Down to Earth

What a colourful month September is!

This was yesterday's trug - mostly to be used for last night's roasted vegetables meal. The spiraliser and the sweetcorn stripper came into action. The spiralised courgette cooks quicker than chunks and it's lovely to add a pile of sweetcorn kernels to almost any dish towards the end of cooking.

This was a harvest from earlier in the week. Our last successful cauliflower - the only one we actually ate - we roasted it - definitely worth trying again next year and worth trying a little harder with them too!

This was the harvest from Friday - much of that went into a vegetable cheese omelet (so delicious!)

I pulled the first two edamame plants which have completely dried. Shelling the beans was rather fiddly and the beans are very small. Some pods only had two beans but the majority have three.

Luckily there are several more plants which are nearly dry - I'll need a good deal more for them to be useful - especially with the preparation needed for dried beans...

Yesterday (Sunday) we had a busy afternoon on the site - clearing and weeding. There's Jamie, hand-weeding the carrot bed and pulling a few thinnings to add to our meal.

I cleared all the lettuces which had turned into trees on our plots - I still have chard to use as salad leaf before I move on to soups for lunches.

Two wheelbarrows plus buckets of lettuce - all to the compost bins.

I also gathered a lot of compostable material by hacking back the squash plants.

There were a lot of immature squashes which probably don't have time to reach maturity - so they got the chop. Although it's tempting to leave them, it's better to let the energy get to the squashes which stand more chance of maturing. The plant will generally do this by dropping fruits that it doesn't have the energy for, but it still uses energy creating long new trailing stems.

Now we have two full compost bins and another one more than half-full. We need to mix them up a bit, but that wasn't a job for today - it was very hot and sunny - we can do that once they've shrunk down a little.

So with all that clearing we can see what's growing a bit better - including this little line of Kohl Rabi seedlings - sowed in mid-August.

The song title is provided by Curiosity Killed the Cat (remember them?) because with so much clearing we can see the earth again...