Carrot disaster

Many months ago (well maybe 3) I sowed a row of carrots under a fleece tunnel in an attempt to avoid the dreaded carrot root fly, well today with huge anticipation I pulled up the crop and got this...

5 pitiful little carrots full of holes! It seems that the fleece provided all the other pests with a nice place to live and from the irregular growth it seems water doesn't seem to go through fleece as well as I expected.

So far this year the carrots have been the most troublesome crop, first refusing the germinate and then growing very weakly. Still at least with this lot I avoided the carrot root fly...

On the plus side there was more sweetcorn, tomatoes, courgettes (phew!) and raspberries to pick and also the first of many globe artichokes


Later...All 3 artichokes have now been eaten, simply trimmed, boiled, and accompanied by a lemon and herb butter. Yum.

National Allotment week

Today marks the beginning of National Allotment week which is great news. Sadly there are no events taking place on my plots but it is good to see that interest is high, last year there were 4 empty plots (until I grabbed mine) and now there is a waiting list as long as me arm (well maybe).

According to the BBC we can all expect our allotments to be highly productive where a "Typical annual yield is £300 of produce", or maybe not...

Still enjoy the week everyone, I think I will make a special effort to make a mid-week visit just to celebrate.

Tomatoes, sweetcorn and more

This weekend saw the first harvest of tomatoes, 16 sungold, and 3 cobs of sweetcorn, there were also a few raspberries, runner beans and plenty more courgettes. This is the first real harvest where more than 1 thing has been ready at the same time so I am very excited. The tomatoes are my first experience of a home grown tomatoes and they taste fantastic, hopefully the rest will ripen soon.

One rather normal pumpkin fruit has somehow morphed into this monster, see the pic below for some scale, I think it must be the Ghost Rider which I planted for a real Halloween pumpkin, the alternative it that is one of my baby bear pumpkins but that seems just a little unlikely. Just behind the pumpkin you can see one of the Crown Prince squash which is also growing pretty quickly. I am repeatedly being told that the soil on my allotment isn't that good, I think these two prove something rather different.

Souper allotment (abridged)

Thanks to Rach@The big sofa I now have a Wordle:

Try it yourself here