I’ve not been at all well this week, so Him Indoors has been mostly in charge of watering…

Despite him saying he might kill things he seems to have done a really good job and everything (bar the dismal garlic) is on the move – we’ve had 2 litres of beautiful strawberries in the last 2 days (the key seems to be to let them go a little further on the red scale than they are in the shops – newbie knowledge accumulation here!), the broad bean pods are HUGE, the tomatoes are outgrowing the culticave (good job I have another now) and we even have chillies and cape gooseberries showing. The sweetcorn has really beefed up too.

The poached egg plants are flowering, my cornflowers are massive (the packet said 30cm high, these are at 90cm…) and the cosmos is about to explode with flowers. The wee poppies are coming on, though a slug has had 2 of them. I’ve potted up some Kew Red lavender – I’ve been obsessing about this for over a year and really really looking forward to having plants. I hope they do well and are as pretty as the pictures on t’internet.*

The only 2 things are: 1) I have a black aphid infestation on sunflowers, french & climbing beans & anything else they can settle on, and 2) one of my potato plants (Desiree) is looking distinctly unwell. It is going yellow all over. It flowered and there are small seed ‘apples’ on it, but I’m not sure what to do about it.

Oh, and progress with a new bed will be slow. I appear to have a road running under my preferred bed site…

Tonight’s salad: broad beans with olive oil, lemon, nasturtium leaves, chard flowers, beetroot leaves, some (bought) tomatoes and parmesan shavings. With strawberries and basil for afters. Lovely.

December edit: they died.