End of June 2009

We have all been down to the allotment fairly regularly as the weather has been a lot better recently, its been warm and also given us lots of rain which the plants seem to love ! Everything has gone crazy. All of the courgette plants now have flowers on and we harvested the first two baby courgettes yesterday. We took down all the Aquadulce Claudia broad bean plants and this revealed a few Rooster potatoes near the surface so we harvested them too ! We then planted pumpkin (Spellbound) and Squash (Little Dumpling) in part of that space as the original sowings in used compost didn't come through. Must make a mental note not to reuse compost !

We have been collecting raspberries (from Dad's canes from Lauriston) for a while now and this weekend we collected all of Henry's redcurrants and made a rhubarb (Uncle Carl's), redcurrant and raspberry crumble which was very nice indeed !

The greenhouse is looking marvellous, all the tomatoes (apart from the Big Boy Beefsteak, as we had to regrow them a bit later), are on their 2nd truss of flowers and are needing tying to the canes regularly, the melons have taken off and are being tied to canes as well, and the 2 crystal lemon cucumber plants have flowers buds on them as of yesterday. The chillies are everywhere, and are still growing, I must feed the chillies, pepper plant (still small), and the tomatoes later today as it will be a week since they have been fed.

So all in all, everything is going well. The only upset I had was that the shallots seemed to be needing to be harvested so I pulled up 2 clumps yesterday only to find that they have white rot - what a disappointment. So they have had to go in the bin, I'll try and harvest the rest today and see how they are. Apparently you can't grow onions/shallots/leeks/garlic in the same spot for 8 years !!! Fingers crossed not all of them are affected.