Food, Glorious Food

It’s been a great month. We’ve had masses of French Beans and Mange-tout. Just how many more recipes can we find for green beans?
There has also been a good supply of radishes and spring onions, but the tomatoes are slow to ripen. The freezer is bursting at the seams with runner beans.
Yesterday I harvested all the onions and they are laid out to dry. It’s a good job we put them under cover because it rained half the night.
It’s been an absolute joy to see the vegetable plot full of greenery and the crops growing since we had some decent amounts of rain. If the potatoes, carrots and parsnips are developing as well underground as they are above ground we should be having plenty of those as well. The leeks are doing well and with any luck when they are added to all of the other root vegetables we should be able to enjoy one of Denise’s fantastic vegetable soups in the winter, but this time made from our own crops.

The chicken project is on hold until my hernia is sorted. It must have been all that digging!

I'm singing in the rain

These are the notes I wrote about three weeks ago, but busyness, holidays and a short illness have got in the way of posting. I'll will update again soon, but suffice to say the garden is looking good.

Last night it rained like billy-o and what a blessing that was, but we can’t have picked a much worse year to start our vegetable garden. It must have been one of the hottest, driest summers for ages. We seem to have spent an interminable amount of time just watering everything to keep it alive.

Despite that things have gone pretty well. We’ve had our first salad from the garden (well most of it). We’ve had lots of French beans already, but the runner beans and peas seem a bit behind. We can’t see what’s going on with carrots and parsnips but there seems to be plenty of growth so hopefully things are going well underground. We did have a bit of a scrab about around one of the potato plants and found a few to make a salad, but the rest can wait until later because they are supposed to be main crop. The onions still look good and I can hardly wait to get at them. Tomatoes are coming along well I think, and radishes and spring onions have provided us with a few additions to salads. It’s a different story for the lettuces though because the slugs, snails or whatever it is that eats them is getting far more than we do.

We are seriously considering having two or three chickens. I know they’re not vegetables, but they will provide us with fresh eggs. You may have to call us Tom & Barbara soon!