Summer harvest

It's not ideal, growing vegetables and fruit in a north-facing garden. But, against the odds (and the south facing back wall) our pear tree is dripping with fruit again, for the second summer. I know I should remove a few to allow it to concentrate its efforts, but I haven't got the heart to - I would prefer many, but smaller fruits. The fig tree is also looking quite abundant, probably thanks to the early heat of the summer - hopefully this latest blast of hot weather will finish them off nicely. Fig and pear tart, I'm thinking?
But I'm glad I'm not trying to be self-sufficient. My summer cropping so far totals about four courgettes, a smattering of blueberries, a few bowls of salad, a handful of chard leaves and a few stalks of rhubarb.
I left the work allotment behind when I opted for redundancy and I miss collecting lunch and dinner ingredients before heading home. For such an inhospitable location with everything against it, we used to do quite well - the onions and garlic were a revelation. But I had to let it go. My co-founder Linda has also left now, so it's in the capable hands of Tamsin and @katebradbury.  This is the photo that Paul Debois took last winter as part of his Land Girls project, which is a nice tribute. 

But luckily I have a new allotment project to tap into while I wait for a plot of my own (there's at least another 6 years to go on the waiting list...). The People's Plot is a local community allotment, which we're just clearing and getting ship-shape. 
At home I can't quite get the balance between growing food and purely ornamental flowers in my tiny space. I am greedy for both and the flowers seem to be winning this year. I didn't weed out all the self-sown sunflowers, so I have been harvesting bunches of the gorgeous ones in the picture for a few weeks now. But they take up a lot of room and nutrients in my limited soil space. I also let my sole artichoke bud flower - I did contemplate eating it, but the bees are loving it, so it feels like a noble sacrifice. And I'm delighted to see some blue agapanthus making a rare appearance, having only flowered once before in the past five years. Also, particularly gratifying in the floral department, my lovely climbing rose is having a second flush of blooms.
But my tomatoes, even the grafted ones I am trialling, are still resolutely green and small. I have heard about other tomatoes ripening outdoors elsewhere in London, but mine aren't evening deigning to blush.
Still, there are potatoes yet to be unearthed from their growing bags and the climbing french beans are on their way. It's only the first days of August, so there are a few edible things are yet to come. Perhaps even a ripe tomato or two; if I am patient.

Seedlings, the Spar and the Vicar

Phew. A week on from Sunflower planting day in the graveyard, the seedlings are not only still in situ, but apparently thriving; and the first showings of the Pictorial Meadows seeds are peeping through. I have high hopes for a dazzling display in late summer.
Planting day was a very positive urban gardening experience. We had a good turnout of about a dozen local folk to plant out some 75 seedlings (we held a few back in case we need to replace them at a later date...). Organising these things is a bit like throwing a party - for the first 15 minutes I was worried that no one would turn up. But there were some new faces and some passers-by who stopped to find out what was going on. The sun shone, David the Vicar stopped by on his bicycle to see how we were getting on (on his way to watch the cup final), and the man from the Spar in over the road that nobody shops in, kept ferrying buckets of water across to us to top up our watering cans. It was guerilla gardening meets The Archers Christmas Panto. Luckily I caught the council maintenance team before they had a chance to weed out all the seedlings a few days later - they don't really know what they're doing. Next month, we're having a plant-sale fundraiser - the garden looks like a very small nursery at the moment with all my seedlings and cuttings. We'll be selling plants to raise money to buy trees.