Better Late Than Never

It's been quite a while since I last posted, mainly due to the school holidays last week. Hubby took the week off work too so we ended up making the most of the good weather and headed off all over the place enjoying ourselves. I took this photo last week thinking that I would do a post, but then never got round to it. Do you remember me mentioning the Micro Tomato seeds which I was having trouble germinating? The first batch of seeds I planted never came up and I only had three more seeds to try. Well, one of the seeds was ok and this is the plant now. It's potted up in a six inch plantpot, so you can gauge it's size, yet it has already got it's first trusses. It won't grow much taller now, but it should get some more foliage. Last year I got loads of tiny tasty tomatoes off one of these plants. It's so small that it lives up to it's name of Micro Tomato, and the fruit is tiny too.

As I've already mentioned, we had a lovely week last week. On Sunday we visited Newmillerdam where we saw coots and Canada geese nesting on the water and some had young in their nests. Mallards were swimming on the lake with their young following behind. Duncombe Park was the setting for a country fair on bank holiday Monday and after that we headed in to Helmsley which is a gorgeous little village. I would have liked to have visited the walled garden while we were there but we didn't have time, so it will give us a reason to return in the not too distant future. We had some rain on Tuesday so we stayed under cover of a shopping centre as my daughter had outgrown her school shoes and needed new ones before she went back to school today. The sun was back on Wednesday so we headed off to the Yorkshire Dales, my favourite place. We spent a while in Hawes before driving down to Burnsall where we parked by the side of the river for our picnic and a paddle. No school holiday would be complete without a trip to the coast, so on Thursday we spent the day in Scarborough. It was a gorgeous day, warm enough for my daughter to don her bikini on the beach.

On Friday, my daughter had been invited to her friend's house for a sleepover, so we decided to stay at home and I managed to find the time to plant up my hanging baskets, plant up all my containers with bedding plants and get my tomato plants planted in to their final positions in the greenhouse. I also evicted many of the plants waiting to be taken to the allotment from my greenhouse, so they're now on staging in the garden until I can find some more time to get them in to the allotment.

We spent most of Saturday at the allotment. Hubby built my bean wigwams and I discovered that I did have some spare space, so I've decided to grow some runner beans after all. I planted out two different types of climbing French beans, and have sown seeds direct for the runner beans. I noticed that my first courgette is growing, so it won't be long now until there's a glut. I was also pleased to see plenty of strawberries waiting to ripen. Many of the strawberry flowers were caught by the frost but lots more have opened so all is not lost.

I would have liked to have spent more time at the allotment yesterday but the heavens opened so I spent the day catching up on housework instead. I'm hoping to get down again later on today as the weeds are threatening to take over.