Rain but in the wrong place!

The last harvest of July was full of beans. The Cobra Climbing French beans are producing beans by the bucketful every other day, and although much more restrained the runner beans are also producing a few beans. The latter seems to be far less happy in the hot, dry conditions and many of the beans they produce are far smaller than usual, the seeds also seem to swell inside the pods quickly. Fortunately Cobra is making up for this shortfall and the Cosse Violette, purple climbing bean, should have some beans to harvest soon.

We are also harvesting broad beans as required. There won't be enough for freezing this year.

31 July

We are now pulling peas from the third and final sowing. One observation is that the first sowing of peas had more pods spoiled by pea moth caterpillars. The second sowing had no caterpillars at all and this third lot so far has just one or two spoiled pods. I guess that this means that there were two generations of pea moths and the second sowing flowered between the two generations.

After watering the bed a few times, Martyn managed to not only lift the remaining Casablanca potatoes but also to dig the bed over and cover it with weed control fabric.

Now that we have completely harvested some crops and a few beds no longer need watering, we have begun to water the potato beds. At this stage it is not likely to increase the yield but it may mean that harvesting will be a bit easier.

The cherry tomatoes are ripening well. We have grown Sungold and a windowsill variety, Red Robin. The Red Robins are the ones on the middle line of the above group of photographs. As we are not growing them on a windowsill there are three plants to each of two large tubs. Surprisingly, Sungold are not splitting this year. No doubt now that I have said that they will start.  So far we have had no larger tomatoes and, like others have reported, we are losing quite a few to blossom end rot. Of late this seems to be a problem most years. At one time we had never come across it.

2 August

We are still cutting lots of courgettes and I have to admit that not all of them are eaten. Last year for some reason we hardly had any fruits which is why we really don't want to cut down the number of plants we grow.

We are still picking berries. I've been picking blueberries for weeks. The plant that was first to fruit is now devoid of berries. The second has very small berries but the other two plants are producing good sized fruit and still have quite a lot of berries to ripen.

The blackcurrants have been smaller than usual too and, although you wouldn't guess from looking at the berries being produced by our thornless blackberry, there are not as many very large fruits as usual.

Last week we picked the first usable, Oullins Gage plums. As is usually the case the first plums to ripen house a grub. This is one good reason to always cut a plum in half before eating. We are hopefully past that stage and are now picking unoccupied plums and they are delicious. It's not a time for complacency though, some grubs may still be in residence so all fruit will still be cut in half before going anywhere near our mouths.

After being without homegrown carrots, what a treat it is to be able to harvest them again. Ours are true wonky carrots and not those that masquerade as wonky in the supermarkets.

We are pulling onions as required although I have begun lifting them and leaving them to dry in the sun. If anything will encourage some rain then that is it! I've already dried off and lifted the shallots, some of which are larger than the onions

We grew two varieties of shallots, Red Sun, (top left), and Golden Gourmet (top right). Of the two Red Sun has certainly yielded the best crop. The bulbs are on the whole larger and there are far less tiny bulbs than there are from the Golden Gourmet.

4 August

Apples are beginning to fall from the tree and we are harvesting those that are otherwise in good condition.

At the end of each plot visit we need to allow time to pick all the sweet peas. At one point last week we had six vases of flowers in the house and my sister had at least two. The stems are becoming much shorter now so maybe this is a sign that the flowering period won't last too much longer.

Sweet peas are not the only cut flowers that we are bringing home. We have managed to find room for a collection of perennial and annual cut flowers. In the vase below we have, dahlias, gaillardia, cosmos, ageratum, clarkia and cornflowers.

By the way, on Friday, we were caught in a downpour complete with thunderstorm.  Unfortunately we found the rain rather than it finding us. We were in the North Yorkshire Moors at the time and on arriving home not a drop of rain had fallen. I think someone is holding a giant umbrella over our part of the country.

Our complete monthly harvests are listed here.

This week I am linking to harvest Monday hosted on 

Dave's blog Our Happy Acres

Copyright: Original post from Our Plot at Green Lane Allotments http://glallotments.blogspot.co.uk/ author S Garrett