The last globe artichoke is now in flower an past eating, it is rather pretty though with electric blue petals, you can tell they must be related to thistles. There were two other globes that I picked which were rather small but tasty.
It's all about the french beans at the moment, I seem to pick a couple of kilos a week and they keep coming.
I pinched the tops of the plants out which is supposed to make them bushier and produce even more beans.
You can see them lined up here in development, I think they really liked the wet weather. The courgettes have been okay I'm getting about a dozen a week including the patty pan squash but I think they prefer more sunshine.
This patch is where the broad beans were, I cut the plants down and cleared them leaving the roots in the soil. Beans are nitrogen fixing plants and this should be good for whatever I plant here next year.
Between the showers there was much to do on plot 68. I'm beginning to start clearing things, in the picture above I had just taken out the row of second peas, this gives much better access to the french beans. In the foreground you can see the bare earth left from digging up the first earlies.
The rain is helping things like this cobnut squash get a bit bigger but it'll be a while yet before they are ready. I harvested a half dozen courgettes, about 48 new potatoes from just four plants and a load more french beans.
The flowers on the patty pan squash are about 20cm in diameter but the squash are still tiny, the do taste nice though.
My tomato plants seem to have grown more horizontal then vertical, I have a fair few green tomatoes but we will need a bit more sun for them to ripen.
Didn't make down to the plot during the week so I was expecting a few courgettes, after the rain and sunshine a couple of them had grown marrow sized.
Yellow courgettes too, mostly smaller in size thankfully. I managed to give some away to Jessica yesterday but it seems we are reaching the courgette glut time of year again and this year with only four plants.
There are patty pan squash as well which are very similar, these are the first I've picked the biggest is about the size of a tennis ball.
One of the cob-nut squash has tiny fruit on it but I think these will take a lot longer to ripen.
Twenty five potatoes from just two plants, they really have done much better than last year.
A few beetroot were looking like they were ready so I pulled them up.
The last of the peas for now about 650g once I had podded them.
The beginning of the french beans, these were just the first few from the bottoms of the plants I'm going to have a lot more to come.
Having picked the wrong potatoes a couple of weeks ago I thought it was time to try again. So I dug up one plant from the furthest row and confirmed these are the early Charlottes. One plant was about a dozen potatoes weighing in at about 750g, there must be about twenty plants in total if they're all this productive thats more than double last years yield.
I had a healthy looking crop of courgettes still with beautiful flowers on them. There's plenty more to come, I gave the plants a water with a bit of miracle grow to help them on their way. Four plants is a lot more sensible than last year. The green ones are doing best so far. The patty pans have a lot of little squashes on them but they aren't ready to pick yet. The cobnut squash are growing well but show no sign of flowering so far.
The tomatoes have delicate star shaped flowers in bright yellow and some fruits are beginning to form of the plants, I'm not sure how long they'll take to ripen? I gave them a bit of miracle grow to help them along.
It looks like an exotic bloom, I picked a couple more artichokes for dinner. It's a lot of effort to eat them but the taste is something else and you end up with a great pile of leaves left over.
This second one was a bit smaller and looked quite different with pointier leaves. being related to the thistle you have to quite careful handling the artichokes!
I spent a lot of time with my hoe clearing out the weeds, I had rediscovered a fine row of parsnips and a slightly patchy row of beetroot growing between the peas and the squash, in fact a runner from the cobnut squash is growing across both rows from the bottom right.
Speaking of peas I picked about 2.5Kg unpodded weight of them and there are still more to come.
I also picked the last of the broad beans, the scare on the end of some of them are going black but they still taste good. Some of the bean plants are having a bit of a second flowering so I may get more later in the year.
The view across the plot at the end of the day, probably the fullest and greenest it'll be all year.
