Harvest Friday plus pics of plot

This is what we harvested today:

Three courgettes, onions (can you spot the red one?!) and a slightly nibbled Hispi cabbage. The plot is looking great now, here are some pics:

A couple of sweetcorn to the left front, courgette Black Beauty front middle, onions behind that, with a second crop of peas behind that and lettuce under the blue hoops (to support netting) and main crops spuds behind that. Here's a slightly different view from the same side:

You can see that the white cosmos flowers and scabious in the front left of the pic are flowering well. The french and runner beans are climbing the netting and beans are beginning to set. Here is the other half of the plot, with my daughter holding her mini allotment in a pot:

You can see that the leeks are doing really well in the foreground. And this is the pic that Graeme was taking from the other side at the same time:

To the left of the pic is the Enviromesh tunnel for the brassicas and to the right are a couple more courgette plants plus two butternut squash plants. The turquoise netting on the far right of the pic houses purple sprouting which incidently have been crawling with cabbage white caterpillars. Not sure how that happened?!

Yesterday we took a trip to Hampton Court Palace. The gardens were lovely especially the kitchen garden. Our favourite constructions were these:

Teepees were created with string tied to the top and wrapped around tomatoes plants for support. Very nifty. Here's a close-up:

Might have to steal that idea for next year!

Cauliflower No. 2

Here's today's harvest:

The last of the Estima spuds (about 1kgs worth), a couple of lettuce (oak leaf, lollo rosso), onions, 3 courgettes, a cauliflower and a pointed cabbage (stripped of their outer leaves). We have also started picking our cayenne chillis (2 thus far).

The five sunflower plants are flowering prolifically now. I cut a few stems to put in a vase:

The two on the left are Moonwalker (pale yellow), and the two on the right are meant to be Velvet Queen but they don't look like the pic on the seed packet!!

Today's bounty

More Estima spuds, lettuce, the last of the (rather scrawny) carrots:

I also noticed that some of the onion stalks have collapsed so picked a few of those too:

We are also picking blueberries from our bushes at home...for the last week we get a bowl like this every day or so:

Just enough to decorate my Weetabix every morning!

Spud the difference

Had a longish visit to the allotment yesterday to get some more peas planted out, do some harvesting and get some salad planted. Harvested the remains of the Lady Christl potatoes and some Estima - would take a trained eye to spot the difference:

(Estima are on the right) - new structures installed for peas, cucamelons and salad:

Peas are the row of stakes at the back here, obelisk for the cucamelons and blue pipe arches to net salad to keep the pigeons away. In other news courgettes starting to take over the world:

Butternut squash doing OK:

(covering the ground with black plastic proves to be a winner) and sweetcorn starting to flower:

Harvest photo of the day:

On balance think Estima have given the best potato harvest so far. We also traded some green courgettes with our neighbours for the yellow one seen here. This is the end of this round of peas, probably have a few weeks to wait until we get the next harvest...

Second earlies

Today I harvested some of the second early spuds Estima:

I pulled 4 plants and got 1.5kg of spuds, a slightly higher yield per plant than the Lady Christl. I also pulled some carrots and a couple of lettuce -little gem and lobjoits cos.

The slugs are starting to tuck in to the cabbages so might have to think about setting up some beer traps and/or putting a few slug pellets down. The warm wet weather we've had recently is probably not helping!

Golden Acre harvest

Keeping with the cabbagy theme, we picked a Golden Acre today. It was about the size of my daughters head:

We also picked the last few pea pods (about 15 or so) plus a couple more courgettes.

Today's harvest, start of courgette-geddon?

Went to harvest this afternoon (in the very changeable British weather - got wet!) and pulled three Potato "Lady Christl" plants which gave quite a poor yield, a cabbage, a lettuce and four courgettes:

There are a few more courgettes on the way and we harvested a couple a few days back so now I think the production rate is more than one per day. Courgettes in everything time :o)

Onion problems?

Since we have completely run out of vertical structures in our garden for our plants, I took the last two tomato plants (Marmande and Gardeners Delight) to the allotment and tied them into the frame covered in  pea netting. Whilst I was up there I inspected the onions. We have noticed that the tops on several of the onions grown from sets have died back and the roots have shrivelled up. Some have rotted around the base and others look like they may start rotting if left in the ground any longer. In an effort to try and salvage something from them I have pulled some of them up and brought them home. I'm not sure what has caused this since we have'nt had a lot of rain... not unless we have been too diligent with our watering! Most of the onions look ok, but vary in size quite a lot. Here are some of the larger ones:

The onions grown from seed are doing ok but are considerably smaller than the ones from sets. Apart from the onions I also harvested some fruit and an obligatory Little Gem lettuce:

The strawberry runners that dad gave me last autumn are just setting fruit, and the fruit are enormous! The handful of raspberries are from some canes that were on the plot when we inherited it. I am guessing they are summer fruiting? The gooseberries are also from a small bush that was also already on the plot. The variety of gooseberry is Hinnonmaki Yellow (the tag is still on the bush!) producing yellow/green fruit. I'm not very keen on gooseberries but will try and do something with them since I went to the trouble of picking them!

The first of many ... cabbages!

Harvest Tuesday:

We picked our first cabbage, a pointed variety called Hispi. Also 75 pea pods, some first earlies Lady Christl and a courgette Black Beauty. Lovely!

Harvest Sunday

This is what we harvested today:

Some more giant lettuces (lollo rosso, oak leaf), 60 pea pods (think we are approaching peak pea production!), and a couple of kilos of Pentland Javelins. We have now finished our first row of spuds ... next up will be Lady Christl, another first early.

Broccoli "green house" - picture heavy

We have 6 broccoli purple sprouting to go out and need to keep them under cover so they are not a butterfly dormitory and canteen - as these plants get quite tall (3 - 4 feet) need a proper construction and cover for this. Time to break out the blue pipe and canes!

Ingredients: 4 x 6' sections of blue pipe; 8 x 4' canes; 20' length of 6' mesh, cable ties and garden wire for sewing.

Canes in ground, blue pipe on canes, aim for total path length from ground to ground around 12'. Then install plants:

Next need to work on the mesh - recall was 20' x 6' - really want around 10'x12' so:

Cut in two and "sew" together with thin garden wire...

Finally cover the frame and we're all done - safe and happy broccoli. Almost certainly cost more than the plants inside are worth but should be good for a few years... we shall see...!

Was allotment inspection day so probably good that we were up there working! Also covered the strawberries with some decent bird netting so we actually get to eat some of the fruit:

More harvesting

Last night harvested a bunch of peas and the cauliflower (we have another on the way). Not sure we got it in time, perhaps should have picked it about Wednesday? no idea - will eat tonight! Peas are lovely though and we have a good crop coming. This morning picked the first three courgettes - certainly the first of many!

Meanwhile we have some non food crops coming along - cornflowers and cosmos at the moment. Have not really developed that side of the plot as much as we had hoped though...

Harvest wednesday

This is today's harvest:

A (not so) little gem, some pentland javelin new potatoes (approx 1kg), 4 stumpy Autumn King carrots and 23 pea pods! A couple of today's potatoes had slug damage, but most were ok.

Yesterday a work colleague gave me some cucamelons! Apparently they are grape-sized fruit that look like water melons but taste like cucumbers with a hint of lime. More details can be found here:

http://homegrown-revolution.co.uk/savoury-fruit/growing-cucamelons/

They look a bit like minature cucumber plants:

Will be interesting to see what they are like..