Its been a busy month, we've all been on holidays, its rained a lot, we've harvested a lot, and we've experienced some highs and some lows with our allotment.
Our successes have been the runner beans, broad beans, potatoes, parsley, courgettes, sunflowers, rhubarb, pumpkin, radishes and chard. We've all harvested lots of delicious veg, and personally I've been blanching and freezing like mad, my freezer full of runner beans. I've made delicious beetroot salad, vast quantities of lettuce soup, and I've finally got over my childhood fear of broad beans!
And now to the less successful moments... not so good were the peas, melon, aubergine, cucumbers and sweetcorn.
We were all so looking forward to some gorgeous corn. In fact it was the one thing I really really wanted to grow and eat, to experience how sweet it really should be. Our plants were doing really well and the cobs were forming and getting plump. One day they looked like this:
And the next day this is what we found:
The local $£@!*&^% squirrels had carefully peeled each one and eaten most of our gorgeous corn. We managed to salvage three nearly ripe cobs and so at least we each had one. And they were even better than I expected which made it more disappointing. Next year we'll still grow corn, but in a cage!
We've got in some autumn and winter veg - kale, cavelo nero and cabbage, but the slugs are dining out on the young plants. I've recently seen what a slug pellet does to a slug, and it ain't pretty!! I've been collecting them in bags and chucking them in the bin. Dead slug smells bad too.
We've cleared and dug most of the bit of Shelley's plot that she gave us a month or so ago, we've put most of the autumn and winter veg in there:
We've also got lots and lots of what I think must be newts in the metal water butt. There were loads of these ones about a month ago:
Today I had a look and there were lots of smaller black newts, I caught one in a cup to get a better look and it was very black and had 'whiskers' coming out from below its head. There really are a lot of them in the tank, but I can't identify them from any websites as there don't seem to be any good pictures of baby newts.
We spent yesterday evening eating a gorgeous roast chicken dinner (thank you Seamus!) and looking through catalogues and deciding what we're going to grow next year.
Finally, here's a new pic of our plot, there are gaps appearing again where we've taken out the sweetcorn, broad beans, peas, beetroot and potatoes:
Am looking forward to our first autumn and winter at 28a!
