The beautiful weather on Sunday brought out a record 28 members and 2 children. We welcomed Mark as a new member.
We harvested a bumper crop of broccoli. We have been harvesting broccoli for three continuous months now. We picked abundant silverbeet and lettuce (Cos, Lollo Rossa, Rouge d’Hiver, Freckles Bunte), celtuce, good beetroot, some garlic, coriander, celery, spinach, sorrel, land cress, asparagus, chicory, parsley, rocket and kale.
We sowed climbing beans (Lazy Housewife and Purple King), bush beans (Jade and Stringless Pioneer), radish (Cherry Belle), okra (a green variety called Mammoth Spineless and a red variety surprisingly called Red) and planted sweet basil seedlings. The children sowed sunflowers. Where sunflowers germinate will always be a bit of a pleasant surprise!
The Purple King climbing beans planted in the “watched space” in bed 3 last workday have started to germinate (photo below). The bean seedlings are close to the metal frame. Near the middle of the photo, there’s also a seed from a pumpkin, or some other member of the cucurbit family, that has germinated. That seed has come from our compost. We’ll remove the seedling. The same thing has happened in bed 7, where we planted cucumbers recently. We have rogue cucurbit seeds germinating there. This is not unusual in our garden.
have begun germinating (bed 3)
One of the Chinese mustard cabbage plants we’ve kept to save seed from (also in bed 3) has become infested with aphids. The seeds won’t be ready to collect for several weeks so we will either need to try to control the aphids or remove this plant to reduce the number of aphids calling our garden home and spreading to other plants.
St Helen's Community Garden 