A friend in the greenhouse and one outside

July 23, 2013 by Elaine 2 Comments

A quick look round my garden on Sunday morning brought to my attention several jobs which needed to be done but i took time to admire the industriousness of a Bumble Bee as he flitted from an open male Cobnut Squash flower, to a female Cheyenne Bush pumpkin flower. That’s the joy of squash plants, they aren’t at all fussy about which species of male the pollen comes from but, although any resulting fruit will still look like a Cheyenne pumpkin, the seeds of that particular squash would not grow true fruit next year and so I won’t be saving the seeds from that particular pumpkin.

First collect the pollen ….

First job on my list: in the greenhouse, the chillis all needed to be re-potted into larger pots and so, grabbing the largest of the pots that we had, I set about carefully potting all 17 of them up and then rearranging them on the staging, so that they were in a position to get most of the sunshine. Whilst carrying out this process, I came across another valued gardeners friend, a 14 spotted ladybird, and I was very careful to make sure that it wasn’t disrupted too much. It was still there a bit later in the day which was a relief because I feared it may have decided to find a more stable home.

….. and then go visit a female squash flower

With the chillis dealt with, my next task was to find spaces for half a dozen beans that had pretty much out grown their pots and needed somewhere permanent to put down roots. Three of them went into the half bed which had been home to the tray sown carrots I had pulled the day before, and I was able to wind their vines around the wire frame over which netting is draped as needed. The other three went into any and every available slot.

Weeding had to be the next job on my list, specifically the weeds that were growing in and in front of the fence beds at the very back of the garden. This took a while to do because there were rather a lot of them, including some really nasty nettles which even managed to sting me through the rubber finger tips of my gloves and the annoying Mares Tail which seems to be popping up everywhere. I didn’t get much of the the weeding done at all because by now the Mudlets were clamouring for their knitting lesson, so I took one last look about the garden, picked a few beans, a large quantity of mangetout and then headed back indoors, safe in the knowledge that the weeds will still be there when I was ready to tackle them again.

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