I have neglected the garden a bit. Whilst I was away for a long weekend, I had asked Matt to water it for me. He managed this (nearly twice a day). He also decided that it needed feeding. He did this with a copious combination of fish blood and bone (which I have learnt is a combination of the blood of fish and the bones of fish, not fish plus blood and bones from elsewhere) and chicken manure pellets (as well as the tomato feed water that I had requested). Now, I am not a gardening expert but when I examined the plants the fact that there was a thick layer of these fertilisers all around them, along with flies all over the garden and the revolting smell (which would be passable on a farm but not in an urban garden), something seemed amiss. It was possibly the horticultural equivalent of giving a small child too many brightly coloured sweets.
So I did the most obvious thing that came to mind and set to in removing the vast majority. This filled two standard bins. In it were lots of earwigs and maggotty things - also rather dubious, I'm suspicious that it's the larvae of flies. In a slightly grumpy manner I requested that Matt should deal with this. He has apparently emptied it into a black sack but beyond that I'm not sure where it's gone. I really must find out more about the whole nitrogen/phosphorous/potassium content thing with the fertilisers and then maybe we can take a more scientific approach to feeding. I've remembered that nitrogen makes leaves (I have plenty of those especially on the squash plants), potassium makes fruits (which is mostly what I'm after now) and phosphorous makes roots (I don't know if I need any more).
This evening the garden seems both more fragrant (I can actually smell the lavender rather than chicken poo) and less fly infested. Matt is still sure that the Wormery is an excessive source of flies but I'm not sure this is such a problem. The after work task was to improve the support for my beans and mange tout peas. I had constructed a rather amateur frame for them a few weeks ago but they (both the frames and the plants) were flopping all over the place so I needed a better solution. That better solution was inspired by seeing my mum and dad's garden (they are experts), and the frame that they had erected for their tomatoes (my tomatoes are not needing that sort of support yet).
So I carefully extracted the existing support network and formed it into the new one. This also required me to do a bit bamboo cane cutting which I have found can be done very easily with some secateurs. I went for a more standard grid formation and I fixed the horizontals and the verticals with green string. I never really used to understand the rationale for green string. To do this fixing I utilised the skill of square lashing. Well, something akin to square lashing - I'm sure it wasn't Girl Guide regulation square lashing but then I wasn't trying to make a washing up stand. Once in situ I tied the plants onto the frames too.
The peas are doing well and I got a good harvest from them tonight. The beans are looking a little sorry for themselves so I'll have to give them a bit more attention. The other job for this evening was harvesting the beetroot. I have looked in four books but none tell me how I can tell if they're ready for harvest and I can't remember when I planted them. Matt pulled one up and it didn't appear to have a beetroot so I might just leave them a bit longer.
I actually quite enjoyed my square lashing; tomorrow I'm going to make some frames for the tomatoes. Perhaps it will encourage them.
