Rainy Sunday

We went up the plot after a rainstorm this afternoon - just to pick some veg. The potatoes are Orla and there are a few obligatory courgettes which I'll take to work - there should be a couple more ready when I want them for my dinner tomorrow evening! Also got another harvest of express french beans from our dwarf plants.

I made some carrot & coriander soup, using our lovely coloured carrots and one of our onions.

My soup recipe is always the same, just with different top 2 ingredients - this is the soups I made last weekend (measurements are very vague):

• Vegetables (e.g.4 carrots/pile of broad beans)
• Some type of herb (e.g.coriander/parsley)
• An onion cooked in butter with the herb
• 1 pint of vegetable stock
• Black pepper

Compost

These are just some of the hundreds of worms in our compost. Not sure why the one in the middle has shiny blue edges! The compost is made up of allotment waste, grass cuttings and cardboard. We've also added some really stinky comfrey juice that we were given a year ago - we added that occasionally.
We're going to leave this bin for a few months (or a year) now as we've started filling our second bin again.

Clearing legumes and spotting bugs

It wasn't a very nice morning; a bit chilly and drizzly but eventually the sun came out. We cleared weeds and also cut down the pea plants which had dried/died back and a lot of the original broad beans which had stopped producing pods and have rust - we don't want that passing to the crimson broad beans (not before the beans have been picked anyway).

We also cut the haulms (tops) off the potato plants which have died down. The Congo plants though are looking amazing - they are standing up again after the rain. We just hope the potatoes under the ground look as good as the plants and flowers!

Found a great little shield bug on the enviromesh over the sprouts - unfortunately we now know it's a Brassica Bug! Doesn't seem quite so pretty now. It'll overwinter in the ground apparently - hopefully it doesn't have too many buddies on our plot - though a lot of nibbling has happened to our purple cabbages in particular...

Eurydema oleracea

Our first Rocky cucumber will be ready to eat next week and another's on the way. Courgettes are going strong and the Balmoral patty pan is producing quite a few more sqashes.

Mostly pickling

Jamie pickled another jar of beetroot this week, again in red wine vinegar but with less demarera sugar than the previous jar.
Also pickled 2 jars of shallots, after soaking in brine for a couple of days. The shallots aren't that good - not many big bulbs. When they are cut into they break into more bulbs. Not sure whether this is because of the weather or the downy mildew, which may have stopped them forming. We did notice that the green tops grew very tall very quickly so maybe it was the soil being too rich from our compost...
Still, I'm sure the pickles will taste lovely at Christmas. The shallots we've used in other cooking have been very tasty.

Sunny Sunday

It was a beautiful day today ~24 degrees this afternoon when we were at the plot. There are masses of ladybirds, hoverflies - they love the calendula - and cabbage white butterflies. Didn't find any caterpillars on the cabbages today - we found 2 yesterday :-(

Our Congo purple potato leaves have started to lean over - this may have been because it was windy, because their stems are so big and heavy or because they are almost ready to die back (hopefully because they've reached that stage naturally, rather than through disease!!)

The sweetcorn are still small (less than 2 feet) but the male flowers have already started growing. It seems the weather may have caused short sweetcorn plants - don't know whether we'll get short cobs as a result...

Picked some more lovely coloured carrots, Orla spuds and broad beans for tea. And the obligatory courgette!

Rainbow Carrots

Made carrot and coriander soup, using our pretty multi-coloured carrots - the soup turned out orange as normal but the pinky carrot kept its colour after cooking.

French Bean Chutney

Spent a few hours this afternoon making french bean chutney - we used our shallots instead of onions and our first harvest of french beans (just managed to get 0.5kg of beans)

First Patty Pan (Balmoral)

This is our first patty pan, picked in the rain to eat, stuffed with broad beans and carrots, for my lunch.

Veggies for my mum

Really lovely hot and sunny day.  I took a trugful of veggies to my mum - pulled the last of the Rocket potatoes and so was able to squeeze 6 more leeks into the space.



We sat in the sun most of the afternoon and in the evening went back up to the plot for a bat hunt. We didn't see any though! We heard a few on the bat detector, but not many although there seemed to be plenty of moths and bugs about - perhaps the bad winter really took its toll on the bat population here :-(

Lettuce flower and nature..

This is what lettuce looks like if you let it go to seed and then leave in the ground for a year - really quite beautiful! The flowers are on long spikes of stem - over a metre tall - amazing!

And this is what I found living in our compost bin - eek! He's probably helping in some way and as long as he stays there and doesn't get too close to me then no problem!

Rather prettier was this comma buttefly I managed to snap before it took off again...