Latest harvest

Been rather quiet on the allotment blog lately - still busy sorting out the garden so the allotment is generally ticking over though we are still working up there. Collected a bit of a harvest today, more courgettes (10 lb this week so far!) a slightly slug-eaten cabbage:

and a beetroot:

Also harvested some shallots - had much of this for tea as home-made coleslaw and beetroot in salad, nice. The pumpkins seem keen on taking over Oxfordshire:

Though we have some decent size fruit:

(phone to give a sense of scale)

Need to catch up on some weeding there tomorrow...

Our first decent harvest...

A lovely golden acre cabbage, new potatoes, lollo rosso lettuce, 4 courgettes and a small tub of blackcurrants. The potato harvest was not great. The spuds pictured here are the sum total of one of our rows of 10 tubers. Looking back at previous blog posts it looks like these might be Charlotte which we have'nt grown before. We were pleased with our yield of blackcurrants considering the plants were essentially twigs last year! They now look like bushes and have lots of new growth so I think we can expect a much bigger crop next year.

General update

Its been a while but we have'nt been idle honest! Currently we are splitting what little free time we have between our back garden and the allotment. Today we dug a patch in front of the raspberries (which are looking very promising), mixed in some manure and planted some of our leeks:

 

So far we have put in 25 leeks but we still need to prepare some more ground for another 30 or 40....
The Japanese onions planted last September were ready for harvesting:

Most are Spanish-onion sized. Here's a close-up of one:

We were very impressed with the size and quality of these onions, and it will be interesting to see how well they store. 100% success growing from set to onion (51 onions in total).
Some of our Golden Acre cabbages are nearly ready for picking, here they are uncovered after weeding:

And here is a close-up of one of the nearly-ready ones:

All have a bit of slug damage on the outer leaves but the hearts look pristine.
The potatoes are flowering but are not ready yet. We pulled a root last weekend and the spuds were still very tiny:

The courgettes (in the foreground of the below pic) have been very slow to get going and we have yet to harvest any fruit:

One of the plants (on the left) has been completely decimated by slugs. The pumpkins in the background appear to be doing well though.
The shallots (variety Topper) have been a disappointment:

Quite a few simply rotted so the gaps were filled with lettuce. The remaining plants are still quite small. I don't think they like being in the raised bed and I think it has been too wet for them.