! So much for saving some of them for seeds.

 Apart from this it's still quiet in here. Traditionally Labour Weekend is when most people plant out their veggie gardens. We're still a little away from that...

The rest of the garden.
Every year this goes insane at this time of year. I've never managed to find out what it is - I call it "the daisy tree" but it's gorgeous and smells amazing. It also grows really well from cuttings.

Our Kowhai tree may not be gigantic, but it is very beautiful and the Tuis love it. It doesn't flower for long, but every year we wait for it and smile when it shines.

Sometimes, there are those jobs that you put off and put off. There's always something I just don't want to do! One such job was re-seeding the avocado orchard. It used to have lovely green grass under the avocado trees, but the chickens go in there, and over the last year they've eaten all the grass, and grubbed up a lot of stones, and made holes for dust baths and generally trashed the joint.  This is the perfect time of year to clear all the rocks and stones out, fill in the holes and rake it all nice and even, then get it seeded with grass again. To be honest, it's not even a huge job. But I just didn't want to do it! Bring in the helpxers!! After painting our room, they did have a day off, we were even going to give them a second day off, but stars that hey are, they wanted to work... so I got them to do this.

 And they made a grand job of it.

This is Gerald. Last week Gerald had an accident. I don't know exactly what he did, but one of his chin bits had a wee nick in it - either he pecked it himself - as it does trail on the ground when he's pecking around, or it caught on something...who knows! But a couple of the girls saw blood and were actually pecking at it. So he went into 'sick bay' for a couple of days for protection. As you can see he's made a full recovery!

... and the girls are totally uninterested - they've got better things to do  - like eat.

 Elsewhere in the garden - a couple of years ago I cleared a wee bed and planned to make it my wild flower area. I bought a lot of seed packets, with various wild flower seeds. I expected to never have to buy seeds again, as I let a lot of the flower go to seed and I sort of shake them around the bed again! However it would seem that poppys are very dominant, as that's pretty much all I have now. Terribly pretty, but not a whole lot of variation!

I planted this clematis only last year, in early spring. It was a small stick! It got some flowers on it and grew a lot. This year it is covered in gorgeous pink flowers. I'm going to get another one of these to climb over the arch of the new picket fence.

NOW! This is a biggie.
Operation Picket Fence is a go. Since we moved in here I've always wanted a picked fence. Finally it's happening - sort of! To picket fence the whole bit we wanted was going to cost an awful lot, so we've done a compromise of fencing 4m on either side of where the pergola and the new gate will go. To do this we need to remove 8m of hedge. But, as this is such an ugly hedge, we decided to take  the whole thing out and pant a different kind of hedge, a much smaller. prettier hedge. This is what it was like yesterday afternoon. See, ugly hedge.

This is what it was like by lunch time today. Gone! Still got quite a lot of stumps to dig out. That'll be tomorrow. Not sure when the fence is starting, but at least now we'll be ready for it.

 And as you can see, from the length of the flipping grass, we still have no mower. Well, that's not entirely true - we had to buy a new one today. Well, new to us! It's second hand really. We knew before we bought it that one of the blades was wonky so we have to wait till tomorrow to actually mow - once the new blade is on. But at least now we have a mower. Whew.

Next month it'll be more of the same. Mowing, weeding, pruning, planting.

Oh and seeds! I'm not really needing any, but I have lots - everything I've written about, I pretty much have.

Edited to add...

LOOK!