It's been a warm week with a few millimetres of rain mid-week so everything is growing happily and, with any luck, lots of flowers will soon mean lots to harvest. I've been lunching on fresh salad and beetroot this week, with plenty of strawberries for desserts.
These are our tumbling
Lizzano tomatoes which we grow outside - they don't have their side shoots nipped and generally produce an abundance of tomatoes so fingers crossed for this year.
 |
| Lizzano Tomato flowers |
The tomatoes in the greenhouse (
Sungold) don't have any flowers yet, but the sweet pepper has several flowers and one tiny pepper already..
The mangetout (purple-podded) is looking really pretty - people keep thinking its sweetpea, but it's better than that! There are some tiny peapods just beginning to form.
These flowers are on our
Tenerife papas...
Looking rather similar to the
kestrels...
Not long to wait now for our broad beans. I sprayed them with soapy water a few weeks ago, to kill off the blackfly. I think I put too much Fairy Liquid in the solution and that's why the leaves have gone black. The pods look good and healthy though, just need to fatten up the beans inside a bit more...
For the same meal we'll see if we have any
Rosabelle early potatoes under all that foliage!
We've already had some home-grown new potatoes - from Chris, a fellow plotholder. They were
Foremost and really were delicious!
We had the AGM on Monday night. Not a massive turnout (it never is) but enough people were there, along with the committee, to make for some interesting debate. A couple of the councillors came along (the mayor, who's a plotholder) and a councillor from Newbury who used to have a plot at Marsh Lane. We're still waiting for decisions regarding the future of Marsh Lane - we won't know until at least September what lease we will have when ours runs out in April 2016 :-(
And lastly, here's our collection of round stones we've found on the site - good aren't they!
That's the purple-podded mangetout on the right and this is the colour of the water that is drained after they've been cooked for about 3 mins - pretty huh?
During one of the bright spells between the heavy showers I managed to get our 6 Brussels sprouts (Revenge) planted. 4 on Plot 7 and 2 on Plot 3, where we figure the ground is probably harder, so may make for better, tighter sprouts. They're all under netting with a cloche (to protect from wind for the moment) and slug pellets.
Jamie's trying to weed around the raspberries on Plot3 but it's a bit of a nightmare, with couch grass, common figwort and horsetail to name a few of the most prevalent weeds...
And this was today's harvest (as well as the strawbs). Broad beans and spuds are on the menu for a while :-) We don't freeze our veggies which is why we generally only plant a few of everything. The only preserving we do tends to be pickling and chutneys (and now jam).
There was no rain yesterday (thank goodness) when I helped on the HAHA stall at the Hungerford Primary School fete. It was a really good afternoon with hundreds of people.
