Bean tastic

We have had a bumper crop of green beans this year. And just when we thought the "Purple Queen" plants were finishing up, I noticed that many of the plants have a new flush of flowers:

We pick the beans every 2 days and typically our harvests have been looking like this for the past couple of weeks:

This is probably about 60-70% of the total harvest. The rest didn't even make it past quality control and ended up on the compost heap. We can afford to be ruthless given the sheer quantity! The "Blue Lake" plants, and their flowers, are now at the top of their 7 foot canes, so still plenty more beans to come:

In other news, the pumpkins "Jack O Lantern" are beginning to ripen:

We have about 4 decent sized fruit. We are getting a small punnet of "Polka" raspberries every few days:

And large quantities of tomatoes from our greenhouse at home, again harvested every day or two:

Definitely peak month for harvesting thus far!

Name that apple

So, last year we planted a birthday present apple tree, which had "Golden Delicious" written on the package - we've already doubted the heritage of this, but now suspect that it may well be a discovery however any ideas welcome! The fact that it came from Tesco originally, and Tesco sell discovery made us suspect this may be one:

Spent a while on apple ID before the more direct route to identification occurred to us! This does however mean that the apples are probably nearly ready 😀

Lotta lolla rossa / fractal dimensions

Just harvested a lettuce from the allotment which, thanks to the fact that it is a lolla rossa, is not slug damaged 😀 which is pretty unusual for allotment grown salad. One of the things it got me thinking is how big is a leaf... stupid question you may think but...

... they are kinda crinkly around the edges:

(this is the edge of that one leaf). When you open them out to wash you find a lot more square inches of leaf than has any business being in such a small space. This was looked into before [1] regarding the coastline of Britain... anyhow, I haven't actually calculated the fractal dimension but I know there is a lot of leaf in there - so much so that one little lettuce can comfortably fill the salad spinner:

and, quite honestly, it would not surprise me if the total surface area is the same as four tennis courts! 😱

Even better, it tastes good!

[1] Mandelbrot, B (1967) Science Vol. 156, Issue 3775, pp. 636-638 DOI: 10.1126/science.156.3775.636

Not allotment: tomatoes back at home

Following on from the sewing post... we've been harvesting tomatoes for a little while but this weekend they have got into their stride - two days harvest of tomatoes and chillis:

Little red ones to the left are Garden Pearl; dark ones are Black Cherry; big ones in top tight are Falcrosso F1 and there are some Bejbino mixed in there somewhere... The chillis are Cherry Bomb - pretty mild but tasty :o)

Changing seasons / overdue update

Things "ticking over" at the allotment at the moment, but we are feeling the change of seasons already. The purple beans have largely finished, supplanted by the green French beans (Blue Lake) and the pumpkins are starting to look fully grown if green. The courgettes are still producing (7 this week?) and we have started getting our autumn fruiting raspberries though they are not really going fill swing yet. Today's harvest was pretty modest:

... but it has only been 48 hours since the last visit. One interesting thing this year is our new apple tree seems to be doing well, though if it is a "Golden Delicious" it is of dubious provenance:

That said, the apples are looking pretty good, particularly for a first season:

Very much looking forward to eating some, though currently a little small at around 50mm across...

Not all veg / harvesting / two that got away / back at the ranch

So while what we talk about on here is mostly fruit and vegetables, we do grow some ornamental things up at the allotment, for example some sunflowers (though perhaps today they should be overcastflowers?...)

If I had to explain why we are growing them up there, I would struggle but is nice to do and we have the space 😀 Harvest wise the purple beans are showing no sign of running out of steam, and the green beans are now in full swing so that's another 800g or so of beans:

These are great in stir fries and in pasta, so we can (currently) cope with the produce! Less awesome are the courgettes - we have had things on last couple of evenings so did not make it to the plot and since Sunday these have appeared:

Literally grown from not there to too big in 3 days. Good job we went to pick else they may have hit the Wiltshire border by the weekend! The leeks we planted a couple weeks back are going great guns - obviously something we are doing right there:

We had also given up on the strawberries and decided to leave them for the birds, only to find that they have woken up and started producing some fruit... along similar lines our pumpkin (Jack 'o' Lantern) has produced some fruit:

And the apple tree doing OK:

Meanwhile, back at the ranch we are harvesting a decent amount of tomatoes:

These are nice as the different varieties actually taste quite different!

Full-o-beans

We've not picked the purple queen beans for a couple of days so popped up just now to go harvest... well we won't be short of beans for a couple of days:

(something like 800g or so?) and of course another courgette! The blue lake green beans are just getting started as well... possibly a week of overlap between them so may have to give away some of our excess produce over the next couple of days. 

These beans are funny - if you boil them they come out looking just like regular beans, but stir fried they seem to keep a little of their colour.

3 Courgettes / day - really..?

... yes really: we have two courgette plants (dundoo) which are not particularly taking over the world but they are between them averaging three courgettes per day:

We're deliberately picking them small, but it is getting silly when these three appeared in the last 24 hours:

Went up yesterday to water and picked three, today had to pick three more because tomorrow they'll be three times the size. Obviously we are not surprised by the idea of a courgette glut, but to hit this many courgettes so early in the season is a surprise. Not yet resorted to researching novel uses for courgettes but give it a week...

Blackcurrants and other produce ...

The blackcurrants are ready and we have lots of them:

We have been picking them in installments as they are a pain to harvest and take ages to de-stalk. I have had some help though:

We have frozen them in 260-270g portions, which provides us with a 3 or 4 person serving of stewed blackcurrants (our favourite way of eating them). So far we have harvested approx 1 kilo off each bush:

... and we have only harvested 2.5 plants!
In other news, we have a steady stream of (purple) french beans, courgettes, mangetouts,  as well as the first beetroot and all the "Red Gourmet" shallots:

The banana shallots are also ready (the tops have died back) so will be harvested soon...

Potatoes - roundup

Pulled some potatoes which had been decimated by the weather back in May, and all things being equal the harvest is pretty poor - Charlotte (3 tubers)

and Rocket (2 tubers)

In terms of the success or otherwise of the experiment, it's hard to say as the frost really caused problems, so next year will try planting the potatoes much later (if at all. ) Was it a good idea growing potatoes in bags?

The supermarket carrier bags were pretty unsuccessful - they were probably destroyed by the ultraviolet, as was the IKEA blue bag (it all fell to pieces when I tried to move it.) The proper potato bags survived much better, as you would hope, but the harvest was no different. End game? Probably better off growing them in the ground.

Harvest Wednesday

Purple mangetouts "Shiraz", green mangetouts "Oregon", dwarf french bean "Purple Queen", courgette "Dundoo" and 3 strawberries! The strawberry plants have reached epic proportions but fruit production has been poor. Many of the flowers were caught by a late frost in April which could be part of the problem. However, there are more fruits developing so we remain hopeful!
Over the last week we have been picking "Garden Pearl" tomatoes as well as lettuce:

At least 3 or 4 trusses have set on each of the cordon tomatoes and we have lots of fruit. The first "Black Cherry" is ripening:

We also have some fruit on the chilli plants. This is "Cherry Bomb":

This is "Cherry Hot":

This is the first "Aji Wrecking Ball":

There are no fruits on the Cayenne Pepper plants but they are just coming into flower so it should'nt be too long. All the chillis and tomatoes are in the greenhouse which  now looks a bit jungly:

Planting out leeks

Our leeks have now reached the width of a pencil so last weekend we planted them out:

These are following on from the spring cabbage. We have approximately 60 Musselburgh leeks and 4 Autumn Giant:

You might notice a few beetroot in the foreground - we just about managed to plant around them and keep straight rows! Before planting we dug in some chicken manure pellets and watered them in with a high potash feed.
In other news the foliage on the autumn sown onions is beginning to yellow and flop over. We dug up some of each type of onion: Japanese, Snowball and Red Baron:

We also harvested another Hispi cabbage as shown in the above pic, stripped of all its outer leaves.
The first dwarf french beans are nearly ready:

These are a variety called "Purple Queen". The french climbing beans "Blue Lake" are just beginning to produce their first flowers:

The parsnips also look promising:

 And the apples on the tree are beginning to swell:

This tree is meant to be a Golden Delicious but the fruit are red! Perhaps it is a red delicious?

Hispi

The first of the summer cabbages are ready:

The foot is for scale! This is a pointed cabbage called Hispi. After removing the outer leaves it is very easy to shred:

We planted 6 Hispi down the allotment on 15th April and all have very little slug damage compared to usual. Perhaps the slug traps are helping, although the slug-catching brew does evaporate and needs replenishing from time to time. I kept 5 cabbages in reserve at home and these are being used to plug the gaps. Keeping the brassica theme going, we have also potted on some purple sprouting brocolli and winter cabbage (January King 3) that will be planted out soon.
It has not been all good news at the allotment:

The potatoes "Swift" caught the frost quite badly and the tops never recovered. Since they had been in 13 weeks (and they should be ready in 10 weeks) we decided to tip the bags out. All we had was about a dozen marble-sized potatoes!
At home we are inundated with lettuces. This was how the raised bed looked on 15th April:

 And this is how it looks today:

We have probably had about 10 lettuces so far. Each time one is removed we replace it with another one waiting in the wings. Today we picked the first "Black Seeded Simpson":

A pretty frilly bright green lettuce that filled two large salad bowls.