After a long long hiatus, I decided to revive the Black Thumb Chronicles. It was a title I decided on last year when I started my gardening journey. Back then I knew nothing about gardening, which isn't that much different now, but a year on I have a bit of experience under my belt and while my thumb has improved, I still consider myself a beginner so I figured the title still fits.

It's been ages since we've worked on the garden. Between what seemed like two months straight of rain and pure laziness we ended up with thigh high grass that Hubby laboured over a few weeks ago.

Before....

After....

It's been great having the yard back but with months of neglect it was looking a bit "how ya going".

For example:
The Apollo tomatoes went wild and needed a huge trim, cut, hack ~ whatever you wanna call it.

I wish I could say that was it but no. There's actually much more of that tomato plant and that was part of my mission today.

Me yesterday

In the spirit of teamwork, my @actifit step count and trying to do as much as I can while I can, I decided to tackle the garden.

Honestly, there's so much to do I didn't know where to start first but figured I better move the cosmos.

Here the before and after relocation shot.

Here they are at the new spot by the fence.

I had to create a makeshift wall so I can plant the cosmos in and add more soil. It'll be great to eventually get more rocks that match the existing ones to create the wall, but for now the bricks will do. You may notice they're also holding the cosmos up and in place.

Luckily these cosmos don't need much soil to grow wild. As it was, it was in shallow ground which made it easy to pull out, so I'm hoping they do well in their new spot.

And now that the cosmos are out of the way the ranunculus got their spot back.

The Berries

We planted a couple of raspberry plants ages ago and they too have grown wild. Wild as in it multiplied and grew taller. Unfortunately the birds seemed to enjoy them and kept hacking away at the top of it so it needed a trim.

The strawberries also needed a tidy up and really the whole section needed weeding so all that got done today as well.

The Lilies

The lilies also needed a lot of weeding.

And then back to the tomatoes

As you can see it's a mess.

I had to untangle everything from everything which involved pulling the stakes out (not that they did much in the end), then I had to cut the fabric rope, then I cut the dead branches and of course cut not dead ones just to get the job done.

After a while the best I could do was drape what was left over the retaining wall fence.

If you zoom in you can see plenty of huge green tomatoes still hanging on the vines.

After all that work this is what I had to show for it..

😭😂😭😂

It's a pretty sad harvest, though I was very pleased to find the strawberries ~ which were delicious btw.

The green tomatoes... Eh.. I have a bowl of green tomatoes inside the house from when the mowing was done and they're still green. I'm keen for some red tomatoes to go with my vegemite sandwiches ~ but I reckon I'll run out of vegemite before the tomatoes turn colour.

If you have a tip on hurrying up the green to red process help a sister out and comment below!