Bean bags

French beans in bags, about 5.5Kg of them! This years glut and I'm going to have to start giving them away as we have another 2Kg in the fridge already.

Not to be left out the squash and courgettes are still highly productive, about a dozen of each every week and there are now five cobnut squash but they will be ready a bit later.

The first of my sunflowers is in bloom, it's only about five feet tall a tiddler compared to some on other plots.

I also got to pick my first four tomatoes, there are plenty of green ones which i hope ripen soon in this warm weather.

Look who I found when cutting the grass! A common frog I believe, I don't know where it came from but as long as it eats the slugs I don't mind. It had very pretty speckled markings. He was only about 5cm long.

I also picked a couple of beetroot, one red as you'd expect but the other was white. At first I thought it might be a stray turnip but it definitely was a beetroot. Paul thought perhaps an albino one? Was it a rare specimen? Too late we ate it. I've also picked a lot of nasturtium flowers, they're very peppery but nice in salad.

Thistles for dinner

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.

Rain clearing

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.

Marrow ago go

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.

I struck gold

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.

Go wild

A quick Wednesday night visit confirmed things have got pretty wild again, just can't take a week off at this time of year. All the rain and warm weather had conspired to make the weeds grow like weeds!

The plants are growing too, here we see the very first of my patty pan squash, bright yellow about the size of a squash ball (appropriately).

I picked a few courgettes, four green and one yellow. There will be a lot more to come.

The peas are doing really well I think I'll have to pick them this week-end or next, they're so sweet when they're fresh.

A lot of weeding revealed a much better row for the secong parsnips and also quite a good beetroot row, it's strange how far ahead some plants in the row are than others planted at the same time. I saw this beetle which was about 4cm long. I think it's a female Stag beetle - they are quite rare.

The jungle

 I needn't have worried about watering the plants for the past two weeks, it looks like their has been plenty of rain. The french beans are already touching the tops of their trellis. All this water has also made the weeds go crazy and the plot was in a bit of state when I arrived.

The courgettes are coming on nicely, just the first few tiddlers to pick but flowers blooming with the promise of more to come. The patty pan squash also have flowers but the cobnut squash are yet to follow suit.

The leeks I left over from last year are now coming into flower, the stems are about five feet tall with big purple flower heads, very pretty if not much use.

The first peas are covered with pods some of which are beginning to swell. I picked a few for dinner but I think having podded them it might be a little early as I have micro peas but they are very sweet.

Here they are once picked and podded, the biggest ones are about petit pois size.

The broad beans are falling over with the weight of the pods on them. I picked a huge bag full making about five and a half tubs of beans most of which have gone into the freezer.

There are the two types of broad beans, the ones I planted in autumn are called Masterpiece Longpod. They have wonderful green beans in as the name suggests long pods with about six or seven beans per pod. The other type has whiter beans which are bigger but with perhaps only three or four in each pod.

The potatoes seem to be doing really well, especially the ones closest to the shed. I thought these were the earlies so dug some up but their red colour tells me they must be the main crop Desiree so i better leave the rest for a while.

The globe artichokes have come on a lot, these three heads are off the biggest plant. I was worried they had opened up too much but I was told the heart should still be good to eat, I'll have a go at cooking them later. The biggest of those three is about the size of a grapefruit!

And if that wasn't enough there were a fair few sturdy sticks of rhubarb ready to pull, along with the last of the strawberries and a few raspberries they will go nicely into a crumble.