Olympic Gardening- A New Event for 2012

The olympic games has taken over in our house this week, and subsequently the garden has suffered a little. Still not much to report, but I do have lots that I should be doing. The lure of the TV is just too strong. I have always been keen on Athletics as I was a reasonable Athlete myself as a teenager, so as it has now started, the following 7 days look to be going the same way. 

Anyhow, back to the garden here's what has been happening. 

Finally my sweet peas, that I planted in the middle of my summer bed, have flowered. I dont think I have ever waited so long for a garden sweet peas. 

The summer bed was looking very scruffy with dead peas, dead spinach and generally very weedy. I cleaned it all out, now I have to think of something to plant in the big gap. 

Finally the Sungold tomatoes have grown and in fact some are ripe, they are very tiny but look lovely. They will be coming indoors later this week . 

My greenhouse Alicante tomatoes are now going great guns. We cant keep up with them and I am already giving them away. I think I will pick some this afternoon and make some tomato sauce and freeze it for later. I cant make my Chilli sauce yet as promised in the last blog, as the chilli is still not big enough to pick. 

My pepper is now looking very pretty, but its tiny. I think its going to take the rest of the year to get to a decent size. 

And I have planted some more Kos lettuce as I only have a few left outside now. This should do us for the rest of the summer.. 

Now onto other things. I have spent all summer going backwards and forward to garden centres and nurseries for bits and pieces. One of the things I have bought are bundles of bamboo canes. But as is the way, I always need one that is a different size to the ones I have. I was walking down the garden the other day and had a bit of a light bulb moment. I can make my own!

We have an enormous bamboo plant in the corner of the pretty end of the garden.

It didn't take me long to cut our four of the longest branches and get them on the lawn for trimming. 

This caused much interest amongst the resident animals, who all wanted to eat the leaves I was trimming off. 

So that was lunch for three chickens and a Labrador, and four huge bamboo canes drying in the allotment for me, Now I can cut my own to size. I will get some more from the bush next week. 

I have mentioned the Pidgeon's that hang out in the garden before. In fact they got a mention in the last blog as they ate my only red garden Alicante tomato. 

Well what I didn't tell you was they have names. They live in my neighbours garden in a large bush near her patio door. They are always eating and are pretty huge so they have been dubbed Big Bob and Fat Dave by them. This has now caught on and all of my neighbours know their names. We don't know if they are both male. I would say not, but the names suit them and we like them. 

Anyway this week Bob and Dave have done themselves proud. One on them, I don't know which, has become very adventurous. 

I give my chickens corn as an afternoon treat, and occasionally they spill it. This means there is corn just laying on the floor of there run. Mostly they scrape around and eat it, but often they miss bits. Well  Bob and Dave have worked this out and so one of them decided to fly into the run to get some for himself. I don't know if the chickens disturbed him or the dog but obviously after eating he tried to get out and found it wasn't quite so easy. 

By the time I wandered down to the allotment and saw the aftermath, the bird had got out but it looked like an explosion in a pillow factory!! 

Thats a lot of feathers from one bird! I haven't seen them for a day or so, but I imagine we may have to change the names to Bald Bob and De-feathered Dave . 

Finally we went on another of our jaunts into the countryside yesterday. this time we walked something called the Lepe Loop, which has a costal path and then goes inland. It was lovely and as we turned a corner in a path this is what we saw.. 

A field full of Llama. Not your normal farm animal around here. They were lovely. Very interested in the dog and they had nice faces.

What a nice surprise. We will be going back to see them again. 

Finally I did a post about the Seedy Penpals Scheme. Well it is now up and running and my first penpal is a lady called Clare who lives in Devon. I have sent her an email and am now waiting to hear back from her before I send out my first package. You don't get your seeds back from the same person, so I am going to be getting seeds from Peter in Brighton.  

Part of the scheme is that you Blog about the experience so watch out for more news when things get going. 

Have a great week. Don't watch to much Tv, but do watch the evening athletics session on 8th August and see if you can spot me in the stadium. Its my own version of Where's Wally!!