Water, water everywhere... well, not really.

This was the rest of our radish harvest from the patio pot -- not terribly impressive. I've been a bit unlucky with radishes and with peas and runner beans. Must research whether it's something in the soil we use.

 Broadbeans however are doing very well!

Courgettes absolutely taking off now. We've had the first two baby courgettes, with flowers still attached, during the week with our couscous.

Our berry haul from last night: the last 2 containers with strawberries (although we reckon there's about another one still ripening), and underneath, together with our harvest from the shrub in our garden, 2 kgs of blackcurrants. And these were the ones the birds didn't get. Next year, we'll totally fruitcage every single shrub and will do even better.

OH has already turned the blackcurrants into 7 pints of blackcurrant jelly this morning -- yum! -- and all before breakfast.



The weather has been absolutely brilliant these last two weeks -- very summery, very dry, beautiful. It's forcing us to do a lot of watering runs on the plot and in the garden, but that keeps us fit and nicely works off the pounds that the evenings' customary pint of German lager on the patio is otherwise threatening to pile on.

Much to OH's amusement, I have copied a wacky water-saving trick from our permaculture friends further south: they keep all their bath and shower water instead of flushing it down the plughole and transfer it into buckets to carry downstairs and chuck over their plants. I've taken to doing the same, and it's amazing just how much water you can recycle that way. It forces you to think more carefully about water use. I've recently had a look at our consumption over the years -- it's been very steady, despite our burgeoning garden -- but the water rates have absolutely skyrocketed (did I say this already? I'll say it again: privatisation is a con -- reverse it. Recommunalise now. Water for the people, not fat-cat shareholders!).

Anyway, all our water reserves for our garden and patio plants have long been used up in the dry, hot weather -- we had about 1000 litres distributed in various water butts. To keep everything growing and flowering nicely before we manage to get the mulch in, we need every drop, ideally not from the tap.

So for the past week or so, I've been scooping my old bathwater into 7.5 litre plastic buckets and throwing it over my planters (though not the veggie one -- I draw the line at eating tomatoes tasting of supermarket own-brand lemon-scented shower gel). I get about 4 to 5 buckets out of this every day, and that's money I'm not throwing into the gaping shareholder maw of my local privatised water supplier. No doubt they'll hit back against us by increasing prices so that any consumption savings are instantly wiped out. They'll give us a bull reason, like "too much rain", "too little rain", "investment in infrastructure", "rising prices elsewhere", and the reality will be that it's some giant pension fund on the other side of the world, which is a majority shareholder and which no doubt will expect secure returns on their investment to meet the grotesque payout demands of the baby boomer generation in non-jobs now flopping into comfortable retirement on the backs of Generation X and Y, who are now  recycling their bathwater in buckets. Nice one.

Rant over. Time to enjoy the sun and think about more water conservation measures like mulching.