Broad Beans galore and first courgettes

Jamie pickled our first lot of beetroot yesterday - in red wine vinegar.

Picked another mass of broad beans for tea and to have raw in a salad tomorrow lunchtime. The crimson broad beans are just starting to flower - I'll take a photo when a few more have bloomed.

Also picked the first 2 courgettes - they're only little and there are 2 more growing already. I'll try to keep ahead of the game, otherwise they'll be marrows within a couple of days.

Pea moth

Taken from my website for 2010 - some things don't change though

Hmm, well we did pick a lot of peas and they really WERE delicious, but podding and finding little caterpillars is REALLY unpleasant! Timing must have just been wrong when we planted the first lot as there were a lot of worms in them - ugh.
Hopefully the next lot will have escaped the moth laying period...

On the plot today...

We've sowed 2 rows of carrots where the parsnips failed - a row of Autumn King and a row of Resistafly, so they should be good for over the winter.

We pulled a Rocket potato which will do us for a couple of days and our first lot of peas for tea tonight.
We ate a couple of peas on site and there was a pea moth larvae in one (ugh), so more careful podding is required!
We got a lovely trugful of veggies today - we're going to pickle some of the beets and I'm having a broad bean salad for lunch tomorrow.

Avoiding carrot fly

We went to the plot yesterday evening. Jamie ventured under the enviromesh and weeded the carrots - all the carrot flies don't fly in the evening (apparently). We tasted a carrot, it was a yellow one - they're rainbow carrots - looked a bit weird but tasted lovely and sweet.

I sowed 12 more dwarf french beans (Speedy) into pots and left them under the cloche to germinate. Nights are still colder than you'd expect in July though - only 8 degrees...

mmm, look at all those peas!

Weeding, weeding, weeding

We got up early to work on the plot before it was due to rain. It's been raining for much of the week and weeds are everywhere again.
Two of the sweetcorn had blown over so we earthed them up and made sure the roots were better firmed in.

We trimmed the tops and roots off 20 leeks and puddled them in where we pulled the first row of potatoes.
The leeks look tiny, but hopefully will be ok. We left quite a lot of room (about 20cm between each) in the hope this will keep the mould at bay...
We've got about another 20 which we'll plant when we've cleared the next row of spuds.

 The onions are actually looking a lot better than last week, they've bulbed up well - seems that the 'tickling' may have helped after all :-)

The shallots are really close to ready now, we're hoping to get a bit more sun/warmth to dry them off.

We picked some more broad beans and chard for lunch. There are lots of ladybirds and larvae around picking off the blackfly and the rain dealt with most of the whitefly (it seems).

Looks like there will be plenty of peas for tomorrow's dinner and we plan to pickle some of the beets in the next few days too.

The congo spuds (the heritage ones) have really pretty flowers on. The plants are different from newer varieties; they sprout up from all around the plant rather than just shooting upwards from the seed potato. We hope they're growing well under all that earthing up we did earlier in the year!

Er, no, not immature spuds!

A little searching has shown that actually, they're known as aerial tubers. They seem to be symptoms of Rhizoctonia (see http://www.scribd.com/doc/22035248/Rhizoctonia-Canker-and-Black-Scurf-of-Potatoes). The cankers appear on the foliage and the black scurf appears on the tubers. We saw some of this dark sooty deposit on some of our spuds last year but it wasn't apparent on any of these Lady ChristL ones.
There certainly didn't appear to be any adverse affect to the taste, look or quantity of tubers - maybe that's because we pulled them quite early.
Ho hum, just another disease to be aware of this year!!

Immature spuds...?

Have just got back from the plot - it was so hot and humid there. Did more weeding and sowed some spring onions (White Lisbon), Radish (Chinese Dragon) and Lollo Rosso in the raised bed.

Jamie pulled the last Lady ChristL from the first potato row - making room for our leeks, which we'll put in in the next week. The potatoes could clearly have formed more as you can see they're still green and on the stem (which wasn't buried). Looks like they could have done with more earthing up - we've never seen that before.

Still loads of well-formed spuds (1.5kg) to have with our first crop of broad beans for tea.

Chard snack

Dave gave me a lovely little yellow courgette so had that fried in butter with chard stems on top of the chard leaves with some rice. Lovely little lunch.

Everyone loves a Qualcast Panther 30!

We cut the paths where the grass had grown really tall along the edges of the plots and did lots of weeding.

We were at the plot at 8:00 this morning - beautiful and sunny and there were only a couple of other people there. The earth is really dry as you can see from the photo, but there's water not too far down and all the plants are finding it.

Transplanted 8 celery plants, 4 peppers and 2 tomatoes (ones from Carolyn & Paul) onto 8A.

The sweetcorn are looking healthy, as are all the beanies - should get to scoff some tomorrow. The brassicas look good, especially the pretty red cabbage but when you move a leaf you get a face-full of white fly :-{ Chemical warfare is imminent...

Minimum temp of just 5 degrees last night - crazy, no wonder the cucumber is about 10 centimetres tall and has already produced a flower!

Downy Mildew

Not great news, but not terrible news regarding the onions. The stems have been looking a bit puckered and have been bending over for a little while. Turns out they've got Downy Mildew - basically due to horrible weather, oh, and watering from above rather than just at the bulb...

Jamie found some information about it in the US - see link.

At least we should get some onions to scoff though and won't have to pull the lot which we were worried about - they just won't be so impressive as some of the huge bulbs people have around site :-(

The shallots seem to have got away with it so far because they're just about ready to be picked and dried.

At least we've got flowers on our dwarf french beans now so we should see some signs of beans soon...