Hive Garden Journal - Tomatoes. So Many Tomatoes.

We seem to have inadvertently turned our garden into some kind of perma-culture. The lawn has pretty much disappeared under potted plants, raised beds and garden furniture, and with the hosepipe ban most of the actual grass is a shrivelled brown desert.

Quite why we have a hosepipe ban in one of the wettest countries in the world is a mystery. But it only came in a week or two ago, and we've been able to make do on tap water and the rainwater collected up in a couple of large water butts we've got.

But despite all these macro things, our efforts this year to get closer to self-sufficiency are paying off.

This first photo is an overview down the garden. Watering using water from the rainwater butts and tap has kept everything green ! Apart from the path, everything is wonderfully overgrown, making lots of fun places for our cats to hide and ambush each other. The bright green blobs on the tree at the top right are walnuts, and you can just see a hazlenut on the edge of the shot. We couldn't be bothered to move the hosepipe....

We planted a Valerian next to the garden office. It's getting nicely established, and is a useful herbal help for headaches and stress.

Japanese Mint. It smells different to normal mint or spearmint, almost an aniseed smell. But it tastes just as nice, and the flowers are great for the bees. We're letting it go to seed so we can collect them up to use next year.

The raised beds are mostly full of bush tomatoes. The idea with the bush ones was that you just let them grow, they don't need all the pinching out of tips.

We tried about 3 different varieties to see which ones worked best in our climate and soil. This might have been a mistake. They all worked, and now we're drowning in tomatoes. There are only so many tomato salads I can handle, even though they taste delicious (home grown is always best). So my wife is bulk-making puree and sauce to freeze for the winter.

Also chard and spinach... doing okay, but a bit overshadowed by the fig tree, which seems to have gone into overdrive.

Peas of some kind. It's also done well, but only just starting to go from flowers to pea pods, so I'm not sure yet if it's all just undergrowth or if it'll actually deliver peas.

This tatty thing is actually the star of the show. Baby cucumbers. Oodles of them ! They give the tomato salads a bit of variety !

The flowerpots are an improvised way to keep the stem and fruits off the ground to stop them rotting. They also protect from slugs and snails, which have been a problem. They love this plant ! So I've been going out a couple of times any night where the ground is damp, picking them up and putting them well away at the other end of the garden.

It's a bit hard to tell, but in this shot there are a couple of grow bags with more varieties of bush tomato, which are about to give us another few kilos of fruit, then some quinoa, and finally a dwarf fruit tree of some kind. I think it's a plum, but it'll be a year or two before it feeds us anything.

Peppers outside the greenhouse. These weren't a huge success for the effort involved, so we won't be growing them next year.

Inside the greenhouse. Now a jungle of aubergines (eggplant), tomatoes and peppers.

This is a weird one. It was supposed to be a white Hungarian pepper. But the flowers seem to have got pollinated by the aubergines. I didn't even know that was possible !

The end result is a fruit that looks like a stripy purple and white pepper, but inside is like an aubergine. Not sure what to call it; an auber-pepper ? A peppergine ? It's pretty and tastes okay, but not what we wanted.

This one is another tomato plant, but it makes tiny baby ones the size of a blueberry. It has made dozens and dozens of them, and they taste sweet and delicious. There's a story behind this one; when Chester went missing, the lady whose wardrobe he was hiding in gave us some seeds for this that she'd picked up visiting South Africa. Turns out they grow really well in England, too.

This is how small they are !

Other things (that I didn't get photos of) are the figs, which might just make us more than one or two this year, and cherries.

For the first time ever, our cherry tree created lots of actual cherries. In previous years, it blossomed but made empty cherries (ones with no stone that don't ripen). I guess someone nearby has got a cherry tree that's become mature, because they generally aren't self-fertile. Our tree is effectively a wild cherry, grown from a stone not a rootstock with a known fruit grafted on. The cherries it made looked like baby plums, so I didn't realise they had ripened until the wasps swooped down. But when I tried one, it was an explosion of juicy sweetness ! We only saved a few from the wasps this year, but we'll get in first next year.

All in all, this is the most productive our garden has ever been. It's definitely repaying all the effort we've put in (especially my wife, who has been doing most of the really hard work !)

Chester (our cat) in the background. Stanley (not our cat) in the foreground. Stanley just wants to be friends, but Chester thinks he's an interloper and is having none of it. We're having another heatwave, and it's too hot for them to even bother to have a fight !