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Sunday, 25 August 2013

Veg update

The tomatoes seem to have blight. We have had a couple, but nothing very impressive.

The courgettes are still cropping well, but not quite so fast. I need to make more courgette jam before they stop.
The fire beans have just started cropping. We are going to let some grow bigger and dry the beans inside rather than eating them 'mange toute' as we did last year. I think they are a bit like kidney beans and can be used in stews and whatnot. We will eat some fresh too as they are very good.

The mini french beans are doing very well. They have nearly as many beans as leaves.
All the pea type things (peas, mange toute, sugar snaps) have died.
The sweetcorn are getting big but we are a bit concerned they aren't going to get there in time.
The cucumbers are going mad, there are LOADS of them. We have made some soup (cucumber with other stuff we had around)
The beetroot are good (Doug is not mad keen on them though - I live them with vinegar). The carrots rather less so at the moment, but I think they will get bigger.
The rocket and lettuce seems to have bolted. We need to do something with the basil (make pesto and freeze maybe...)
Potatoes aren't very big, but they taste good and there are quite a lot of them
The shallots grew and didn't go to seed, but they are not terribly impressive as each one only had 3 or 4 segments. The onions were a bit of a disaster as they all went to seed and hardly grew at all. We planted 100 and harvested about 20 only a few times bigger than the sets we planted! The garlic did grow but they are not very big and seem to think they are done now as the leaves are dying back.
We planted rather a lot of broccoli in one bed thinking many would not survive, most of them have (so far - despite the cabbage whites who scoffed the kale) so it is quite crowded.
The squashes (butternut and pumpkins) have a number of tiny fruit. We are not quite sure if they are going to manage to ripen in time. We have nipped off a number of the growing tips to limit the number of fruit each is trying to ripen. We planted rather too many in the bed so they have all grown together and it is hard to tell what is what.
I need to get it all in to a spreadsheet so we can remember next year what we did and where everything was - so we can make sure to rotate things that need rotating and plant more or less of things as appropriate from our experience this year.

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