Private Jungle

My humans are picking blackberries at the allotment. They aren't very good at navigating prickly stuff so it takes ages and I'm bored. I'll just head off down the garden, dodge the trailing pumpkin vines, pause to contemplate the Jerusalem artichokes, and wait outside the greenhouse for F to slide the door open.

This is my private jungle. Half the tomatoes have grown like triffids and are leggy and reaching all over the place.  The other half are stocky little fellows that F is in love with & reckons she will grow every year (Summer Last variety). In here under all this greenery it is warm and humid and I can hide and peek out the windows looking for the fox.

F closes the door and goes back to the blackberries.  They have brought 7 x 1 kilogram buckets to fill. There are more blackberries than they have bucket space.

On the way home we will drop one of the filled buckets with our elderly neighbours - the ones I used to visit when I had my 'free to roam' pass (before Greece).

I will ask F to do some update photos of all her green stuff before we depart.

Okra flower

Leeks

Yacon

Some tomatoes at last (outdoors)

Tomatillo

New Zealand Spinach

Parsnips, celeriac, J Artichokes

Parsnips again

Some of those blackbeeries

The lupins haven't done well. Wrong kind of soil.

The kale needs a bigger cage

The corn didn't thrive either.

Gigantes (huge Greek beans)

Scarlet runner beans and pumpkins

Some kind of pumpkins that grew out of the compost

Sweet peas at last

"Summer Last"

Aubergine flowers

More Aubergine flower close up

My private jungle

For today's meal

Some of the 9 (larger than that) buckets of blackberries that eventually found their way into our freezer

Another handful harvested. F is going to slice and pickle them

F wanted to add that as there is nothing to indicate beetroot size (and she regards them as her sole success so far) that the roots are longer than her hands. The allotment is heavy clay soil so we should have good beetroot; we just don't have very many because sparrows ate the leaves off when they were small, and when we realized the problem the survivors had to grow inside a cage. Those sparrows were cheeky, they would raid the silver beet as well (also caged by then) even when F was working nearby. She had to put a net over that cage and now even F can't get at the silver beet.