Garden produce

Yesterday we had our first garden-grown broccoli for dinner. Well, that actually makes it sound bigger than it was: we each had 3 pieces, as the broccoli itself was still quite small but had already started to flower. Now we've had quite some visitors to the garden lately who had no idea how broccoli is actually grown, so here's a picture I took about a week ago:

Our broccoli buds.

Yes, broccoli is a flower. The word actually means "flowering top of a cabbage" in Italian (I got this from Wikipedia, btw, my Italian is not that fluent). I don't know why so many people are surprised at the way broccoli grows, but it's always nice to learn something new, right?
Since my last gardening post there have been some changes: we now have (apart from the broccoli) 3 other vegetables growing in the garden: tomatoes, peppers, and winter leeks. The leeks replaced the beans (legumes, actually) that were slaughtered by a buch of slugs (same for the rocket). The strawberries and radishes are of course long gone, and the artichoke plant does not really look like it's doing much, but we'll keep it just to see whether it does something next year.
So, the tomatoes. We actually went for a store-bought version here, because the ones we grew from seed were just too tiny to produce flowers (or so we thought, they now have some very very small flowers, so something may still happen there. The store-bought tomato plant came with flowers in place, which have by now turned into some lovely tomatoes:

Cheating with tomatoes

I hope they will turn red before our big vacation, so we can actually enjoy them!
The pepper plant is also store-bought and still in flower, and the leeks are still very tiny at the moment, but they're supposed to grow until November/December. The grape plants have some veeeeery tiny grapes which we hope will get bigger in time, but last year the total harvest was 3 grapes, so we're not holding our breath on that one.
Apart from these functional plants, we of course also have some nice flowers, to keep the insects happy and thus to keep us happy.

Our own white rose.

Our rose (which we've had for a while now, but which doens't seem to get any bigger) had just one flower last year, so I'm very happy with the turnout of this year. There are some other flowers on the lower stems, which hadn't opened when I took this picture, so it looks even better now.

Alcea rosea, in good Latin.

I just found out that this is called a "Common Holleyhock" in English. Well, we call it "stokroos", which means "stick rose", so neither name is very favourable. Anyway, we've had these ones for 3 years now, and they've been doing great all along.

Clematis show-off.

They (meaning the housing association that owns the building) removed a whole wall of ivy from our garden last year, as it was getting into the roof tiles and window sills of the people living above us, and to replace it we put in a clematis, which is less damaging and nicer to look at. I'm never sure whether I like these plants, they look a bit too show-offy for me, but still, they're flowering nicely.

Butterfly central.

And finally a nice combo shot of our butterfly-bush and hydrangea. We've had both of these for a couple of years too now, they are both in corners of the bit of garden that gets the least sunlight, so I'm not sure whether they are totally happy, but they look nice and the butterfly-bush attracts a lot of butterflies and bees and bumblebees, so that's good.
That's the end of the tour for now, hopefully I can get you one more update some time in autumn, when most of the fruits of our labour should be in!