Pumpkin Pie

Back from a two week holiday and the allotment is starting to look a little autumnal.

The Dahlias are still flowering, picked  a bunch today, some carrots, a few squashes, but the big harvest of the day was my pumpkin. It's enormous, I really didn't think it would grow when I picked up a plant in Simpsons in the Spring.

Busy making Pumpkin pie and soup.

I'll write a review of the year for the Dores website in the next couple of days.

Wallflowers For The Spring

As I've said before, it's not just fruit and veg on the allotment, I grow flowers too.

One that works well is wallflowers especially as they are biennials. In June I planted two rows of seeds, White Ivory and Giant Pink.

Here you can see them growing, ready to harvest.

As the summer bedding in the garden is looking pretty tatty now, especially after this weekends wind and rain, I've cleared it away ready for the wallflowers. 

Here's my walled flower bed on the drive, all planted up with the wallflowers, ready for the spring.

As the wallflowers are pink and white I've interspersed them with dark pink tulips that will hopefully grown up through the wallflowers.

Lots to do at the moment

Had to crop my onions this week. A bit earlier than they should be, but my potato plants next to them had got so tall that in the strong wind they'd flopped over the onions and underneath the onions were damp and going off.

Not a bad crop of white onions considering, red onions very disappointing, again! Don't think I'll grow them again..... and I don't think I'll grow my onions next to the potatoes again either.


 
Having a problem with my carrots, last post they were cropping well, but some animal, I think a badger is digging them up. He's eaten all of my early carrot row, apart from the ones I've dug. I've put heavy stones next to the fence where he's getting under and I'm really hoping he doesn't discover my other two rows of carrots.

Other things cropping well at the moment: baby sweetcorn, courgettes, flat leaf parsley, spring onions, new potatoes, french beans,  dahlias and gladioli.  Especially pleased with these green gladioli.

I also have two pumpkins growing, getting quite sizable. Saw the plants it Simpsons, didn't think they'd do much, I could be wrong.






The other two things I'm having problems with is catapillers on my cabbages, they've shredded one row, hardly any leaves on them and weeds which have gone crazy since the rains came.

Need to think about lifting my potato crop in the next couple of weeks. The "Desire" have got blight and the plants are dying off but should still be a good crop. The "Golden Wonder" seem to be resisting.

Yes, that really is a courgette!!

It's all gone crazy

The allotment is cropping wonderfully at the moment, some things more than we can cope with.

New Potatoes:

Been cropping these for a while now, in fact we haven't bought any potatoes since early July. The type is Epicure and I must confess I didn't think they'd crop very well due to the dry early summer, but as you can see they're doing wonderfully.

 And they make the best chips too!!!

Other things cropping really well at the moment are:

Spring onions, courgettes, mini sweet corn, french beans, beetroot and Italian flat leaf parsley.

Had a real surprise with these carrots this afternoon, I've been leaving them for weeks because every time I checked the on the surface they looked very small. Today I thought the plants looked really big so I pulled one, to my surprise the carrot under the ground was really long, So I pulled enough for dinner.


I'm growing flowers too, for use in the B&B, flowering really well at the moment are the Dahlias and the sunflowers, the Statice is coming to and end now although I've been picking arms full for weeks.  I picked my first Gladioli today, a lovely mixture and purple and green.

  

Starting To Crop

This haul was from the allotment the other day.

Gooseberries, strawberries, beetroots and my first courgette. Sunflowers, dahlias and statice.

Broad Beans

Picked my first crop of broad beans today. Not many but enough for dinner.

I planted two lots, one batch of seeds I planted in the ground back in February, the other I grew in the greenhouse and planted out in May.

I don't think either have done better than the other, but certainly the number of successful plants from seed was much better from greenhouse raised plants. Probably only about a third of seeds in the ground germinated. Probably due to the cold spring.

I also picked another punnet of strawberries this afternoon. They are some of the biggest and tastiest strawberries I've ever had. Made a strawberry flan this afternoon.

Warm Weather, Works For Some Things

A few more crops are ready recently, the two most exciting for me are new potatoes and strawberries, neither of which I've managed to grow before.

I dug into the soil at the end of June to check my new potatoes (Epicure) but they were still quite small so I left them for another 2 weeks.

Now they look like this and are lovely cooked with sprigs of mint and served with butter.

You can't beat the taste of home grown spuds.







I netted my strawberries about a week ago, I thought the birds wouldn't find them up their, but one afternoon I went up to weed and found a couple of strawberries scattered with chunks missing even though the weren't ripe.

So I loosely draped a net over the whole row and
yesterday went and picked my first crop.


Alas not everything on the allotment is enjoying the recent weather, my cauliflowers are a disaster. I think the ground is too dry for them as we've not had any proper rain for weeks. Most of the row have just flopped over and died, I have about 5 plants left from a row of 20. Strangely the cabbages are doing really well, they don't seem to mind the dry.