Shape of You

We've had some proper rain now and yesterday we didn't need to water anything outside the greenhouse. On Saturday everything was pretty damp too but we took the opportunity to feed most things with Tomorite tomato feed - it's good for squashes, courgettes, peppers as well as tomatoes.

These cucumbers are from one of our Rocky plants - the mini cucumber variety that we've grown for the last few years. However, this year one of the plants is producing all of its cucumbers looking like this... It seems to be coincidence that we're growing Crookneck squash this year. Apparently, if squash do cross-pollinate the effect won't be seen this year; the hybrid appears in the next generation. Also, cucumbers apparently cannot cross pollinate - female flowers can only be pollinated by the male flowers of the same plant. AND Rocky doesn't even produce male flowers - it self-pollinates.. Well, someone needs to tell our Rocky that! As it certainly looks to be producing Crookneck cucumbers!

Could this Crookneck squash be affecting our cucumbers?

I managed to get a cucumber on the other plant to grow down a heart-shaped mould though - so this is more interesting, but you can see that the seeds are forming quite early :-)

Well, they taste good, no matter what the shape. As with most of the vegetables on our plots this year, they aren't likely to win us any prizes at the Horticultural Show next Saturday! Even those beetroots are a slightly odd shape because I didn't thin them so rather than being round they have flat sides!

Here are our new plot signs made by our plotholder buddy Alfie - a donation will go to the HeadsUp charity based in Oxford.

He's very creative with metalwork, as you can see and they won't go rotten like all our wooden signs have. They're great - this second photo is for Plot3 - it does have a number 3 on it, as well as the three wise monkeys.

We haven't put them up yet as we had other stuff to do today - before the rain started again.  I planted our leeks! They've been waiting in the raised bed for months - the ground was too hard to attempt to plant them.

So today I borrowed a very heavy metal pin to hammer into the ground to make ~30cm deep hole and wiggled it about to make it slightly wider. I had to chop quite a lot of root and tops off these leeks, then dropped them in the hole and then puddled them in (e.g. filled the holes with water). We can't remember where the leeks came from - I just know that they aren't ones we grew from seed, so we don't know what variety they are.

I was pleased to find this Autumn Crown squash growing in the grotto - I've only found one, but it's quite well camouflaged, so there may be another in there..

This is the biggest squash I've found so far - I think it's the Boston Winter squash - though I expected it to be orange... it doesn't look like it's going to go orange, but maybe it will..
So, the slightly spurious link is to Ed Sheeran. I do really like this song, but perhaps mainly because there's still no escape from it on the radio!