LUT Hive Garden Journal 2026 #5
Published on HivePostify by @livinguktaiwan · Thu Jul 02 2026
My garden is starting to look quite productive now. The recent hot weather and my auto water irrigation system has probably helped a lot.
Courgette There's been a few flowers but nothing has come to fruition yet. It's still early days. Getting the male and female flowers to grow in sync is little tricky. Luckily this morning I saw a pair open at the same time, but there was no more pollen on the male flower when I saw it. Hopefully nature had done its job already. I have two plants here, so has my neighbour, hopefully there are lots of opportunities to pollinate my courgettes this year.
Tomatoes My two tomato plants in the raised beds are a lot bushier than those grown in buckets. Not sure if it's due to the sun location or watering, either way they all seem to be coming along nicely. I had lots more and not enough space to plant this year. Luckily neighbours were happy to take them off me, especially when they saw there were tiny tomatoes already. I'm glad they've gone to a good home.
Chinese broccoli These Chinese broccoli have done very well this year. I have two patches, one I've harvested three times and finished, they tasted sooooo good! Exactly what I want from my garden
There are more in this little patch. I should get two harvests from here. It will be sad when they're all gone next week.
Morning glory Last year I saw others grow morning glory with a quick harvest. They are nice green vegetables, great for stir frying. These area about a week old, I hope they will grow nice and quick.
Other seedlings Most of my little seedling have failed this year. I had lettuce, spinach, and salad rocket in the blue container on the left. All but 4 lettuces survived. I harvested the spinich and rocket for salad the other week. They're supposed to grow back again, but there doesn't seem to be much life there. The square pot in the middle is a week old Chinese cabbage seedlings. When they're bigger I'll replant them out to where the Chinese broccoli used to be. Then I'll plant more lettuce so I have a successions of greens over the summer.
Yardlong beans My yardlong beans sat in the pot for about a month, and nothing happened. Then I set up some string trellis and they started to climb. I didn't realise that's all I had to do for them to grow 😅 Each plant have quite a few shoots, I hope they will all grow into vines giving me loads of beans. We shall see next month.
Peas My peas were coming along nicely, then I went away for a week and when I returned, most of the leaves had been eaten by aphids and caterpillars. It was such a sorry sight. I've cut off most of the damaged leaves and some new shoots are growing. I also havested a handful of peas, but I don't hold much hope for them.
Choyate My choyate plant is coming along very well, it has quite a few vines. I need to cut them back to just two strong one so it doesn't become too bushy and grow lots of small fruits. I'd rather have quality over quantity.
Flowers This year I have more flowers in my garden, most were gifted to me. Like these sunflowers. They're over a meter tall but no flowers yet. To be honest, I'm not a big fan of them because they take up precious space which I could have used to grow more food. However, they offer shade to other plants so at least that's quite useful.
The crocosmia is starting to bloom. They add a nice fiery splash of orange in the garden, and with the purple lavender in front, makes a colourful contrast.
The jasmine plants have little white flowers and sometimes release a pungent aroma which is quite nice. I have to prune them quite hard otherwise they go wild. They could easilty take over my raised bed, so I hope to give away the one on the right away after the season.
And finally, my gladiolus in honour of my late mum, these were here favourtie flowers. They look very messy as there are a lot of baby crowns, I've already discarded loads. Yesterday, I noticed some stems have buds, I counted 10 so far. I can't wait for them to flower again. Last year they put on quite a display.
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Tags: #lutgarden#gardening#homestead#hivegarden#homegrown#life