Flower power

Yesterday I had a few flowers, today I've got mini courgettes! They seem to have grown overnight. Given how many I've got coming along I decided to pick a selection of yellow and green courgettes and a few of the male flowers as well.
The courgettes are so small and tender that they taste great raw, so I used a potato peeler to slice them into strips and put them into a salad which also included some of the raw broad beans and radishes.
I wasn't really sure what you do with the flowers so I googled 'courgette flower recipes' each one I found suggest some sort of cheese stuffing and then dipping in batter and frying. One thing they all seemed to say was courgette flowers are very rare to find for sale. This didn't really help me very much as I don't have any ricotta cheese so in the end I dipped the flowers in beaten egg, rolled in seasoned flower and shallow fried them, it was a great way to eat them but I do think they deserve a better filling next time, and judging by the number yet to come there will be a next time.

The courgette plants have grown much bigger than I thought they would, they're beginning to overshadow the nearby row of leeks that I only planted out a couple of weeks ago. In the above picture you can see another new power tool of mine, the radio! I play radio three to the plants, they seem to like it.

Finally here's another plot shot, there's quite a gap between the fennel and the strawberries that I haven't yet filled but with all the watering I've been doing I'm not too worried about it. 
Watering is the main chore on site at the moment, I met a man at the hand pump who told me that I ought to invest in another watering can, he seemed to have three or four and was constantly filling them and ferrying them back to his wife who was in charge of the watering. While I waited for him to fill his many cans he gave me tips on how to use the hand pump.
'Keep the handle three inches away from the the stand, like the peasants in the Dordogne' he told me.
I resisted telling him where to stick his watering can.

Hot plot

'Ninety' said said a voice while I was busy weeding, I looked up to see the old woman from the plot behind mine.
'The temperature, not my age' she cackled.
She was probably right, the sun was fierce today but all the vegetables seem to be enjoying it, the courgettes have come on leaps and bounds, the green variety have much bigger plants than the yellow ones but both now have flowers and I'm soon going to be inundated with courgettes!
I was at last able to pick some of my cut and come again lettuce leaves. They've spent the week under the net tunnel and that has kept those birds off. I then planted some more lettuce and some rocket in seed trays to grow in the greenhouse.

I decided to get some more tunnels so I could protect my cabbages as well. I asked at the association shop if they had any, they didn't but they did tell me I get a 10% discount at the garden centre up the road, I wish I'd known earlier. The garden centre is still expensive but's also convenient so bought two more tunnels. I decided the cabbages in the ground were too far gone and dug them up and replaced them with the last ten I still had in the greenhouse, they're are smaller but actually have leaves so stand some chance of growing.
I planted the last third of my radish row and was able to pick a dozen or so from the first third, they're still a little small but almost perfectly round. I also planted some more turnips at the end of the half leek row. 
I then had a big harvest of beans, there are so many of them right now, I filled a carrier bag with them. We'll have some broad beans with dinner and I also picked a few raspberries to have for pudding.

The rest of my time was spent weeding and watering, I want to get up to date as possible before I go swimming in Turkey on the 5th.

Midsummer madness

Here's the view at plot 68, really nice to see things filling out a bit and beginning to grow up a bit. The courgettes in front of the shed have done the best and they're the ones that get more shade in the afternoon. The french beans are winding their way up the canes and you should see the size of my onions!

The raspberry net is a success, a few dozen I've picked this evening which will be great with some ice cream. You may notice in the top picture that the strawberry net has moved, it's now a salad net. If you look back a couple of posts you'll see how well the early salad was doing, that was before the birds and slugs had found it. This is how it looks now, I hope a few slug pellets and the net will help it re-establish itself, I've ordered a couple more nets online but the strawberries are over now anyway.

The cabbages have also proved irresistible to all the pests, I do still have some more in the greenhouse growing in pots, I might have to replace the ones in the ground, or maybe I'll just plant the others out and see which ones survive. This is one of the the most eaten examples!

I'm very proud of my french beans, they learnt how to climb up the bamboo all by themselves. I've been giving everything a good water in this warm weather, the soil gets dry very quickly because it's so sandy.

I'm going to need to do a weeding soon, they never seem to give up and there are all sorts of strange things coming up all over the plot. Finally here's a picture from the other end of the plot.

Bean feast

Not the most flattering angle, here's Ptolemy picking some broad beans. Both Ptol and Nicole came down to the plot today and I put them both to work! Nicole got out the hoe and started working her way backwards down the plot narrowly avoiding the artichokes. Here she is in between the potatoes.

You can really see the difference between the two types in the picture above, Desiree on the right, Rocket on the left. The potatoes must have read my last post because since I was last on site a flower has appeared. This is on one of the main crop desiree plants, they're very pretty.

After Ptolemy had picked a bunch of beans we started to pod them, we couldn't help but try them too, they're still small and delicious raw, Ptolemy took some photos as we did this. Here are some beans in their furry pods.

Here's me crouching on the ground podding a few more. We'll eat the beans for supper tonight lightly fried with pancetta and some sage from the top of the plot. I also picked a dozen raspberries and a few strawberries, these will be nice on ice cream for tea.

Before the girls arrived I had my first go with the strimmer. I bought a cordless strimmer from argos for £39.99, probably not much more than a decent pair of edging shears would cost and a lot less effort to use. I used them for a bout 5 minuted before I noticed that the centre handle was the wrong way round! It was much easier to use them once I had turned it, it took about 20 minutes to give my borders a good trim and make the plot tidier - they wouldn't bee very good for much more than grass and weeds but were perfect for what I wanted.

I'm sure the courgettes will flower soon, there seem to be buds forming on most of the plants. The slugs have begun to attack some of the more tender plants, I realised the cut and come again salad has actually become eat and eat again slug food and the savoy cabbage seem to be a real treat for them. I'm not sure whether the nematodes have worked at all? so I bought some slug pellets this time and sprinkled them in the affected areas I hope this produces the required results.

Here are the shelled beans - yummy! and there's a whole load more where they came from.

Potato update

It would seem most likely that the the bigger plats on the left of the picture are the main crop Desiree and the smaller bright green ones are the early crop Rocket. Looking back in my archives I planted both lots on March 13th so almost exactly three months ago - Some people seem to say you can pull up your earlies after 12 weeks whatever and other say you wait for the plants to flower. They are much smaller than my main crop so I guess I better leave them in for a bit longer.

Net gains

After the success of the strawberry nets I put a large net over the raspberries which look to have a lot of fruit developing on them. A bit difficult to see in this picture but their are two posts with a wire between them and a large net over the whole thing which is held down with pegs.
So far it seems to have worked and today I just picked my first four raspberries and a few dozen more strawberries, sounds a lot but they're only small.

Also I have now thinned out my leeks and one row has now become one and a half rows. I bought a lovely dibber at the garden centre to help me replant them, although it made good holes they mostly filled in again when I watered the leeks back in, I hope my leeks won't be too full of mud. The courgette plants are getting bigger and bigger, there are flowers ready to bloom but they aren't ready just yet.

The parsnips seem to be doing really well, I gave that area a good weeding the other day and was surprised to find a few carrots growing as well, not many but I'll see what happens to them. The mixed salad is growing well as are the second radishes, I've already planted a row of third radishes for when they are ready.

I can't remember which are my earlies and which are the main crop potatoes, the two rows look different, one has much darker foliage, I'll have to see if I can find pictures of each variety and see which is which. They're fully recovered now from that late frost but they're not yet in flower.

When clearing out the ground by the compost bin I decided to lift the onions that had been on the plot when I first got it, they were still rather small but tasted delicious roasted with chicken last sunday.

Slim pickings

A bit of a gap in the harvesting since I planted the salad a bit late and I've already eaten all the first crop of radishes. The broad beans are beginning to pod now so I as my books suggest I pinched out the tops of the plants, this provided quite a lot of greens, I cooked half last night after washing with just a knob of butter, they do taste like beans with a spinichy sort of texture, unusual but nice.
The net is working on the strawberries, I only picked about a dozen but they're the first to ripen with out the fruit vanishing, all the other plants out of the net are without a single berry.

Also I made a few small cuts from the various herbs I have growing, none of the plants are that big yet but I think it's good to crop them carefully anyway to encourage new growth.
The intense heat yesterday had made the few remaining courgettes in the greenhouse wilt quite badly, I decided to plant them out and see what happens, a good drink perked them up a bit and I guess last nights rain must have helped as well. I also decided to plant out the kobocha the four plants that germinated are looking healthy and have a bout six leaves now, and I was worried about how hot it was getting in the greenhouse for them.

The fruit is beginning to form on the raspberries so I think I'll have to cover them as well soon if I'm going to be able to pick any. In a couple of weeks I hope to be eating those broad beans as well.