I dug up the rest of my potatoes today including this whopper about 15cm long. The Desiree have been really good after all that frost scare in May and I'll plant more next season and forget about the earlies which were much less impressive. The Desiree are quite solid but make a lovely mash with the addition of milk and butter.
Everything seems to have slowed down. I didn't pick any courgettes today there were about six that I could have harvested but they are still really small, 3" - 4". I hope if I leave them another week they might get a bit bigger.
There were another dozen or so tomatoes to pick and a hand full of french beans, apart from them I took a few onions and potatoes home.
A bit of sunshine although the wind is cold. Now I've cleared the spuds I'm ready to plant some early broad beans for next year, I might clear the fennel out of the way too because although it looks pretty I don't think I'll get any bulbs to eat.
The french beans have put on a little extra spurt of growth with new flowers and beans ripening. The lower parts to the plants seem well spent now with the leaves either turning yellow or having already fallen off. I only picked a hand full but it looks like there are more to come depending on the weather. Courgette production has now stopped, only picked about eight tiddlers this week, they were forming last week but don't seem to develop any further, I guess it got too cold for them.
A clear path where the potatoes once grew, the weedy bit on the right is where the last of my desiree are hidden, it's good to tidy up a bit and I'll be able to plant broad beans here in the next couple of weeks ready for next year.
My cabbages are starting to form heads I think, I love the wrinkly leaves on a savoy cabbage I do hope they grow as it's taken a lot of time and care to get them to this stage and they only cost 78 pence in the supermarket! Something that hasn't worked that well is the fennel, I thought it was doing really well but although it's grown about five feet tall and flowered it doesn't seem to be forming bulbs that could be eaten, I'm also told it has really deep roots and is very difficult to get rid of it once it has settled in.
The rhubarb plants are looking much better now, I hope they're storing up some energy to produce long pink stalks for me in the new year, I'm looking forward to that crumble!
The robin did his best to help me today with the big clear up, two weeks since my last visit and I hardly recognised the place. In Norse mythology the robin is supposed to be a familiar of Thor and it's appearance was connected with the arrival of thunder storms, luckily it stayed sunny and warm in Fulham because I had lots to do. It was difficult to know where to start really, some weeds were three feet tall and some plants had completely overgrown others, it was a mess.
First I picked about forty five courgettes and fifteen marrows, more than I could carry back home with me. It's a bit difficult to tell from this picture but the front row courgette plants were now growing up against the shed, they had to go. It's quite difficult to pull the plants up because they're very prickly and the scratches seem to irritate my skin.
It made quite a pile of compost, more than I could fit in the the compost bin so I left it by the box as you can see. Having cleared the plants this was when the robin rushed in to help me by picking out any insects I had left behind, i think he was quite curious about having his picture taken.
I think the end result was worth it though, now I have a clear space to start growing things for next year as well. On the edge of the dark cleared soil you can just make out some the leeks which were totally over shadowed by the courgette plants, whose spiky stems have shredded the young leeks, I wonder if they will recover?
My other abundance is of tomatoes, this is much more welcome. I picked about fifty of the small plum type, they are very sweet although a lot of them have split, did it rain a lot while I was away? Not so much luck with the beef tomatoes, they just don't seem to ripen. I picked some more onions too, so it's robin ratatouille for dinner tonight!
