5th June Update

Whew! Trying to keep up to date with all the weeds that the wet weather has been germinating, working full time, looking after Lee after his recent op AND trying to post on this blog is proving to be a bit difficukt, but as I've a few minutes spare I thought I'd get up to date by posting some of the piccies from the plot so far this month!

This first batch were taken on 5th June, and as you'll see from the next couple of posts, everything seems to be growing like crazy, which unfortunately also includes the weeds!

The First piccy is of the central bed on plot1, in the foreground are the minipop sweetcorn and butternut / pumpkins, and behind is the brassica bed, which is filling up nicely!


This second piccy is of the aliums bed, interplanted with carrots (5 varieties), which we did suffer some problems of having had the tops of their foliage nibbled by the local wabbits, but they seem to have come on well since then and we harvested the first couple last week, delish!

As you can see in this bed is also our fist batch of overwintering garlic, here going nicely yellow, and which will probably be pulled later on today!

Behind the garlic is the tops of the first sowing of parsnips, a lot of folks on the Grapevine forum have been having lots of problems with parsnip germination, but the first batch we sowed into loo rolls are going great guns, and the second batch sowed direct are also germinating nicely, I guess we must just have a nice fresh batch of seeds and a bit of luck, currently we've about 94 parsnips growing aweay nicely!

This piccy shows the courgette plants in the center, the peas on the netting behind, the turnips sowed in the center of the netting, some of the bunching overwintering onions at the front, some of the outdoor toms and just planted in the bottom left corner some of our outdoor cuces!

The courgettes seem to be groeing everytime you look at them, in fact we had our first flowers about a week ago, and I'm hoping for lots of fruit in the next few days!

Bunching onions are also now at an edible size, so some of them will also be harvested today!

Other things we've been harvesting include about 6 1/2lb of ripe strawberries so far (about a lb every 3 days or so), 3 meals worth of new tatties from the ones we planted in September on plot1 (they were supposed to be xmas spuds, but died back in october, then came back in March and we didnt have the heart to pull them!) Must say, freshly dug new tatties, washed, boiled gently in their skins with a knob of butter and a little salt is one of those tastes that is definitely worth waiting for! We've still another 15 new tattie plants to harvest yet, so I have a feeling that new spuds will be on the menu again for a few days yet!


In the greenhouse things did seem to have stalled with the cooler weather we've been having of late, but this week they do seem to be growing on apace again!

We've had 6 lovely fresh and sooo crisp and tasty cucumbers now from the one marketmore thats inside the greenhouse, as you can see here it had 3 cuces at once on it!

The small plastic greenhouse at home has given us about 8 or 9 rips toms so far, and there's quite a few growing nicely in there too, along with a few in the greenhouse on the plot!

The peppers, chillies and aubergines in the greenhouse have also been flowering away nicely, and we've now lots of chillies, quite a few peppers and toms growing, but as yet no aubergines have set, ah well, plenty of time yet!



Its not all been good tho, we've entered into the Chileman Big Jim Chilli Challenge, to see who can grow the largest Big Jim chilli pepper, we started off really good, with the 3 early chillies on the Big Jim growing away well, until they hit 13.5 cm, and then we started to get some problems, as can be seen in the piccy here! It was almost as tho the skin had split and gone soft, but above that the chilli was fine, so we took the decision to harvest them and Lee used them in a lovely mince dish he did the other night!

Thankfully we've now got another 2 larger Big Jims on the plant, which last time I checked were 15cm long, good, but not yet good enough!

Anyhows, another more recent set of piccys to follow! Hope you enjoy them all!