The predominant memory of last week's harvest is of travelling home with the car filled with a scent that was a mixture of ripe strawberries and sweet peas. |
| 17 July |
The Malwina strawberry plants are shrugging off the lack of rain and producing lots of their delicious fruits. They have definitely prevented our strawberry harvest from being a disappointment this year.
| 18 July |
Each visit to the Plot also sees us coming away with a large tub of very tasty Tulameen raspberries. We have also Picked a sprinkling of All Gold autumn raspberries.
Our fruit collection was tending to be dominated by darker coloured berries. There were lots of blackcurrants to be picked which is quite a tedious job and took far longer than the blackbird liked. It frequently had to take sudden evasive action, always accompanied by squawking disapproval, as it was late in spotting one of us crouched amongst the bushes.
The blueberries are still ripening steadily and the fruit of the thornless, Loch Ness, blackberry is starting to ripen.
We also picked some very sweet ripe wine coloured gooseberries. The variety is unknown as they came from cuttings from a plot neighbour's plants. The berries are small and a dusky, dark pink when ripe.
We picked the first few chard leaves. It's a while since we have grown chard as we found the taste rather earthy but we've decided to give it another go. It maybe that the stems are the earthy tasting part. It just seems that many people harvest chard when not much else is growing so we thought we may be missing something.
We picked our first couple of handfuls of Cobra, climbing French beans. As we have picked the last of the first lot of cauliflowers we are moving from brassicas and into beans.
We are still harvesting peas from our first sowing. These are nearly finished now but the second sowing now has pods swelling.
| 22 July |
The courgettes haven't yet assumed unmanageable glut proportions and we have picked our first two Burpless Tasty Green cucumbers. One had been nibbled at the end and both were an appropriate C shape. Supermarket rejects for sure but certainly not rejected by us.
Last week, I posted about how we are growing watercress in our garden pond. We've been picking it as required for a while but it has never been photographed so this week I put that right.
The sweet peas are now providing armfuls of flowers. Most of the flowers are still being supported on extremely long stems. Has anyone else found this to be the case with their sweet peas this year?
For those of you who have said you enjoy watching the videos of our plot, last week I put together a film showing the fruit trees that are planted on the plot. It's about 14½ minutes long.
Our total harvest for July so far is listed here
As usual I am linking to harvest Monday hosted on Dave's blog Our Happy Acres
