Spuds and Raspberries

In Spring we put 3 spare kestrel spuds in Plot 8A, alongside the raspberries. Anyway, we've been pulling them over the last couple of weeks - they're pretty scabby, especially compared to the lovely-looking spuds we've been getting from Plot 7 - they taste and cook fine though. The plant closest to the raspberries grew much slower than the others and looked a bit different, but we pulled it yesterday and it was a kestrel.
It seems that potatoes and raspberries are not good growing partners. The raspberries are certainly happy (Dave took a punnet-ful away today) but the potatoes only produced about 4-5 tubers and are quite uneven shapes and scabby.
We won't put them in there next year and will move the raspberries and get them under control now we know they're mainly Autumn fruiting varieties. The roots have got everywhere and are spreading to path and neighbouring plot so we'll pull them and transplant just a few canes - probably in December/January. Autumn varieties can be chopped right back and then will fruit in the same year, so they should be fine....

Record-breaker!

We had a big salad for tea last night - it was a record-breaking meal with our maximum number of our home-grown ingredients consisting of:

1. Red cabbage
2. Carrot
3. Potatoes
4. Spring onions
5. Beetroot
6. Cucumber
7. Radish

The coleslaw made with the red cabbage and carrot was lovely - Jamie thought it wasn't quite as tasty as the green cabbage stuff we made last year. Still, the Rocky cucumber is definitely vastly superior tasting than any shop-bought cucumber!

There was enough edible cabbage from that giant red that we picked - we had plenty for 2 meals and could have had 3 if we'd been more organised. Quite a lot of shredded cabbage went into the compost bin :-(

Scarlet Empire Runners

Our Scarlet Empire runner beans are looking happy. Producing some really good 30cm pods!

First Red Cabbage

Here's our first giant red cabbage - if there's enough to eat we'll have half cooked and the other half as coleslaw. The other cabbages don't look as big as this one, but may be able expand a bit as they're thinned out.

After taking all the outside and eaten leaves off this is what we're left with! Looks nice.

Jamie picked lots of runner beans on Monday but there are loads more appearing and our crimson broad beans are almost ready. We've still got lots of peas and the courgettes/patty pan are producing new ones continuously at the moment.

The weather was wet all day yesterday and not very warm, but it's burning hot again today... so plenty more growing time for our sweetcorn hopefully.

Green Manure

We sowed mustard, as green manure, yesterday in the middle section where the onions/shallots were. We grew this last year and it just gets dug in when it's died down after the frosts. This quarter is going to be for the legumes next year. So, at the moment it's turnips, green manure and horse manure under black plastic.. The turnips have just started showing a white bulb.

We're picking one of the red cabbages tomorrow, so this is the last photo of it growing - there's a lot of caterpillar damage, hope there's enough edible stuff left for us!