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.