Allotment!

I finally got down there for another nose this evening. I'm so thrilled. OK, so it's a lot of work, and getting the weeds and bolted things up isn't going to be much fun. But all that growing space will be brilliant. Also it has an existing fruit cage and a big rhubarb plant, and a little strawberry patch. I'm a little paranoid that the old (still just about existing) owner will come and remove everything, but I think the chances are pretty low.

The fruit cage is home to a load of raspberry canes with lots of lovely ripe untouched fruit on them, and what appears to be 2 gooseberry bushes and 2 blackcurrant bushes! I'm SO HAPPY about this!!!










I'm also considering investing in a food dehydrator. My current top choice is the Stockli model, as it's not extortionately expensive but seems a decent one. I'll be buying some of the fruit leather inserts because fruit leathers are amazing and we all love them. I must admit that my primary reason for considering getting one was the leather aspect, but it seems you can also dehydrate things like onions and courgettes, and then rehydrate them for use in cooking throughout the year. It seems an ideal way of coping with gluts of things (ha, fat chance of that this year!) and takes way less space than trying to store things in a 'cool dry place' or the freezer. It might end up gathering dust like so many of my other gadgets, but so far I'm hopeful :)  Especially now I'm going to have lots of different kinds of berries to experiment with!

It's been a while..

I have been a little disheartened to be honest, but it's not all bad. The beans seem to be doing very well since I bought a rainbow coloured twirly bird scarer thing from Poundland..

We've also had a decent supply of cucumbers, although the latest ones are very strangely shaped!

I don't think it will be long before our apples are ready. Some of them are very tiny, but that's OK. I can't wait to try them!

 Scrumptious

Broadholme Beauty

I harvested my red onions yesterday. I didn't have room to plant many of the set, so it was a bit of a waste of money, but.. yesterday I met my allotment for the first time! It's VERY weedy but huge and my mum assures me it has good soil. And it only costs £4.50 a year! So next year I will be growing loads of things :)

We've been blackberry picking twice over the Summer holidays and have made a few jars of bramble jelly and a batch of fruit leathers. The leathers are delicious and have proved so popular that I'm seriously considering splashing out on a dehydrator, as our oven doesn't go low enough to cook them without burning within minutes, and unfortunately my friend's oven took *3 days* to dry them sufficently which is a bit of a pain if you want to cook anything else! 

And in even more exciting news, CHICKEN RUN!!!

15 days until the chickens arrive :)  I hope our girls like their new home!
More chicken and allotment news to follow :)

The garden is disappointing me this Summer. It seems very slow to take off and I don't know why. My bean flowers are disappearing as quickly as they appear and I don't know what's eating them. The dwarf beans are a lost cause. Lettuces bolted ages ago, although there are a few still out there. I only have 2 peppers growing out of about a zillion plants (perhaps time to close the greenhouse? I've left it open all the time for a good month or two now which probably defeats the object).  Melons, chillis and watermelons have no flowers yet, squashes are slow to grow. I'm sure they're normally enormous trailing plants by this stage of the Summer. Beetroot is a lost cause. It's so disheartening. Tomatoes are really slow too, although I'm harvesting a few of the Tumbling Toms at last. Bit fed up to be honest.

Plums..

While I was putting the tree netting up I had a quick count of the plums on our tree. I counted 85!!!!! I'd better get researching plum recipes :)

Failures so far this year: lettuce (as usual), dwarf beans, beetroot.

Home grown cherries..

Are the single nicest thing I have EVER eaten in my life, ever. Even nicer than Christmas dinner and chocolate and birthday cake and trifle and strawberries and cream and all my other favourite foods.

We don't have many, again. Last year we had around the same amount but all but 5 were eaten by birds. This year the birds did start pecking at them before they got ripe, so a few had holes in and went mouldy, but there are a fairly decent number left considering the tree's only on it's second year.

Pudding!

The remaining cherries, still ripening

Millie with her cherry. Yes, she does have one plait and one pigtail. I was using her gorgeous Rapunzelish hair to practise fishtail plaits on, and her other side was inaccessible ;)

Posing, with cherry juice on her face. And in her teeth. And down her top.

In other news, this weekend we went raspberry picking at Our lovely local fruit farm. We picked from the tunnels and they were amazing. I am definitely going to attempt to avoid supermarket fruit where possible because it's nothing like the freshly picked stuff! Anyway, I made the raspberries into a jelly, and got my standard 2.5 jars out of the batch (I seem to get this number no matter how much fruit I use!)  Jelly making is so satisfying. I'm going to try and stockpile a load to get us through til next Summer. I'll try strawberry and redcurrant next, also from Primrose Vale fruit :)

The garden is enjoying all the rain. I am not. Where's Summer?!

Today Millie and I harvested the first bag of potatoes. These are actually the 'second earlies' and shouldn't have been the first ones we harvested, but the plants had died and rotted away so I thought we might as well get stuck in. I tipped the contents of the potato bag out onto a binbag and Millie gathered all the spuds. She loved it :)

We've begun to harvest quite a few things. I've been helping myself to sugarsnap peas for a couple of weeks now. They're quite yummy but I think I should probably try cooking them to tempt the children with.

The fruit is doing well. The cherries have started to turn red all of a sudden, which is a pain because I still don't have my fruit tree nets (they're on order). Some of them have been attacked by birds already :(

I can't tell if the plums are looking any bigger or not. I had hoped that the photos in this blog would make slow growth more obvious, but I'm not convinced!

 The mini cucumbers are almost ready to pick. They're SO cute! Apparently each plant (we have 2) can produce up to 20 of these per week. I hope that's a gross exaggeration because the three of us can definitely not manage 40 mini cucumbers in 7 days. The guinea pig might help though :)

June Drop hit the apple trees quite heavily, but as my dad has pointed out, I'm very lucky to be getting any baby apples at all in the first and second years of planting. I think we'll have enough to enjoy, anyway, and only the pear and Bramley haven't produced anything this Summer.

Finally, look at the cute little tomato! I moved the three Tumbling Toms out this week, and planted out the Super Marmandes. I hope not to have to buy any tomatoes at all from July-September/October (wishful thinking I know, they're bound to sucumb to blight as usual)

Hopefully it won't be too long before I actually get to make something out of all this lot. I'm hoping to go raspberry picking at the PYO place soon, and then to make raspberry jelly which is probably one of the nicest foods I've ever tasted.

Garden photos

 Cherries! Almost fully grown, but there's no sign of them turning red yet. Must buy tree nets.

 Uh oh, an apple cordon that's growing at a 90 degree angle because all the fruit is forming at the top..

 The strawberries are mostly being protected from birds this year. These little beauties were hiding under the enviromesh :)

 Potato flowers

 Mini cucumbers! I really hope these are going to grow into fruits. They do look slightly bigger than they did two days ago..

 I have a new plan for the future chickens. I think the best option is a walk in run at the bottom of the garden (here, in place of the shrub and along the fence) with an Eglu coop inside it. I'm hoping to have this in place by my birthday (August 31st)!

 Blueberries!

Fattening plums