Inchoate

First tomatoes

Woohoo - I "harvested" my first crop of cherry tomatoes today. I've picked a couple off in the past but this is the inaugural picking session.

Satisfyingly tasty!

Here's what made most of them:

Tomato Factory

There's another potted cherry tomato plant that's produced a few too; no picture of that.

Here's the naughty tomato plant that seems to consume huge amounts of water, produce lots of leaves, sprawl all over the garden and yet produce no goddam fruit. Bad tomato plant!

Lazy Plant (this is nearly ten times as much vegetatation)

I think what is happening is that it requires so much watering (almost daily) and it doesn't get that from me so suffers repeated drought/drench cycles; you can see the yellow leaves. So in fact I am the negligent owner. It has produced a little fruit but the snails enjoyed them first. My neglect extends to not attaching them to some supporting bamboo. The bamboo's there but they more or less ignored it and instead sprangled across the grass.

Thanks to my mum for setting the plants up!

My experiments in lawn repair and reseeding are going quite well. More on that another time.

Lucky

Found this in the garden just now. When I was looking I expected to find one.

Although that could just be evidence of being slack mowing the lawn and letting too many of its friends get it on :-)

Out of Heaven, into Nature

Outstanding night out Wednesday with Courtney at Heaven, preceded by excellent-as-ever meal at Sarkhel's across the street despite various amounts of psycho-noise in my head. Mercifully drowned out later by club music, spirits, flesh, and dancing (wherein I learnt a move from C. I have promised only to use for the Power of Good).

I was definitely in an altered state when I got back; there's a shrub being "trained" into a tree in the back garden. It doesn't apparently like this happening to it, although the mile-a-minute vines are quite down with being pruned regularly, in a "really bwoss, we jus' cayn't help ourselves!" kind of way. Honestly, I was not on drugs.

So. 5am. In the garden.

Dawn moon. Pure magic.

Do not put either of these men in charge of your webserver.

I am developing, after three decades absent appreciation, an abiding fascination with nature and its relentless growing. Having a garden is such a pleasure. Although this photo doesn't really show it well, the vine has somehow grabbed onto the top of this tomato plant frame, entwined itself and continued on with its rampant domination of the shed. Really, there is this inexplicable metre or so where the vine appears to have grown horizontally through thin air to catch onto the frame. Nature, and probably our cocky resident blackbird, only know how it managed this. Awe inspiring.

(Mention must go to Chris who I think unintentionally outdid himself and probably 90+% of commercial catering establishments by producing this, and I'm going to use the word again dammit, outstanding , pesto, sun-dried tomato, and wafer salami dish. C. & I polished off the leftovers off at 4:30am with appropriate reverence.)

There's a jumping spider on my monitor

The old lady gave birth to several million of these guys in the shed a few weeks ago. I guess when you can jump so fast a human eye (well, mine, anyway :-) can't even register it, making the trek from the shed to the conservatory is no sweat. Even for a lickle spider like this.

I'm pretty sure those little black dots are eyes...