Blooming

Perhaps a little warmer last week and things began to grow. The nasturtiums are in flower, these bright red ones are self sown from last year, the other are more orangey in colour. The flowers taste hot and peppery in a salad.

Flowers also on the patty pan squash, you can see a little squash in there too. The courgettes got a bit bigger but the fruit are still too small to be worth picking.

My canes have a good covering of raspberries, I hope to get a good crop of them this year.

My main job was clearing away the first broad beans, they had finished cropping and were a bit of a mess having been buffeted around in the gales. This frees up a bit of important space for cabbages, tomatoes and perhaps I'll get those leeks in the ground?

Digging out the bean roots I found a few potatoes. This was last years potato patch and they must have grown form spuds left in the ground. A few were skewered with the spade but I took the others home and ate them.

The french beans are topping out so I snipped off their growing tips, they're also just beginning to flower. 

Progress

Such a long time since my last entry and so much has happened, sorry I've been to busy to post. a two week holiday in June isn't the best timing for the allotment but it has to be done. This bag of beans I picked before I went away.

Some pods held as many as seven beans! Shelling them takes ages and is hard work on my nails.

I've probably picked about a dozen of these tubs full now, each tub holds about 700g of beans. There are eleven tubs in the deep freeze and we've eaten a few beans already.

I had quite a tasty strawberry crop too, these are from the newer plants I put in last year. They have a really good flavour.

Yum yum!

The french beans aren't looking so hot right now. Quite a few had blown off their canes and I had to re wrap them, you always twist them anti-clockwise because this is the way they grow. I wonder if they grow clockwise in Australia?

The parsnips are doing well, really! I had to do a lot of careful weeding but the Turnips and beetroot have fared okay as well.

I put out some tomato plants before I went away worried that they'd dry out if I left them undercover.  They've survived but are still really small, the few I did leave covered are much bigger and I need to plant them out as well now.

The potatoes are in flower, these ones are a pretty pale shade of blue.

Most of them are whiter like these above.

I have several big globe artichokes now. This plant has tulip shaped globes.

These are more traditional round artichokes but they're supposed to be the same variety.

I picked two which we ate for supper, despite the shape they were very tasty.

More beans, like green fingers reaching up. Some plants are so heavy with beans they've collapsed.

My very first patty pan squash, it's about the size of a fifty pence piece at the moment.

The courgettes are tiny, quite a few fruits have appeared but all really small so far.

And the yellow ones are even smaller, perhaps one cm long.

This might be my total crop of peas. Despite a double planting I've only got about six plants and this is the first pod on the only one that's in flower.

I dug my garlic up too. The foliage had died right back, the heads aren't that big but they weren't about to get any bigger.

Hot beans

Suddenly scorching weather. It's been quite windy too, the broad beans are quite tall and some have been blown over. The first beans are almost ready to pick, I love the beans when they're small and sweet.

Six beans in a pod isn't bad, they're a beautiful bright shade of green when they're so young. I'll wait until next week end to do a proper harvest. Then I'll be away two weeks, I hope the other will be okay when I return.

My courgettes have gone into the ground, plants still quite small but I wanted them out of the greenhouse before we go away.

Yep, it's a parsnip! they seem to have done quite well this year unlike the cabbages that didn't germinate. I bought some cabbage plants from the trading hut, two pots for a pound that contained around eighteen decent seedlings which I potted up.

These are turnips which seem to have attracted some pests, I'll have to keep an eye on them. I also bought a few sweet pepper plants from the trading hut, I've never grown them before.

A few globes are forming on the artichokes, I counted only four in total. I really love them boiled and eaten with butter, I hope they get a bit bigger.

The thyme is in flower and looks very pretty, it would make an amazing repeat pattern don't you think?

The first ripe strawberry of the season, I ate it of course and it was delicious. I look set to have a bumper crop this year as long as the slugs don't get them.

Snails

Even the plot sign has snails on it at the moment. Along with the slugs they're munching anything they can, slug pellets are killing so many around the green house that the ground crunches with shells when I walk on it.

The plot is just starting to fill out a bit but I'm at least two weeks behind last year due to the weather. I put up the canes for the french beans, there's a gap on the right where the soil is too thin to plant above a concrete drain.

I planted out six of each of the three varieties of climbing beans. Violette, yellow and green. This leaves a dozen post still needing a plant, I have many more but didn't want to put them all out at once.

Looking down the canes. A few more peas have come up but I still don't really have a decent row of them.

Parsnips have just grown a bit, it's always good to see the true leaves then you know what is what when weeding.

I was eating strawberries at this time in 2011, I just have my first fruits forming this year.

There are a lot of flowers though so I hope to get a bumper crop unless the slug get there first. The rhubarb is also going mad, I've picked so much I might have to freeze some.

The first few pods are showing on the broad bean plants. I picked the growing tops off of them today and will have them for dinner.

The potatoes seem quite content, even the 'missing' one is beginning to come through.

Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb

There's a fine stick of the rhubarb. I didn't pick any last week end giving it a good chance to grow, and with all the rain it's done very well.

There's almost 2Kg of the stuff here, and plenty more to come.

This is the rhubarb bed after picking. Many people see to keep their rhubarb in corner or by the path, I like having a whole row of the stuff.

The potatoes have come on well as have the weeds. I was thinking of earthing them up but my time today was taken up with sorting out the seedlings. Slugs and snails have been running wild with the wet weather and munched quite a few of my babies. I took all the seedlings out, put down a lot of slug pellets and potted up a few new seeds where needed.

The second beans have become a bit weed infested but the soil is still rather damp for walking on so I'll have to tackle that problem later. The first beans suffered rather with the wind and quite a few have blown over, I surrounded them with string and canes to hold them up better.

What I thought were beetroot I have now decided must be turnips! The true leaves coming through have helped me to identify them.

So these tiny rather dark red seedlings must be the beetroot.

And I'm pretty sure that these are the first signs of the parsnips which have germinated reasonably quickly this year.