Avocado surviving, weeds thriving

29th July - after the chop!

11th August - the new shoot

After being left to its own devices for a while, my sprouting avocado pip had shot up to over a foot high, and produced some healthy looking leaves at the top - really quite attractive - but online advice was to cut it back to 6" high. I did this with trepidation, fearing that the loss of all its leaves would be such a shock that it would die... however, less than a fortnight later it has sprouted again.

Soaker hose installed

After a week of fairly frenzied gardening in mid-July - mainly to change parts of the automatic watering system (which had suffered from our neighbour's young cats knocking over sprays as they jumped up on to the garden walls) - there has been little done recently, as the weather has been far too hot for the expenditure of much energy. In two places - the bed against the front wall, and the extreme end of the long border (with the rhubarb and loganberry) - the drip and spray watering has been replaced by soaker hose. I hope the cats can't destroy that! The rest of that long border remains to be done in a similar fashion; it is showing the effects of lack of water.

Both blackberry and mulberry have been fruiting prolifically for several weeks; I'm currently straining mulberries (5 kg) to make jelly. The apples are fruiting well - particularly the one in the centre, which was actually planted a year later than the other two - despite the reappearance of the bugs which wrecked the leaves last season. Obviously the winter tar oil treatment wasn't enough to prevent their return. It will need to be applied more frequently in the coming winter. We've also had our first crop of blueberries!  - just one bowlful, but it's a start.

I've tried to encourage the citrus fruits more this year, by removing all the parts killed off by winter frost or wind, and applying specific fertilisers. The orange and lemon seem to be responding fairly well (although no fruit has yet appeared) but the kumquat, though looking quite healthy, has hardly grown at all. I fear it is badly positioned in the front garden, where it only gets sun in the mornings, and plan to move it in the autumn into the large pot at the back which formerly held a young lime tree.

Discoloured leaves

The patch under our bedroom water needs a lot of work at some point. It was a mistake to plant tansy in there some years ago - it spreads underground and can't be contained! The soaker hose doesn't seem to be letting water out, and several plants are looking quite parched. My main worry is the wisteria. We've lost most of it once before - after a lovely spring display it just died away, but new shoots appeared so I hoped it was recovering. Now the  shoots which came up in the last couple of years are showing similar symptoms - yellowing and patchy leaves, though there is also new growth which looks healthy. It may be because the watering hasn't been working well - other possibilities are lack of nutrients or viral infection. I'm hoping it's water or nutrients, as these can be addressed. I've treated it with a fertiliser specifically for climbing plants, and will continue to apply this until the autumn.