A little light gardening

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Oh my aching knees!

It feels as if infirmity isn’t so much creeping up on me as galloping on a horse swinging a polo mallet! Maybe the paintballing at the weekend wasn’t a good idea. I had a great time, as did my nephew, the only bad point was getting out of the car at the end of the day when I discovered that my knees don’t really want to work anymore. This will make gardening very interesting for a few days.

Yesterday (Sunday) all I did (or rather, could manage) was some simple harvesting. I pulled up a few more turnips, dug up some new potatoes, more bread beans and mange tout, a handful of French beans, picked the strawberries, raspberries and blackcurrants that were ready, cut a lettuce and generally had a mooch around the plot.

The good news is that the ant-squirrel cage seems to be working. The quantity of strawberries were back to a over half a pound and none had been munched. Definitely a good result there.

My late broad beans have started to sprout, so when the current crop of broad beans are all picked then I’ll have the plants up and put the new ones in their place.

There are flowers on the runner beans already! If I’m not careful we’ll be inundated with beans. And the pea pods are going absolutely mad. It looks like the first picking of peas could well be a bumper crop. I expect that sometime later this week.

There are a couple of courgettes ready for picking, but as we were having roast chicken last night I decided not to bother picking them. Also the spring onions are ready to dig up, well some of them are. So I can provide a decent cooked meal at the moment and a lot of a salad (I really just want the cucumbers and tomatoes now).

There’s more flowers appearing on the mange tout, so this could mean that we’ll have even more. There are flowers on the cucumbers as well.

I suppose that a lot of growing vegetables is the succession planning, you have to make sure that the plot produces as much as it can for most of the year, to a degree this is reduced by the purchase of the chest freezer we have. But I still want the allotment to be producing the most it can.

Part of me thinks it may be nice to have broad beans between June and October, but another part of me thinks that in the summer months I don’t really think I’ll need a lot of peas, broad beans, runner beans and French beans all at the same time, so I think I’ll carry on growing at the start of the season and then having some at the end of the season too, that way I get to enjoy the summer veg without filling the freezer up.

Today was another harvest only day, but this time just fruit. It being a lovely day we had salad tonight, but most of the stuff on the plate was home grown. isn’t life grand.

Enjoy the summer all.

• 30 Jun, 2009
• 6 likes

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