This has been posted as part of Blaugust 2026 🌻🐝 Despite being keen on growing our own food and increasing our self reliance, we've not done too much this year. A combination of things meant we got to it a bit late. I take the blame here, I could have spent more time in the garden but I... well, I didn't. We have got some things growing though! We planted a little late this year and with the heat we've had things have certainly struggled, but we (read: my wife) has kept what we did plant alive! Here's what we've got this year. 8 (or 9?) cucumber plants I can't quite tell the exact number as they're two per pot but I think one has three in it. Cucumbers are a classic fyr.io household foodstuff. We love em, we grow 'em often. Most of the time they grow well. This year they're growing exceptionally well - there are gonna be so many cucumbers that we're going to have to give them away. They've loved it this year, they're flowering way more than I've ever seen before. Won't be long before we can pick and eat this bad boy! 3 tomato plants Another classic staple of the fyr.io residence. We're trying a new variety this year, with a smaller bush which should become laden with little cherry tomatos. One of the three is doing very well indeed, the other two are... doing okay? They're a little small. We're not sure if this is two doing poorly or one doing exceptionally well. The first tomato is almost ready to eat, I'm looking forward to it! The first tomato is nearly ready. Will we cut it into thirds and each try it, or will one of us just greedily eat it? 1 tomato plant Yeah, another tomato plant, but this one is growing in the planter we used for tomatos last year, but we didn't plant it. No big deal... except rather interestingly, it is not a variety we've grown before! I guess either something funky happened with last years plant which self seeded (grafted or something?) or a different seed found its way to us in bird poop. Eager to try this out once they're ready. It's a decent sized plant with a fair number of shop-bought-off-the-vine-looking, longer than usual tomatos. 1 melon plant We grew this last year and it was tasty, but we only got a few melons. This year I've made sure to help the plant grow out a fair bit by encouraging it along some wiring in the greenhouse. There's plenty of flowers on it too, though so far the pollinators seem to prefer the copious amounts of cucumber flowers we've got blooming nearby. Several beetroot Another foodstuff we grew last year. They worked very well then and have worked very well again this year, too. I don't know how many we planted or how many we have left, we've eaten a few already. I wanna say we planted 8 and have eaten 4 so far? Very easy to grow, likely to find a permanent place in our repitoire. One thing we noted last year is that they grew easy and once grown stayed in place for way longer than we thought it would. We didn't pick the last one for a good few months, expecting something rotten at worst or woody at best. But you know what? It was perfectly fine. Loads of mixed salad Can't put a number on this as we forgot to thin it once it had started growing. We then managed to let it grow too much and it turned stalky and woody, so we ripped it out. Whilst it was in that sweet spot of large and leafy it was very tasty. Next year I want to do this again, properly. I eff'd this one up. 1 basil plant This was a plant purchased from a supermarket (Aldi), chucked in some water to see if it would grow roots (it did) then planted in our planter next to our surprise tomato plant. It has done exceptionally well and is producing a constant source of basil leaves without any input from us (outside of watering, of course.) Love basil, goes well on our home made pizza we have on friday. 3 sunflowers Not really a food (although you can eat the seeds) but we wanted to grow one each, so we did. Two are normal, but one of them grew to a gargantuan size. It's huge. I don't know how big, I haven't measured it (why haven't I measured it?) but I would say it's easily bigger than 50cm on the horizontal, and it's a bit elongated vertically too so even bigger than that in that dimension. It's a bit of a bendy funky shape though. If I remember I'll measure it tomorrow. We've cut the head off now and have hung the flower on a tree as we hear the birds will love it. The other two sunflowers are still in the planter, keeping the bees happy. Here's some images of the giant beast! I took these photos over the last few days, but this last one I took this evening. Bees can't stay away from these sunflowers, one of the two smaller ones often has one or two on it. As I looked outside earlier I noticed one, and thought I'd snap a few pictures. One of them turned out to be pretty nice if you ask me. Here it is! I'm using this as my current phone wallpaper, here's the original resolution version (3000 x 4000) if you want it. This concludes the early August 2026 gardenlog. As I mentioned we've not put enough energy into this year as we would have liked. Life kinda got in the way. I hope I can spend more time doing this stuff moving forward, it's so rewarding being able to make a meal from the garden. With the chickens still laying eggs every day we've got protein sorted too. The dream is to be self sufficient, though we don't have anywhere near the amount of land needed for that. I consider this the early days, the practise, where we figure out how to even do food growing stuff, ready for when we win the lottery and can actually afford a decent sized plot of land. We can dream!