Second-Year Growth

I discovered at the pub last night that a pleasant but hardly close acquaintance of mine has been following the progress of my garden on the ol' Book of Face. Flattered and a bit taken aback at this knowledge, I nevertheless happily engaged in a good twenty minutes or so of Plant Talk with her and had a lovely time. It seems that since this is my second growing season, my amateur gardening peers assume I must have learnt something by now. And I have! I've learned, for the most part, how I've done things wrong.

Take for instance my tomato plants last year. It didn't bother me that they were three metres tall and had more foliage than my forsythia and my holly combined. They were big and happy and gave me a lot of fruit, much of which never made it into the house (well, I mean it did, but it was already in a belly at that point.) The fruits were delicate and delicious, and I enjoyed them thoroughly. But I did a lot of things wrong.
I forgot to water them, okay? Summer rainfall is unpredictable here, so you never can be sure just how much rain is getting to the plants' roots. I'd see it rain and think "I don't need to water them today--thanks, sky!" and go about my business. But unfortunately, due to the angle the rain came in at, the semi-protective cove I carved out of the hedge for them, and (as the plants got bigger) the canopy of leaves the tomatoes themselves grew, most rainwater missed the roots entirely. So when I'd come out the next day and the stems would be sagging before my eyes I'd rush around to give them a drink.

This causes problems, I discovered--if you let them get dry, then suddenly dump a bucket of water on them, they slorp it up too fast. While this isn't really a bad thing when the plant is young, once fruits begin to grow, a period of dryness makes the tomato skins less elastic--meaning that when the plant suddenly injects water into them, they split. For un-broken fruit you must sustain your water supply. That didn't really dawn on me. They still tasted great, but they didn't last as long.
Another thing I didn't really realize until later in the season is if you stop fertilizing the soil on a regular basis, the fruit becomes tasteless and the colour is less vibrant. (see also "plant leaves make their own canopy which keeps water off roots"--water which contains liquid fertilizer). They do like my tasty high-potash tomato food from Tesco.

A third thing, this time involving growth. The plant doesn't really exist to make as many fruits as possible. That's not its overall priority. The plants want to be big and lush and eat all the sunshine they can find. Last year I didn't mind this, but I did something quite strange for no particular reason that taught me a lesson. I planted 3 tomatoes in 9" pots and the other 7 in the ground. The 3 in the pots stayed little (they maxed out at about 3') and were more prone to nutrient-retention problems, but they flowered first, fruited first, and sustained regular, if smaller crops of tomatoes throughout the entire season. The 7 in the ground (in the hedge, that became the hedge) got much taller (12' or more) and much, Much leafier, and produced more tomatoes, but did so later, and by the end of the warm season they all had at least one cluster that had not ripened. It seemed like they put far more effort into overall growth than fruit growth, more than likely because they had bigger, stronger root structures that could support unchecked growth of that kind.

It's worth noting that I didn't mind them getting huge and taking over the hedge at all--mostly because I had completely scalped the hedge to make room for them, and without the vines I would have probably caused several awkward "er, nice jammies" encounters with my neighbours.
But yes, at least someone out there has been enjoying my failures and occasional bright spots of success in the yard. Check out the slime trail left by one of my many tomato seedling murderers. I caught this one and gave him a fling at the fence.
My courgettes are flowering and have tiny immature squashes deep inside.
Two of my rosemary shrubs have been eaten by something or other but the third is happy and healthy.

The peony has finished its all-too-brief show but the azalea is still going and my miniature rose is just getting started. (teeny tiny rose! It would fit in a salad bowl)


The sage went all powdery and died, which is something my landlord says happens frequently. I have some sort of wall-climber that has tiny flowers that the bumblebees absolutely adore.
The apple tree is full of tiny orbs.
I hacked the fuchsia back almost to the ground in March and it's full of leaves again, ready to go. The lemon balm is taking over, but I don't mind. Apparently it is a useful mosquito repellent. (It does smell like citronella so I'm not surprised. I wonder what would happen if you mashed it into a small bowl of water and heated it?) I have two types of mint (one brightly-flavoured, one more subdued) that are both doing well, but I'm having to pull their little sprigs out of the path. They're growing in pots but that is apparently not a restriction. The Big Pink Plant finished blooming and has settled down for the summer.
The Japanese Maple is so richly red it's almost purple and the lettuces are covered in aphids.

The Hosta is happy and no longer looks like a city of the future. My garden has far more aphids and whiteflies than last year. I don't really know why but I have a few hunches--I grew tulips this year and by the end of March they had aphids all over them. I wonder if they like laying eggs on tulips. They certainly like laying eggs on lettuces, but then again everything likes to eat lettuce. Snails, aphids, flies, cats...I've decided to just leave the lettuces as a herbaceous sacrifice to the neighbourhood.