12 Kg, beautiful, wonderful, lovely potatoes. All white (except the one red), this is the potatoes dug up from one of my beds, the other bed has the reds in but as they haven't succumbed to blight I have left them in (still flowering too). We had some of the little ones for tea tonight, they were lovely.
The reds are still in the ground, it looks like spraying them with Bordeaux mix worked as there is hardly any blight on these. I have picked off all the flowers and the fruits so all the energy goes into the tubers.
The two pumpkins I planted under the beans seem to be doing well, one has several fruits on it but the other looks like it only has male flowers, I'm not too worried about this as it has obviously fertilised this one. The butternut squash plants are still small but I can see some flowers forming so I'm keeping my fingers crossed. It is the first time I have grown Butternut squash so I don't really know what to expect from them.
Now I had a problem with my broccoli this year, I didn't label the plants properly and didn't know what was what, but this is definitely a broccoli (Calabrese really). I'm not sure which type as I planted several, using up the open packs of seeds left over from previous seasons and packs of things I wasn't really keen on (like purple sprouting broccoli).
My beans are doing great, lots of flowers and many tiny beans. It's a waiting game now. Unlike others down the allotments, I have kept mine as weed free as possible. In fact I have pulled as many weeds as I can get to all over my plot. A lot of the others have weeds everywhere, some are quite overgrown.
After reading someone else's blog (sorry I can't remember who's) I decided to make my own scarers (left). I had originally bought 2 from the £shop (right), not expensive and quite pretty, but growing your own is also about making things cheap and, well, just making things. So I made about 5 of these. Easy peasy, cut the middle out of a bottle of pop, use a hole punch to punch 3 holes in the top and six holes along the bottom, cut carrier bags into strips and tie them into the bottom holes. Tie string to the top holes and hang. Don't they look good. Home made and free. I'm enjoying this plotting lark.
.jpg)
Well that is until I look at the onions. Only one grew big enough to use in a salad. The others have all lost their green so I had to pull them up. It was recommended that instead of keeping these and using them as sets for next years crop, that I pickle them. So I have got out my trusty old (1951) cookbook to check exactly how to do this. Hopefully I will have some time tomorrow to start this (and find some jars). The rest of the harvest consisted of one overgrown zucchini, one pea pod and three runner beans.
The sweetcorn look very nice, they are very short but I can see the cobs swelling and there seem to be several cobs on each plant. Other people there have sweetcorn which seem to be getting taller but there are no cobs on any of theirs yet, I don't know if that's better or not.
Oh, by the way, the cookbook was my nan's, not mine, I'm not old enough to have bought it new. It was passed down to me, I do have the one I bought when I first started having to cook but I don't think these will be passed down any further in my family. My son DOESN'T COOK NOR DOES HE GARDEN. Actually there isn't much he does do, except sit in front of the X-box.