June – Don’t take gardening tips from me

Moving house, which finally happens this week, involves moving the garden. Luckily, with my approach to plants – alternating smothering with attention and then complete neglect – there’s not too much to do. However, since I have had a little success, and transportation to the new house is likely to be a traumatic experience for my darlings, I feel now’s the time to document their existence.

Most precious of all my plants is my chilli plant, which shockingly has a chilli growing on it. Part of the reason this is so shocking is that I hadn’t paid any thought at all to pollinating my flowers, so I can only assume that during an afternoon outside in the sunshine (my chilli lives indoors) a bee paid it a visit.

Second to that are the numerous cauliflower plants which I’m growing for the cauliflowers’ biggest fan – the Father.

Hanging in a basket at the front of the house are my strawberries – very small but beautifully sweet. I’m in shock every time I look and see that I have actually grown something I can eat. There is no picture because I ate the strawberries.

Moving on to my accidental, sunburnt pepper plants. Both the sunburn and their existence is accidental – their mother pepper came from Aldi and made up dinner some weeks ago. Since they germinated only at the end of May, I’ve little hope that they’ll give me peppers, but I can’t just kill them. Out in the back garden, alongside the cauliflower are numerous cherry tomato plants. Hopefully, my tomatoes will at some point have a growth spurt because next door’s are at least three times the size and have flowers.

The two pots that contain my tomatoes were gifts from my kindly neighbour. He went to pick up a piece of furniture he’d bought from somebody’s house, and spotted these two large pots standing empty by the door. Being a man of great enthusiasm and better at small talk than anyone else I’ve ever known, he commented how splendid they were and hence was given them as a bonus gift. When he got home and placed the pots outside his own front door he decided that actually he wasn’t all that fond of them after all. Sometime shortly afterwards, during a conversation about bark, he asked me if I would like them. Being short of pots, especially non-plastic pots, I said that would be great.

Finally, in the list of plants that are moving garden are my sweet peas, coriander, thyme, beetroot, carrots, parsley and chives. Just a few small experiments.

All gardening advice is always welcome, trial and error is exhausting.