We were away for two and a bit weeks in August, during which time my cousin and her son looked after things for us, watering, harvesting and making sure things were ok. When we got back at the beginning of September, there were hundreds of runner beans waiting to be picked, as well as French beans, huge marrows, loads of cucumbers, and chillies.
Here is one of the marrows!!!
Above- one of our harvests in September.
Runner beans anyone?!
Struggling to find the right 'Carry On..' inspired caption...
Below- Some of the leaves on the Jerusalem artichoke plants had gone like this:-
I don't really know what it was though and since I took all these dead looking leaves and stems off, it's been doing really well, except for the fact that the really strong winds we had a couple of weeks ago blew all the plants over so Baz had to cut them right down. I'm hoping that they'll be ready to pick soon. Yum. We discovered when we used to get a veg box a few years ago that if you roast them (with skins on) they are really tasty.
Above- another one of our recent harvests. We need to grow some other coloured veg I am thinking.
Above- how it was all looking in mid-September, from the bottom. You can see that the area on the left is full of weeds and we will be working on this area in the autumn/winter.
Above- so I'm pretty sure that our tomatoes got blight. But I have managed to save a few of the plants and we now have a whole two red tomatoes nearly ready to pick and a collection of other ones I'm hoping will ripen and be edible.
Above- here is the tomato plant with the blight (I think) showing on the leaves and on the stems.
Above is the cucumber plant which pretty much monopolised the polytunnel this summer, due to us not trimming it back and leaving it to take over. I have since cut a little bit off and attached some of the plant to string which is attached to the beam running above at the top of the polytunnel. But I don't think you can really tell that well from the pictures above and below. It's now pretty much dying off. These are pictures from about two or three weeks ago.
Above is one of the chillies we have grown. Unfortunately all the labels I put in the chilli plants I started off got mixed up so I couldn't tell you which type of chilli it is. But I can tell you it's quite a hot one! I was going to try and preserve a few in olive oil but Baz decided to freeze them instead.
I was hoping to do some seed saving this year, but so far I haven't done any. I have gone back through my notes I made though from my food growing course from a couple of years ago and found this article which I've made notes from too, so I'm going to try with the cucumbers, French and runner beans and possibly the chillies. The cucumbers have stopped producing fruit now, I had planned on trying to pickle a few into gherkins, but that'll have to wait until next year because we've eaten them all now. The cucumbers, which came from a plant my friend Sam gave me, have been one of the best crops this year. We have had at least 30 or so, and apart from a couple which we let get too big so couldn't really eat with the skins on, they've been so tasty! We will definitely be growing them again.
The last couple of weekends we have been sowing green manure seeds for over-wintering in the beds which don't have anything in. We bought two types- Phacelia Tanacetifolia and Mustard (White) both from Homebase, which I'm not totally happy about because we should have got organised and ordered some different ones from a nice online organic website, but we didn't. Anyway, these two can be sown up until September so last weekend (the 29th/30th) was the last weekend in theory that we could sow it. We managed to do about 5 or 6 beds, a couple were just half beds, and the first lot I put in about two weeks ago is already coming up.
It'll be two years soon since we first took up a plot on this allotment site, but 6 months of that was on our original plot and a few months of not having a plot at all.
Hasta la vista.
-x-
I was hoping to do some seed saving this year, but so far I haven't done any. I have gone back through my notes I made though from my food growing course from a couple of years ago and found this article which I've made notes from too, so I'm going to try with the cucumbers, French and runner beans and possibly the chillies. The cucumbers have stopped producing fruit now, I had planned on trying to pickle a few into gherkins, but that'll have to wait until next year because we've eaten them all now. The cucumbers, which came from a plant my friend Sam gave me, have been one of the best crops this year. We have had at least 30 or so, and apart from a couple which we let get too big so couldn't really eat with the skins on, they've been so tasty! We will definitely be growing them again.
The last couple of weekends we have been sowing green manure seeds for over-wintering in the beds which don't have anything in. We bought two types- Phacelia Tanacetifolia and Mustard (White) both from Homebase, which I'm not totally happy about because we should have got organised and ordered some different ones from a nice online organic website, but we didn't. Anyway, these two can be sown up until September so last weekend (the 29th/30th) was the last weekend in theory that we could sow it. We managed to do about 5 or 6 beds, a couple were just half beds, and the first lot I put in about two weeks ago is already coming up.
It'll be two years soon since we first took up a plot on this allotment site, but 6 months of that was on our original plot and a few months of not having a plot at all.
Hasta la vista.
-x-
Sweet ;-)
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