Anything but eventful

Not much point boring everyone with weeding and dead-heading statistics, though we haven’t been doing a lot else lately.  We’re still beset with the noisy machinery and uncouth shouting of the oiky builders two doors up, but their presence does seem to have limited the obscene screaming tantrums of their client.  Such a nice quiet neighbourhood we live in.

Crops are cropping, and though we’ve had precisely one runner bean so far, we’re already tiring of, and giving away, baby plum tomatoes.  

The rain and cooler weather seem to be benefiting the larger tomatoes, though I’m still throwing a lot of rotting ones away, and they aren’t ripening yet.  There is one tomato plant with big round fruit, and they are ripening.  The seed came in the San Marzano packet, but it certainly ain’t that variety.  The Bramley apple is fruiting like mad this year, so I hope we’ll get to the fruit before the beasties.  We even have a few blueberries on the little bush we were given several years ago.  

The flowering department isn’t bad either: Chrissie’s tagetes are blooming in profusion and a large variety of colours - which is surprising as they all came from the same seed pod.  We raised nicotiana and rudbeckia from Marshall’s plug plants this year, and they are doing very well.  I was prepared to be disappointed by the  ‘Toto’ rudbeckias, since the first ones to bloom were all the same colour.  But other colours are coming along now, and their habit is much more compact than the ‘Rustic dwarf’ mix we’ve used in earlier years: they were far from dwarf, and had to be staked.

So it’s Toto for us, I think.  It’ll be interesting to see if they over-winter.  The Rustics did so for a number of years, but last winter’s vicious frosts finished them off.  Meanwhile, the perennial rudbeckia - Goldsturm, I think, despite the ‘aubergine’ label - looks as vigorous as ever, though it hasn’t started flowering yet.  The heavy rain of the past few days (well, it is Wimbledon fortnight after all!) has rather hammered the roses, but at least we have plenty of stored rain water again.