I am constantly blown away at the moment by some of the beauty I find in the allotment.
As a kid I thought gardening was stupid, and I've never really been that thrilled by flowers, but when you start with a messy wilderness, strive to make it productive, and then find so much beauty there too, it feels amazing.
I must have spent half an hour gazing at this nasturtium flower the other day. The photo doesn't do it justice; the colours are incredible. It's quite the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.
And then there's the wildlife! Isn't this amazing? Have you ever
ever seen a purple grasshopper before??
Anyway, back to the vegetables.
We have harvested quite a few potatoes now; here are some we pulled up last week.
Those still attached to the plant are not all it produces; there are several more left behind in the soil. It seems the brown patches on the skins are scab; an ailment caused by soil which is not acid enough (which I kind of knew but was in too much of a hurry to do anything about). The damage is purely cosmetic so it's nothing to worry about, but apparently if you dig a bucket of grass clippings into the soil before you plant it gives it a healthy acid boost, so I'll try that next year if I can.
Since I took this photo a week ago, the potato plants have gone from slightly-unhealthy-looking to completely dead, which means all the potatoes are ready to be harvested now! This is at least a month before I expected, and I'm not sure where I'm going to store them yet! I wonder if there's time to plant a second crop in their place... Or maybe I could put the cabbages, kale and broccoli there to save myself some work at the weedy end!
Having removed the forest of weeds (thanks Dad!) I finally decided there's no time to dig through every inch of soil for roots and keep sticking to the plan; at this stage I'm just desperate to get things in the ground before it's too late (which it probably already is). So I just dug a small patch for tomato seedlings, one for courgettes and pumpkins, and one for cucumbers, and these are all planted now and settling in nicely, like the pumpkin below. Whether I'll get a decent crop before the end of the summer remains to be seen, but I'll try dammit!
With the sweetcorn I didn't even bother digging a small patch, but just planted the seedlings among the grass. Below you can see the rather rickety-looking tower we built for our cucumbers to climb, with the courgettes and pumpkins next door and the sweetcorn seedlings in rows in the background. We scattered radish seeds all around the cucumbers and courgettes, to keep squash borers and other nasties away. With a bit of luck they might distract the flea beetles away from my salad leaves as well; flea beetles love radishes.
We've been eating lots of salad leaves; despite the outer leaves often being damaged by slugs or bugs, the inside ones are usually ok. However, not every type I planted (16, remember!) seems to have done anything, and despite my efforts, half the patches are too overgrown with weeds to be sure. The lamb's lettuce and rocket is past eating already before I have had any! I don't think I'll bother with these in future; I'm not organised enough to successionally plant and pick things that
must be harvested so young. If they were in my garden or if I had time to visit every day it might be all right, but otherwise it's not going to work!
We have picked and eaten our first peas, though a few were infested with nasty pea moth caterpillars; the slimy little grubs already eating my precious peas inside their pods. I’m so glad I investigated those tiny brown marks on the outsides! Once you know what to check for it’s easy to tell which ones are infested and which are not without opening them up. It seems to be only the mangetout which are affected; the sugarsnaps are unharmed by any pest so far.
Today I picked the first of the beans too; the yummy Purple King french beans, though the slugs and snails are still taking their share. Although all the types I planted are starting to crop now, my bean trellis looks rather ridiculous; out of three types of beans planted there only one is actually climbing; the Purple King and Borlotto appear to be bush-beans despite the packets claiming they were not!
I’ve been dying to try eating nasturtiums, since my self-sufficency-hero John Yeoman goes on about them a lot and edible flowers seem to be quite trendy at the moment, so while I was picking salad for supper I added a big handful of nasturtium leaves and another handful of flowers.
Salad never looked so good!
They’re very hot and peppery, with an unusual fruity flavour I couldn’t quite make up my mind about. While they do make a salad look pretty funky for a special occasion, I don’t think I’ll go out of my way to eat them again. Some self-sufficientists (is that the right word?) grind up nasturtium seeds rather than buying black pepper, but I don’t think it’s a flavour substitute I’d like to make!
I'll keep on growing them though, to distract slugs from more important things (allegedly...) and to attract insects, and for the occasional dinner-party salad, and just because they're fantastic!
And yellow ones...
And even some baby pumpkins! It'll be a while before we harvest those though!
The cucumbers are trying hard too. I had great success with these in a growbag last year but I think I planted them a bit late this time. But there are tiny cucumbers appearing even though the plants are barely six inches high! The radishes planted all round them are doing well too, as you can see.
Even though the radishes are only planted for pest-control purposes, they look so yummy I had to pick a few. I haven't been brave enough to try them yet (my sensitive little mouth doesn't like things too hot and spicy) but I will!
We've harvested our first onions too. The foliage is dying down now (like the potatoes, a month or so earlier than I expected) so I guess they're not going to grow anymore, but some of them are still rather tiny. I suppose it's the competition from the weeds. Still, most are a respectable size, and they have a nice mild flavour and a really good texture.
Here's something else every garden should have; we dug the Swiss chard from under a forest of weeds and it's doing quite well! I'd never heard of the stuff until I started gardening but it looks so amazing I can't believe it's not more popular. You can cook it like spinach, eat young leaves raw, or wait until it gets really big and cook the stems. On the left are beetroots which are doing pretty well too, and the leaves are lovely in salads.
We dug a lot of things from under the weeds this weekend in fact; the strawberries look like they've still got fruit to give, the carrots are starting to grow well and I found salad leaves I'd forgotten I planted!
