Saturday 17th July 2010

I have not been good and kept this up to date so will try and remember everything we have been doing in the last couple of weeks.

Today we picked some more peas, took up the rest of the garlic in the 'onion' bed - except the elephant garlic which is still there. We also picked some gooseberries as these had gone red - I'm over the moon about that as I thought it was a green gooseberry bush and red are supposed to be tastier :-) There is a nice size pumpkin growing on Henry's plant so hopefully that will get nice and big for Halloween. We planted the leeks that were still in the tray in the greenhouse into the bed where the beetroot was. On the way out of the allotment we met a local farmer who asked whether we wanted free manure - he had a trailer load - he brought it down and we shovelled it into a couple of the spare beds, he said he would come back later on and drop some more off for us - timing is everything !

We have so far had 2 tomatoes (golden cherry), and there are plenty on the plants so they will come into their own soon. There are piles of chillies on the plants - none ripe yet but they look big and juicy - looking forward to trying them ! The 2 pepper plants look absolutely fine but as of yet - no flowers. We are keeping our fingers crossed for them !

In the last couple of weeks we have also harvested all the onions and shallots, staked the two apple trees which look much better and are also laden with apples ! We have tried some small borlotti beans (whole), and they taste very much like runner beans - the rest we are leaving in the ground to dry out so we can use them in stews in the winter.