On Saturday I popped over to our plot to pick a few tomatoes as our supplies were getting low, by which I mean we were down to one bowl. We hadn't managed to make it over there during the previous week, and in that week it'd changed a lot.
The tomatoes had gone bonkers. At first glance it looked as if there were more red ones than green ones, so I picked as many as I could fit in my bag. That turned out to be just over a kilo, we went back on Sunday to pick the rest, another half kilo.
There's still more to come, which is great news as I had wondered how we'd get as I think we planted them a little too close together in another case of "more-plants-than-space", which happens a lot.
I thought the tomatoes were crazy, and then I saw the squash bed - that's a grand name for where we're growing our courgettes and pumpkins - had also changed. The plants had filled out and there were plenty of yellow flowers from the veg and red nasturtiums enjoying the sunshine. And plenty of bees enjoying the flowers.
Our butternut squash are getting there now and we've six or seven of them on a couple of plants. They're still a bit on the small side, but they look butternut squash shape and will be plenty for MOH and I, meal-sized in fact.
I did have a bit of pumpkin-envy though as I spotted pumpkins the size of beach balls on the next plot - yes they are huge, and will easily need two people to lift them.
PUMPKIN-ENVY
Spurred on by the success of others, I hunted through my pumpkins and found this:
MY MUNCHKIN
IT doesn't quite compete does it. I guess it was never going to as it's a Munchkin variety. Checking further I'd had more success with the courgette plants. Out of nowhere a baby marrow weighing half a kilo had appeared, so that and two round courgettes came home too.
I'm hoping that the sweetcorn will soon be done too, the tassels are darkening but at the moment the corn is still a greedy-White, but some are just turning yellow. They've done well among the weeds, ahem.
The tagetes seem to like the artichoke and are thriving. At home they've been pretty much eaten by the slugs and the snails, but not here. I've just spotted some seed heads in the photo below, so I'll be saving those so I can grow them again next year.
We've also dug all the potatoes now too, as I'm coveting the space for my brassicas which really need to go out so they can establish themselves before any change of weather. Sunday we dug almost five kilos of two varieties. It's amazing how many of these Shetland Black potatoes we mistook for stones, and how quickly we adopted our behaviour to tap the stone-looking ones on the fork. If it clunked it was a stone, if not potato. The purple Arran Victory was much easier to spot and in both cases it was easy to see how the soil had improved.
I'd say we're not big potato eaters, but we've already plans to grow plenty more potatoes next year. Well that's assuming we up our digging game in a part of the plot which we've not used (or dug) yet. In the meantime our crop is double-bagged (paper and canvas) and stored somewhere cool and dark.
What have you had success growing this year?