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.

Hoe hoe hoe

Thanks to the fact that we are finally getting some summer weather the annual weeds are starting to show themselves - so much so that it will take a trained eye to spot which plants are deliberately there in these pictures ("spot the bean" perhaps?)

Fortunately a few thousand years ago some folks figured out a tool for dealing with this problem without pulling the blighters out individually (which we had been doing). After application it is much easier to see what we're actually growing:

Before and after pictures taken on different days and quite by chance show good comparison! Anyhow beans starting to grow, some of the onions are doing OK, some not (seems to be a very exact dividing line here too hmmm...):

In other news, our black currants are going well, and starting to ripen:

Mangetout mangetout

Not just a Del Boy catch-phrase, we really do have lots of mangetouts! Here is our first batch from the allotment:

The two remaining Iceburg lettuces in our raised bed at home have hearted up nicely. Here is one stripped of all its outer leaves:

And these are "Ishikura", a Japanese spring onion that does not bulb up:

To keep the supply going I sowed some more spring onion seeds a few days ago...

Garlic harvest

Since most of the foliage on the garlic has yellowed and died back we decided to lift the garlic, trim the tops and leave to dry in a tray in the greenhouse:

These are Germidour. We sowed 19 cloves on the 9th October. We had to discard quite a few (almost 50% of the harvest) as some of the bulbs were rotten, which was surprising given the lack of rain. Despite this, most of the remaining bulbs are a really good size (much bigger than shop-bought garlic) and will keep us going for the best part of a year, provided that they store okay.
Something really strange seems to have happened to the onions and shallots planted a few months ago:

The ones towards the top of the pic are far more advanced than those down the bottom for no adequately explained reason!
Despite the high winds this past week the apples have managed to remain on the tree; we currently have 15 to 20:

At home the lettuce in the raised bed just keeps on coming. In the salad spinner bowl there are 3 deconstructed "All The Year Round" lettuce:

We had to dispose of two more today as they had bolted and we simply can't eat them fast enough!
As well as picking sweet peas every night, we also have lots of Calendula flowers:

I also wanted to showcase my daughters "Fire and Ice" flower display for the "garden on a plate" competition at the school summer fair:

All the plants and foliage were from our garden including: Heuchera, Calendula, Sweet Peas, Aquilegia etc. I don't think our interpretation of the theme was what they were looking for but I thought our flower display was lovely!

Lettuce as big as the kitchen sink!

Take a look at this lettuce I picked yesterday from the raised bed:

This is "Marvel of Four Seasons", a French heritage butterhead variety with soft leaves that are crunchy in the middle. I also harvested 4 more spring onions: 2 x Ishikura and 2 x White Lisbon:

It is difficult to tell the varieties apart at this stage. Apparently Ishikura does not "bulb up" like White Lisbon so maybe the difference would become more apparent over time. Either way, I am simply delighted to have harvested spring onions after my failed attempts over the past few years.
I can't resist showing off some more of our sweet peas. I love the crazy contorted shapes of some of the stems:

Harvest at home

For the last few weeks we have been harvesting salad from our raised bed. At the weekend we picked the first Iceburg lettuce:

The above pic doesn't really give you a sense of scale so here is a medium-sized leaf next to my coffee cup:

It really had reached epic proportions! Unfortunately it was only just starting to "heart up" but I had to remove it to give some of the smaller lettuces room to grow on. The biggest leaves had to be cut into quarters to fit into our large salad spinner. The leaves don't have as much flavour as some of the others we've grown (e.g. Catalogna, Lollo Rosso) but were lovely and crispy.
We also picked an "All the Year Round" lettuce:

This one has a very dense heart and thick sweet crispy leaves. We have a lot more lettuce ready for harvesting and smaller plants in pots waiting to fill the gaps as we harvest stuff. I sowed more seed last week with the hope that we can have a continuous supply until late autumn.
We have also started harvesting the first of our spring onions sown way back on 8th Feb:

There are only two in the pic since we are only harvesting as we need them! Finally, a non-edible, but pretty nonetheless:

These are Spencer-mixed sweet peas. We currently have 4 vases full of flowers dotted around the house filling the house with their distinctive perfume.