Birthday gifts

It was my birthday earlier in the week and I got a couple of things for the allotment.

Firstly, this truly amazing wind sock!

Here it is fluttering away this morning. It’s attached to the bottom half of our fruit cage. On the right of the path you can see all our potatoes growing away nicely. The canes in the middle belong to our neighbour opposite.

Also with the money I received have purchased this Blood Orange tree

 

Popped to the nursery this morning and brought it back in the car. Our first citrus tree it’ll be interesting to see how it gets on. At the moment it’s just starting to produce tiny fruits. If all goes well I have my eye on one of two more trees.

Other things done today: Some more flower planting and general weeding, plus lifted the garlic which is now drying off in my garage. Pic below is of the elephant garlic

Also have begun digging the first earlies in earnest now. They’re quite a bit bigger than expected, probably due to the vast amount of rain we’ve had!

Next week it looks like our gooseberries will be ready. Picking them is a job I hate, but eating them is a task I love!

Peppers

Today was another gloomy, overcast day with a chilly NE wind blowing much like it has been for seemingly weeks on end here now. Usually we have dry, warm, sunny weather in general this time of year, but not this year. Apart from one hot weekend sometime ago, it’s been cool most of the time.

But, now we have our super greenhouse, for the first time ever we’ve got proper peppers growing-

 

These are just standard sweet peppers, but also have some more unusual varieties growing too, which have flowers starting to appear but no fruit yet. Even more excitingly, again for the very first time after years of trying numerous different varieties and growing techniques we have melon plants with flowers!!!

Whether anything will actually grow from them who knows but just getting to this stage seems like a major achievement!

Elsewhere on the on the plot, the leeks are now in their final growing position, the sweet potatoes are rapidly growing, garlic is now ready to dig, spuds are going mad due to soaking up all the rain we’ve had recently and we’re picking literally pounds and pounds of the most amazingly tasty strawberries every day or two.

So although weather could be better everything’s coming along fine. Just some nice warm sunshine please now and things will be even better.

 

 

Spuds

Had my first exploratory dig to see if the fantastic potatoes above ground equated to anything below ground yet and as can be seen above it does. Had 12 small ones off just the one stem so that bodes well for when I start digging properly in the next week or two.

I also planted out for the first time sweet potatoes

These are a variety called Beauregard which hopefully will do us proud. They’re outside in full sun so fingers crossed they crop well. Interesting fact time: sweet potatoes aren’t potatoes at all but are part of the Ipomoea family instead. According to the blurb, these will be ready at the end of September, can be boiled, steamed, baked. roasted or fried and also store for ages. So we shall see.

Elsewhere on the plot out greenhouse crops are doing well despite the spell of cold weather we had two weeks ago. Also have begun to pick strawberries

We’ve now got about 60 strawberry plants which is pretty amazing when they all came from just 3 initial plants. It’s my birthday in a couple of weeks and I always remember eating pounds of fresh strawberries then, so to be picking and eating our own makes it twice as good.

Also picked caulis-

which have been wonderfully tasty. I was going to dig the plants out about 6 weeks ago as they appeared to be doing nothing but then they suddenly took off and these beauties have appeared.

Finally hanging up on my patio are my tumbling tom tomatoes

All grown from last year’s saved seed hopefully they’ll be equally productive. Although the main varieties are at the allotment i like being able to pop just outside and pick a few as and when required.