First Strawberry!

Just a quick one to say we had our first strawberry of the year last week.

First strawberry of the year

Obviously there was the ceremonial cutting and sharing of it. Only three ways mind, as Mrs Matt does not like strawberries!
It was off one of the three strawberry plants that were taken last year as cuttings from runners and kept in the greenhouse over winter and only went outside about a month ago. There are lots more fruit on them and we've had another red one since. Yummy.

Newly laid turf

The people who lived in our house prior to us moving in decided to put round beds in the middle of the lawns. Now this may look pretty - well, they would if they had nice flowers in them - but they are a royal pain when it comes to mowing.

So a couple of weeks ago we decided that we'd do away with at least one of them - the one by the greenhouse. This is what it looked like (pic taken winter 2008-09)

This was how the lawn looked before Emily's work

So we started the job and Emily took it upon herself to dig out all the plants that were in the bed. This was not an easy task considering the vegetation was in full growth. After a few hours of hard work and sheer determination she had dug everything out. Well done Emily - fantastic job!

The next day I set about squaring off the edges and levelling the earth. I gave it all a good soaking and then laid some rolls of plush new turf.

This is the result:

New lawn

After laying the turf I kept it well watered over then next few days to make sure the roots didn't dry out while it was knitting into the earth.

The hardest job was making sure that the new turf was level with the existing garden. In some places this is not quite right but there's not a lot I could do about it at the time.

We're really pleased with it and it's opened up the lawn a lot. We plan to do the other round bed in due course.

Cucumber News

I'm growing four cucumber plants this year which is almost certainly too many (I know the picture has five seedlings but one was a spindly outcast). But I'd rather have too many than not enough. Again I bought a packet of all-female plants to save the hassle of having to remove any male flowers. The variety is Passandra and is 'mini' type - you pick the fruit when they are about 15cm long.

After a few days in my home-made propagators this is the state of them on the 24th March:

Young Cucumber seedlings

Well, it's nearly 10 weeks on and now look at them! The cucumbers themselves are already a nice size. The biggest one at the moment is over 5cm so not long to wait ...

Loads of flowers on the cucumbers

They've been re-homed into the old recycling boxes and I've put up some netting in the greenhouse for them to climb up. Hopefully it should be able to bear their weight.

The Courgettes are getting bigger

And here they are in the very overcrowded greenhouse! My only concern now is that as they grow they'll start to block out light to the other plants.

Lots of pots in the greenhouse

If you look closely you can see the irrigation system which is part of another hi-tech project and will be reported on soon - once it's up and running!

Germinating Courgette

Both last year and this I've grown courgettes from seed. What has amazed me is how large the seedlings are and how quickly they grow.

So this got me thinking - a germinating courgette seed would be the ideal thing to film in timelapse.
So I downloaded the trial version of HandyAVI and set it up in the office with a webcam pointing at a small pot containing compost and one zucchini seed.

HandyAVI is a very cool piece of software - it can do lots of things beside timelapse. I set it up to record a frame every 3.5 minutes. After a few days I was rewarded with the following video:

Even thought it seems bright in the office, it seems that the seedling grows taller than normal, searching out better light.