Back from the holidays

Whenever I return from holiday, although I always look forward to getting back to the garden and allotment, I'm usually a bit worried as to what sort of state they are going to be in. We've recently returned from two weeks away and I was quite pleased that everything looked quite good on our return. 

Before we went away I had a good weed and cut back in the garden and all that hard work seems to have paid off.  I was expecting to see plants flopping all over the place and lots of dead heading needing to be done.  Instead everything was looking quite perky, some of the plants I had cut back had bounced back to produce more flowers and the borders were full of late summer colour from the rudbekias, heleniums, sedums and phlox.

Down at the allotments the vegetables were growing well. The tomatoes are now ripening daily, the courgettes are growing faster than we can pick them and the french beans are growing fast too.  There are cabbages, cauliflowers, swede, kale, leeks and raspberries all ready for picking. And lots of flowers too.  Everything seems to be ready all at once.

The sweet peas which we had not expected to do well have been flowering for weeks now and had grown so big that they had toppled over.  We hoisted them up,  fixed some more canes in place and tied them all up with thick string. I'm hoping they will sort themselves out, at the moment they look a bit trussed up, but they are still producing flowers so it seems a shame to pull them up yet.

The rest of the allotment just needed a good weed and we started with plot 10b doing all the raised beds and the paths during the week. This weekend Helen and I started weeding plot 8.  We didn't finish but it's all looking much better.