Vegetable Garden Update

This evening we spent a little time in the garden, helping out the veggies where needed. Steve put up some trellis to protect the sunflowers from passing kids or hooligans. We measured the tallest one, and it was just under 9ft tall (275 cm, 108 inches) and now has a beautiful yellow flower. It will look lovely when all the flowers have developed fully.

All the fruits in the garden are doing well. Jude picked a bowl of strawberries, and Luke picked (and eat) a bowl of raspberries, which are his favourite.

The peas are growing really well and Jude harvested a bowl full of them to eat with dinner. We like them best raw, but even cooked they tasted so much better than frozen peas from the supermarket.

I have two types of pumpkin growing in the garden. One is butternut squash (they grow HUGE and spread right across the garden) and the other type turned out to be courgettes, despite saying they were small round purple pumpkins on the packet of seeds. But no, I'm pretty sure they are courgettes (zucchini). This is the best growing courgette from our 7 plants.

And here are a few baby ones which have just appeared (behind each flower you can see a little green baby courgette).

This week we used a few of our home grown onions in curries. I caught Luke heaving them out of the ground while I was gardening. He was so proud of himself and ran over with two muddy onions saying "Mummy, these ones are ready to eat". They aren't supposed to be harvested until Autumn but they are huge already and look just like proper onions to me.

Here is the veggie garden in all its glory. It changes so much from day to day. Unfortunately all our tomato plants caught something nasty. They all went black and died. About 20lbs of green tomatoes when black and mouldy. We harvested some green ones a few weeks back and have them ripening in a draw.

The garden is full of wild mushrooms at the moment, with all this wet weather. I'm trying to find out what sort of mushrooms they are, and whether they are edible or poisonous.