Rain, Rain, Rain...Again!

We've had another wet and windy week again here in the UK. Before I ever started to grow my own food, I always thought this was a negative thing. However, I see the necessity of rain. I see how it gives the vegetables and fruits the water that they need to grow and bear their crop! As you can see below, there has been some obvious growth on my plum trees. The newer leaves are much lighter and brighter and are looking healthy. This is encouraging, I hope for a large crop from these plum trees some day!

Ready For Summer!

Quite literally, I myself am ready for summer. I'm ready for cricket, I'm ready for seeing my friends in the park. I'm ready for some more interaction again. But with our homesteading and gardening, we are ready for summer too! We have some make-shift water butts that will give us some water to water the greenhouse as we may not get some rain again for a while. We are trying to be more self-sustainable too and don't want to have to use the hosepipe to water our food. These large buckets full of water really helps towards that! We have two large water butts outside of the greenhouse and luckily one of them has filled up to the top! That should easly be enough water for 10 days or so!

3rd Time Lucky!

We have been so lucky with our rhubarb crop this season, here you can see that we are already onto out 3rd crop for the spring/summer! I've really enjoyed harvesting these, washing them, weighing them out, chopping them up and then putting them into freezer bags in the freezer ready to be used as and when we need it. We've cooked some rhubarb crumbles, rhubarb chutneys and we have even delved into some rhubarb gin! Social distancing must really be getting the better of us! ;)

Tomatoes, Tomatoes, Glorious Tomatoes!

Tomatoes are perhaps my most favourite vegetable. The great thing about tomatoes is that you get such a large crop when they start to fruit! Be warned too that they can get really large indeed! Some of the ones just behind this picture are as tall as me! Originally in these pots a planted 5 seeds in each pot and most of them actually grew! To what you can see now are 4 pots of around 4 tomato stems each! These definitely need to be planted into larger pots soon as the roots are starting to crawl out of the bottom of the pots! Going to need to head down to the garden center and get myself a whole load of pots! On the larger tomato plant you can see that some juicy green tomatoes are starting to grow! Hopefully they get large and red and sweet soon!

What Have We Here?!

We've have been tidying up the garden down the bottom and pruning the hedge so that we feel like we have some privacy from the neighbours but also feel like we can breathe too. What we found was that there were around 5-10 Damson trees hidden amongst the bushes that we had no idea were there before! Sadly, whoever the owners were before totally butchered this hedge and just cut straight across it. However after some investigation we found that we have 5-10 damson trees in the bushes! We are now haning plum lines off them and allowing them to breathe and grow in a healthy way and actually get the sunlight they deserve and need! You can see in the second picture that one of them is starting to bear some fruit!

Experimenting

I've got a new batch of cucumbers and lettuces and herbs on the way. I've opted for the biodegradable pots to plant the seeds in as experimentation compared to planting them straight into pots. It's been a different journey because sometimes these biodegradable pots can get really dry really quickly in the greenhouse which may damage the growth of the seeds. I then realised that putting them in these trays could help hold onto some water and prevent all of the water from running off of the soil and thus drying up to quickly. Do any of you have any tips for these? Help greatly appreciated. Below this you can see that I cross planted my lettuces into larger and longer pots as they were big and healthy enough to managed the outdoors! There's a large cauliflower in the middle too as this was just taking up too much space planted in the greenhouse!

The Aftermath

All of that pruning to save those damson trees means that we have totally overflowed our green recycling bin and now have has to create a makeshift compost pile! We didn't want the bin collectors complaining that they couldn't empty our bin! We filled that bin right to the top!

Thank you, Thank you, Thank you!

Thank you very much again for taking the time to read this update of mine. I've really enjoyed taking up this new hobby of homesteading during the corona virus and I have also enjoyed documenting this on the local grower blog! Please feel free to upvote, comment and share. This really encourages me and really helps! As I mentioned before, I have been working behind the scenes too at creating the GROW token and I have been successful in doing that! It was something that crossed my mind and it has been so exciting to actually have done it now! I have thought long and hard about the GROW token and it's utility and quite frankly just what to do with it! This is all outlined below and goes a really long way in support me so thank you very much! Special thanks to @darthknight and @trafalgar for your generous upvotes!

Why Should I Buy GROW Token?

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