Currants

Just about the entire crop of jewel-like white currants, and a few redcurrants.

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More Spuds

I dug up yet more King Edwards on Sunday and wonder how many are still in there, since the bed will soon be needed for something else. Their tendency to disintegrate when boiled seems lessened by our unintentional ‘overwintering’. I traded some with a friend for a piece of Scottish smoked haddock and heard later [...]

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February?

Finding Osteospermums in flower in February must be unusual.
This monstrously unappetising radish would be unusual at any time of the year.

Clearing the beds (late again!) for spring planting, we found more vegetable surprises: a small handful of baby beetroot.

Emerging crocuses are what I’d expected to see, with a little luck (and less squirrel activity) this [...]

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New Year Potatoes

This is the first week I’ve given the allotment any serious thought since the late autumn, sitting down to make a crop rotation plan and a list of tasks to accomplish before spring sets in (to follow in a later post).
Just as I was planning which potato varieties to order for this season (with suggestions [...]

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Last of the Summer Veg

I’m still catching up on posts, using photos taken earlier in the month before I was knocked out by a cold. The above borlotti beans, beetroot, Chantenay carrots and rainbow chard constituted our last substantial serving of vegetables of the season, and very good they were. I served them with pot-roast partridges stuffed with Lincolnshire [...]

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Autumn Leaves

The plot is looking more colourful as autumn approaches and the most eye-catching change since my last visit was the leveller bush (yet to produce any fruit, after two seasons), now a vivid red.
Here’s a more detailed view.

The borlotti beans, still growing, are producing just a handful of beautiful pink and green pods - quality [...]

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Carrots

We had the first Chantenay red-cored carrots. They seemed to be the slowest-growing carrots ever and mysteriously didn’t have red cores, but were delicious.

Another one, carrots ready for the pot.

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Love-in-a-Mist

Much of the plot still looks green as these dried Love-in-a-mist hint at autumn colours to come.
Recent sunshine has boosted the growth of the rainbow chard. I’m not sure what’s causing those holes in the leaves. Little snails?

I picked two round courgettes and half a normal one (a small snail was munching its way through [...]

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Evening Primrose in the Morning

It was a beautiful morning today and what has become the evening primrose patch is looking lovely amidst the generally overgrown top end of the plot.
I wasn’t sure if these were evening primrose - they seemed too short and stubby - until I read this text and discovered that they are biennial plants, forming ‘rosettes’ [...]

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Fennel Flowers

The fennel has bolted, before forming bulbs. (We ate some anyway.) There are also a few other veggie flowers at the plot. A radish, left to go to seed.

Very late (perhaps too late) borlotti beans - not enough sun for these, I think.

The artichokes are nicely established, though haven’t produced any flower heads in their [...]

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