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.