A long barby afternoon

We spent all afternoon having a barbecue. It was such a lovely day, just perfect weather!

We had shallots and courgettes from the plot but had to buy tomatoes - ours have flowers and tiny tiny fruit but it'll be a while...
I was going to pick my first patty pan but will wait and maybe have that stuffed.

Turnips planted for winter

Another warm day and annual leave meant we spent a few hours up the plot this afternoon.

We've moved some of the better looking shallots to dry onto the metal cage - we'll pickle that lot first. In the space on Plot 7 we sowed 2 rows of turnips - Atlantic and Oasis (which are melon-flavoured, apparently).
I took all the grotty-looking leaves off the onions and tickled round the bulbs and you can see they look really healthy!

The runner beans have climbed to the top of the wigwam and have lots of flowers - no sign of beans setting yet, a good job really as we've got plenty of broad beans and peas to keep us going.
Tonight we're having our first ever baked spuds from the plot - 2 lovely big Orlas.

First Orlas

It was lovely and sunny this afternoon so we spent a few hours sitting and pottering. We watered everything as the ground dries out really quickly and we haven't done a proper water for a few days.
We pulled our first Orla potato - lots of lovely big potatoes, which should be good for mashing and baking. Also picked a load of broad beans for tea.

Whilst wandering around the site I spotted this pretty gingery moth - a Ruby Tiger apparently. The whole site is covered in Cinnabar caterpillars, so expect to see a mass of the pretty red and black moths soon....

BBQ weather

The sun shone for much of the day and it was lovely and warm, so we had a barbeque on the plot - just me and Jamie, though Malcolm and Richard joined us for a bit and our neighbouring plot holders, Sue & Chris, Jane and Dave were around so it was unusually busy at our end of the allotments!

Earlier in the day we saw this Common Footman moth sitting on our potatoes.

A ladybird gets its spots!

While we were at the plot yesterday we saw that a ladybird had just emerged from his chrysalis, which you can see on the cane below him.

Over the next couple of hours his spots became clearer and here he is the end result - quite amazing!

Shallots galore

At last a lovely warm sunny day this July! We went up the plot in the morning and have laid all our shallots out to dry on a canopy for a few days - looks like we'll have plenty of pickled onions at Christmas and beyond!

We planted out the 12 french bean plants which were germinated under the cloche. We put a few in between the sweetcorn plants, but the others in the legume quarter.

The first patty pan courgette is swelling - it's meant to be white, so though you can eat them when they're small I presume I should wait for it to change colour. The green courgette is providing me with plenty for the timebeing anyway.

We've got rather behind with picking the broad beans. Will probably make some humous or find some other way of using lots of beans - broad bean soup may be interesting..

The only shed I'm allowed!

My friends at work, Cathy and Sarah, gave me this lovely cake for my birthday at the weekend!

I can't tuck into it yet - need to leave it intact to show to others :-)

Peas, peas, peas

Managed to avoid the rain while we picked peas. Loads to be picked and plenty more coming. The smaller ones seem to have managed to avoid the pea moth but there were still lots with larvae in them - urgh, makes podding a bit of a chore! Anyway, they tasted lovely along with spuds and onions.

We need to pick more broad beans - I took a load to work the other day but there are still masses more. These two butterflies were sheltering from the rain amongst the leaves.

The french beans have all sprouted in the cloche so we'll plant them out at the weekend and beans are just about big enough to pick from the 5 plants we planted out already.

Fungus Gnats

It's been really rainy over the last couple of days. We've been up to pick food but haven't done much else. Had a courgette, spring onions and chard yesterday. Today pulled a load of Rockets from just one plant (forgot to weigh them) and some lettuce and radishes.
Peas and broad beans are desperate to be picked, but we've got a cabbage from Malcolm today, so they'll have to wait till later in the week...

We took up a lot of compost today - all the broad bean pods, etc and some cardboard boxes (which is mainly what we use as brown for our compost and it works well).
There were masses of little black flies all over the wooden compost bin - fungus gnats apparently, don't seem to do any harm.

Potato, carrots and onions for tea

Picked a couple of lovely big onions, another Rocket spud and a few carrots (Early Nantes - they're so delicious!). They're all cooking (dauphinois-styly) in the oven at the moment.

The crimson broad beans have flowered - they're really beautiful and lots of different pinks and purply. I thought they'd all look the same. The beans are meant to be red in green pods, but we'll see...