Rain relief

As you know I got very despondent about the state of the garden during the heat of the summer but in the middle of October we had a few days of rain and I started work on the vegetable garden.
I am very pleased with progress despite help from the kittens, the spring onions are up and growing well although I will have to sow a second spinach patch as the first has grown very patchy with early kitten scratching.
I have covered the carrot box, unfortunately I lost all the carrot seedlings due to enthusiastic digging so I have resown with lettuce and covered it with blue plastic netting. I think I will do the same with the spinach patch.
I have sweet potatoes in the ground and they didn`t grow terribly well during the summer but have now taken off and are flowering like mad. They have very pretty flowers like a small cream and pink morning glory.
I am not at all sure when they should be dug up but I have emailed a friend who grows them so should know soon.

Patchy baby spinach

The broccoli, cauliflower and lettuce are doing very well and we are eating outer leaves of the lettuce already. The red cabbage are getting quite large and the sweetheart cabbages are just starting to look like cabbages and not weeds.

Broccoli, caulis and lettuce on the right and red cabbage and sweetheart babies on the left

We had another drama with Daisy yesterday morning when she didn`t appear for her breakfast which is unheard of and after about an hour of searching for her I rang our neighbours to ask them to keep an eye out for her. About a minute later the phone rang and Jim said that the Alsatian on the land next to them had cornered something up a tree. We rushed up there and sure enough it was Daisy clinging to the top branches of an olive tree. Jim and Muriel held the dog using Mark`s belt and Mark scaled the tree. He managed to grab her and hand her down to Jim where she leapt down and went hell for leather home. Hopefully she won`t do that again it is a big dog and has been known to kill a cat.

Some friends from Mourtero brought us some beautiful mandarin oranges, fabulous flavour but pippy so I squeezed them all and bought some gelatine and made a lovely jelly from them. Very refreshing and I hadn`t had jelly for ages, really enjoyed them. All the citrus fruits are starting now, soon be time for more marmalade.

Next time I will tell you about the other side of the garden.