The beginning and the end

Today I picked my first tomato, it was a 'Latah' which is an early ripening variety from Real Seeds, warmed from the sun it was delicious. Sadly today was also the end of my tomato bed because all the plants are showing the dreaded signs of blight, I had hoped that evening waterings and the blistering hot heat would delay the inevitable but sadly not. The are plenty of also ripe and unripe fruits which will be turned into sauces and chutneys; the bed will be used for some over-wintering kale and next year I will be growing blight resistant varieties.

The hot and wet weather should hopefully provide perfect seed germination conditions so I have sown Pak Choi, Mizuna, Fennel, Swede, Endive and Mispoona to hopefully provide crops in the coming months and over winter.

The new potatoes are continuing to delight, 'Charlotte' has proved to be an excellent masher so we are enjoying plenty of potatoes in all forms. The courgettes have started to go mad, I returned home today with 1 marrow, 1 very borderline marrow and a baby courgette as well as 6 cucumbers and another pot of raspberries. Now I'm off to dig out my stash of courgette recipes to turn these beauties into something truly delicious.

Enjoy your plots.

Fruits of July

Potting on

Not much plot action this weekend because I've just run 10k for Cancer Research, a worthy cause but unfortunately one that highlights how incompatible my love of running is with my love of veg growing! I'll explain how I ended up pursuing both another day.

So with the need to rest prevalent I have spent the weekend sowing seeds and potting things on. The seed sowing guide is still in use and it does seem to be working; now when I have 10 minutes spare I can quickly consult my spreadsheet and get some seeds sown rather than wasting all the time sifting through my mess of seeds. 2 trays of leeks have joined the 2 sown a few weeks ago, this year I am attempting to have a decent crop of leeks, something which didn't seem important in previous years because we hardly ever ate them. The discovery of Sarah Raven's creamy leek recipe has completely changed that and we are now buying leeks on a regular basis.

The courgettes and squash have all been sown, I might follow them up with some later sown courgettes to make sure I have a supply right through the summer. Alys Fowler has been giving some tips on how to store courgettes for the winter in her "The Edible Garden" programme on BBC (still available on the iPlayer if you've missed it) so I'm not feeling quite so worried about the courgette glut as I normally would. Normally I grow 'Crown Prince' as my Squash variety but the F1 seeds are very expensive so this year I'm experimenting with a variety called 'Potimarron' which is meant to be excellent for roasting as well as being a French heirloom variety so I'll have a chance of saving the seeds.

The aubergines were in desperate need of potting on, as were the chillis but annoyingly the weather is still far too cold for either to move outside so I have completely filled my coldframe. The aubergines are from Real Seeds and should fruit outside provided we have a decent summer, they have certainly been excellent in germination and growth so far so I'm starting to worry about an aubergine glut - well I can dream can't I?

Avoiding the gluts

The borlotti beans are coming along nicely, I don't think I will ever have a glut but hopefully there will be enough to try out a couple of Sarah Raven's recipes. I took the time to patch up their rather shakey structure and removed a few of the weeds but this weekend was mostly about improving the look of the allotment rather than actually improving the allotment so I have been hoeing the weeds rather than digging.

The weekend turned out to be a hot one and also to be a weekend of firsts, the first plums were eaten (very tasty) and the first maincrop potatoe roasted, more exiting thought was the first of the sweetcorn, boiled and eaten. Delicious, and there is plenty more to come.


The couregettes have been politely producing 1 couregette per week which has been a very modest amount but it looks like all this sunshine has convinced them to put out 3 or 4 each, next week will mark the beginning of the courgette glut...

Squash, heat and some bees

All this hot weather is really making things happen, the first courgette was picked today (a beautifully small one which I am quite looking forward to eating), the beans need staking and the weeds are making good progress in taking over my plot.


The squash plants are starting to spread out, soon I hope they will be big enough and brave enough to fight it out with the weeds which I have deliberately not bothered weeding because I know squash have excellent smothering tendencies which will hopefully kill even the most persistent of weeds. Most of the squash plants are planted over an upturned bottomless bottle to help funnel the water to the roots, and it seems to be working, the plants with the bottles are definitely more vigorous than the ones without.

It was far to hot to actually attempt anything today so I picked some cabbage and globe artichokes to go with my new potatoes and then took some snaps of the bees enjoying the flowering parsley.

Slow but steady progress

Today I managed to earth up the potatoes, I only covered the leaves with a very thin covering of aoil after reading this on Pumpkin Soup's blog. This year I will be aiming for little and often and hoping for a bumper crop. Strangly the Rooster potatoes (a maincrop) are far more vigourous than the Charlotte (a salad crop). Go figure.

I also got around to sowing 8 more squash plants, the batch sowed 3 weeks ago came through ok but then I lost 3 so hopefully I will have a full set before the month is out. I have also sowed my courgettes inside, two plants this year and also a full list of couregette lovers from work, well you need to have somewhere to ofload the excess.

No sign of the carrots or chitted parsnips on the allotment, hopefully they are just biding their time. Managed to get the dward beans, pak choi and beetroot sowed but sadly no extra carrots because I left the seed at home, doh!

With 2 more days of the bank holiday stretching ahead I am hopefull that more sowing will happen, some weeding might not go a miss and if the weather stays like this there will certainly be more watering.

Blighty

Life suddenly turned busy and a weekend trip to Edinburgh last weekend (yes very nice thank you) contributed to the lapse in posts but the allotment never sleeps so plenty has been going on.

The tomatoes have succumbed to blight, disappointing but fairly expected given the amount of rain we have had. I was lucky and did have some fairly hefty harvests before the blight arrived. About 50 semi-ripe tomatoes are now covering the windowsills and actually seem to be ripening up quite nicely. The Sungold variety were the outright winners this year, the small size meant they ripened up very quickly and tasted great.

I was concerned that my potatoes would also be affected by blight so I have pulled all the plants up but left the potatoes in the ground. I am hoping that they will store in the soil over winter without problems, but just in case I have a large supply stored in the shed. The Pixie potatoes are a bit bland but the Arran Victory are stunning, they are a purple skinned variety so look lovely and they taste divine. Hopefully they have also succeeded in suppressing the weeds too.

Courgettes are still going mad, I harvested 14 this week from just 2 plants! I am running out of recipes for them now, especially the marrow sized ones which are a bit too sqidgy for my liking. Luckily I have uncovered some courgette lovers at work so I am going to palm them off.

The globe artichokes are fantastic, the plants are huge and look lovely, even when rising out of a nettle patch. I have decided to let the remaining buds flower because they look so nice. Isn't it a shame that courgettes don't spoil into something so pretty?

Planting, planting, planting and a little bit of accosting

Today is supposed to be the bank holiday's only day of sun so I have been fairly busy trying to make the most of it. This morning I planted out the masses of plants we were given by OH's very lovely grandparents, re-potted the strawberry sweetcorn and planted the tomato plants in the final garden veg bed; they are slightly overcrowded and I have 3 more which were never going to fit, so they will be going into a growbag at the bottom of the crappy greenhouse.

This afternoon I ventured down to the allotment to plant out my sweetcorn, unfortunately due to the extreme wind I ended up having to stake them and since I only had 5 canes with me I couldn't finish planting them out. I did manage to plant both courgette plants though. Each of the sweetcorns will have a pea plant next to them, today's lot get the pre-germinated ones and the rest will have to make do with a seed after a few pea disasters along the way.

I also bumped into one of the potential council complainers but after accosting them with my fork it turns out to not be them, this means it was definitely Mr he who got the council to clear him plot and then just sprayed chemicals all over it before planting it up with lots of nice seedlings from the garden centre. Nothing against anyone who chooses not to clear their own plot, or grow their own plants but I really don't think you can then go complaining about people who do!

Things are progressing well on the allotment, all the asparagus crowns now have a spear each so hopefully will gain strength over the summer to produce plenty more next year. The peas which I sowed but the wonky twigs are germinating. The sweat peas are growing well and I even have some carrot seedlings in the fleece tunnel! Not all the carrots have germinated but in the spaces where they have, there are a couple of seedlings so I should have enough to replant into the gaps.