Monster

Well, that’s August finished.

We took home this colourful selection of veggies yesterday. The yellow courgettes are from Neal’s plot (thanks Neal) and they’re now part of a very yellow soup, along with that carrot (Five for the price of one 😄), shallots, garlic and flavoured with turmeric and sweet smoked paprika. I remembered to remove the courgette cores this time so it’s thick and creamy.

The radish are the best we’ve grown for a long time. Jamie sowed them later than we normally would.

They’ve avoided the pest damage that they usually get, but…. that may change quite soon… as I found these 3 large white butterfly caterpillars in the cage 🙄

We picked the last of the tomatoes, as you can see the blight was well and truly into the stems. The red(ish) tomatoes are under the grow lamp at home to ripen (hopefully) and the remains of the plants have gone into the green bin at home.

And I’m sorry to report another crop fail - one of the Boston squashes has succumbed to blossom end rot. Probably because of the lack of rainfall during fruit development and, although we’ve been watering a lot, clearly not enough so the plant has suffered calcium deficiency. Some of the tromboncino have also suffered, but nobody minds cutting 20cm off the bottom of them! I’ll add some lime when preparing the plot for next year.

Things aren’t all doom and gloom, though the mood isn’t helped by the weather - look at the grey sky and there was a north-easterly wind chill.

The Borlotti beans are colouring up nicely. I don’t think I’d bother with the dwarf ones again which seem to be growing at the same speed as the climbers and aren’t so prolific.

I’ve also decided to keep them all for drying as we have plenty of runner beans and dwarf french beans to eat fresh, at least for the timebeing. Borlotti are my favourite dried beans but the Gigantes are also beginning to fatten up now.

The plants are still looking very much alive, with only the foliage on the squash (not all of them) dying back. You can see the courgette plants in the background.

So, that was the last day of August and the song title is provided by The Automatic. It’s mostly referring to the carrot but it also makes me think of Winter 😩