June's bounty
June is one of my favourite months of the gardening year. It's a time when you are rewarded for all your hard work; clearing from winter, sowing, potting on, attentively watering seedlings and taking frost action. Me referring to bounty probably tells you this post is about our allotment. It's starting to feel like a functioning plot and having an actual harvest has temporarily dimmed the focus on the weeds.
Our strawberry patch has been booming! In just 3 weeks we've picked a whopping 3.5kg of fruit. I'm recording the weights of everything we harvest on a spreadsheet so at the end of the year we can total up how much we've grown - and its value in supermarket prices. A bit nerdy of me.
I had kale seeds left over - not many but enough for a small crop. After our caterpillar woes last year we decided to net them. But the netting we have isn't very big so we are harvesting the leaves before they get too big for the net (around 12cm). They're really tender so I'm going to pick them this way from now on.
The potatoes are starting to flower, yippeeee! I read that if you leave them for an extra couple of weeks after they flower you get bigger potatoes. So that's what we're going to do. We're keeping our fingers crossed they stay blight free.
Red currants from the communal fruit trees at the allotment have been made into mixed berry jam along with strawberries and some foraged fruit from last year.
Sadly our garlic in the back garden has rust :( I've cut off a lot of the affected leaves to try and stop it spreading and I'm hoping the bulbs will still reach a good size. All the lower leaves are starting to turn brown now so they only need to hold on for a couple more weeks.
I dug up the worst affected plants and thankfully the bulbs seem fine.
Garlic scapes have been popping up. Before the rust situation, we were cutting them off and putting them on the bbq. Very tasty! If you've got no idea what a scape is, it's a shoot/bud that grows up out of the garlic - you trim it off so that the plant puts its energy into growing the bulb instead.
Scott's family bought me two blueberry bushes for my birthday. We planted them out in the fruit patch at the allotment and they are chock full of fruit.
Red runner beans flowers are the brightest vegetable growing. I'm hoping we get a mountain of beans so we can live off runner beany herb linguine like we did last year. Garlicy, lemony, cheesy pasta filled with freshly picked beans - Summer meals don't get much better than that.
Cornflowers are my favourite wild flower. I squirrelled away lots of saved seeds from the front garden last year so I sowed those along with the cornflower seeds I received as a leaving gift from my last job. The heat this week has coaxed the first flowers open.
