Sunday Morning Garden

I love Sunday mornings. This one is cool and damp and bright. It's nice to have some respite after a busy week. A young member of my blended family joined me this week to help with the garden through the summer. His exams finished on Wednesday and he arrived on Friday in the nick of time to attend to my kitchen garden.

Cauliflower and tomatoes got staked, and mulch on the tomatoes.

There were so many maintenance jobs to do. My friends, Jo and Rich, who run the Female Gardening Company, had come and cut the grass for me a week or two ago after it had grown knee-high with rain and sun and me going on holiday at the critical moment. But now it needed cutting again and was just reaching the point where my very old domestic mower wouldn't cut it.

Half the lawn was covered in these funghi. The slugs had had a good feast.

The grass is growing much better this year (much of it was moss). My neighbour had about a third trimmed from her tree last October, so much more light is coming into the garden. It's made a big difference - the panier on the mower was full, plenty of grass clippings to put on the kitchen garden. Funghi are everywhere, people look a bit puzzled and keep saying, "Is this the right time of year?"

Everything, even the aubergines which had been attacked by slugs, is growing well in the kitchen garden. So well, that many things needed staking. That was the next job, building a little scaffold around each plant to support it. Then spreading the grass clippings.

I'm trying some new garden techniques this year: chop and drop, where you cut down vegetation and leave it on the ground to decompose into the soil. This adds nutrients, helps to conserve water and improve the soil structure. It also saves countless trips to the local recycling tip - which is reducing my ecological footprint, too!

Cardoons and globe artichokes, both in the thistle family, in their new home.

In the afternoon, we started working in the upper terrace in the kitchen garden. I had been busy chopping and dropping earlier in the week. We tidied a little more, removing any brambles, ivy, bindweed or bamboo, and laying the remaining vegetation along the edge of the bed.

Taking some some fine home-made compost from the compost bin mixed with some horticultural sand, we set out five little mounds and planted the cardoons and artichokes, before mulching with grass clippings. I'm not sure about the one on the far left, that might have lost its growing point.

On Monday, we tackle the hedge and get the chillis into some bigger pots.

We're also going to buy a wood-chipper 😎.