Harvest Monday - summer!

What's that? Summer has arrived (for a while at least). Following on from some very chilly autumnally weather we've had a lovely couple of days, and look......a strawberry

 

There would've been another one too but a beastie had enjoyed it first. This one was yummy anyway (Jan and I had half each). Hopefully the first of many.

I've lifted all my garlic, bad rust had developed and some of the plants started to rot in the ground. So it won't store, but we'll try and eat it up before any more of it rots. I might sow some carrots in the space where it was, as the garlicky-ness might put off carrot fly? In other years I've planted out squash after lifting garlic, which seemed to work ok too.

Brace yourselves.....this was my potato harvest today. My early potatoes are in flower so I thought I'd rootle around in the soil to see if I could find any reasonable ones to harvest. I think you can see how that went.

I also picked some baby chard leaves. The plants self-seeded in amongst my onions, so hopefully they won't affect the onion growth too much. Posh bags of salad leaves quite often include baby chard so it's nice to get some for free here.

My autumn-sown broad beans have started fattening up. The plants themselves look awful (having been battered by winds and squashed by cats or foxes over winter, then more-recently eaten by slugs) but they've hung-in there and produced some decent beans

I've probably picked about two thirds of them so far

Whilst I was podding the beans, Jan made us this tasty soup with a fresh garlic, the potatoes and then the beans and chard plus a bit of coriander and mint that I'm growing at home. Lovely, with a spoonful of goat yogurt.

Yesterday Jan really wanted a BBQ, so after all the effort of getting it going just to cook a few veggie sausages, I had a think of what else we could put on. Turns out that you can BBQ rhubarb, and there were some stalks that needed pulling from my pot in the back garden. After drizzlling with oil and about 10 minutes on the BBQ they softened up nicely. We ate them with balsamic vinegar and honey (it actually worked!).

And we've finally been enjoying salad leaves from the back garden...here's 'freckles'

I've planted out the lettuce on two sides, and have been checking for slugs most nights. Plus I'm trying out the bran trick, you can just see a white barrier of it around the lettuce patch in the piccie below (the bran's only been in place two days though, so will have to see how effective it is)

I've also finished off the rustic 'gate' made from buddliea prunings...the diagonal stem gives it stability (otherwise it's a bit wobbly). I'm quite pleased with it actually, I might make one for the other side too if I've got enough sticks.

In naturey news, I keep seeing this lovely toad on the allotment (pic by jan). At the moment it seems to spend most days under a pile of rosemary prunings. I'd like to tidy them away but feel a bit guilty whilst the toad's there. I saw a really big frog today too, hope it gets munching on those slugs.

On Saturday we got the bus over to the east coast for a walk. It was a bit misty to begin with but cleared up later....Here's a few of the famous Horsey seals. Well, their bums anyway.

And a beautiful blue sky by the time we headed inland a bit. We were lucky to see swallowtail butterflies and painted ladies (plus the usual marsh harriers, skylarks, stonechats etc , we're a bit spoilt for wildlife round here).

That's me for the week, thanks for reading and hope you've been enjoying nice weather, nature, and some harvests too.

 

I'm linking in with Harvest Monday, kindly hosted by Dave at Our Happy Acres

 

Oh, I forgot to include this basil, picked when pinching-out some basil seedlings (to encourage bushy plants), which we had with a pasta dish

 

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