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!

Courgette Cake

Another way to use courgettes, other than frying in butter which is always delicious, is in courgette cake. We made a chocolate one last year and it was far too heavy.
This one, from the Hairy Bikers website is really tasty and has walnuts in. You can still see the grated courgette so it's a bit interesting - but can't taste courgette at all!