Good year for fruit and veg
A garden full of unusual plants and a big collection of fruit and vegetables in Alnwick, Northumberland.
Developing fruit and vegetable crops, greenhouse plants and the continuing absence of substantial June rainfall, has occupied our gardening thoughts recently. Add the complication of a holiday that left us playing catch-up with weeding and it wasn’t the best of starts for July. Despite this, it’s looking to be a good year for fruit and vegetables.
Our favourite first early potatoes, ‘Foremost’, planted on Good Friday, dug well for a delicious evening meal, accompanied by ‘Sweetheart’ strawberries. We grow a substantial amount of fruit, some of which is frozen or stored for use over the year, and netting against a large blackbird population is necessary. Six strawberry varieties extend the growing season, with red and blackcurrants ripening now alongside the gooseberries, and early raspberries in a separate bed. They’ve all been protected just in time.
Salad crops, peas, broad beans, courgettes and spinach are harvesting well and we’ve stopped cutting asparagus
spears after a succulent five-week period, allowing the decorative fern-like foliage to form.
Cobs are appearing on healthy sweetcorn and runner beans are climbing well. This year we’re trying Suttons’ Super Trio Mix of ‘Tenderstar’, ‘Firestorm’ and ‘Moonlight’. The mixed flower colours are certainly decorative, and I can’t wait for the promised freely-produced, stringless beans.
We’ve thinned out the greenhouse peach fruits and our grapevines, tomatoes and
peppers are full of promise. A modest collection of decorative streptocarpus has once again survived winter, and since potting them on has burst into bloom. My current favourite is ‘Polka-Dot Purple’, bought at Harrogate Spring Show last year as a rooted plug.
A variegated ivy, planted against the house wall next to a patio door to encourage nesting wrens, has done just that. It’s entertaining and satisfying to watch the recent brood, seven in all, coming home to roost each evening.