Monday, August 6

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.


This week I am linking to harvest Monday hosted on 


Dave's blog Our Happy Acres



18 comments:

  1. What a wonderful harvest!
    I love blueberries! I don't grow any, but a friend does and she lets me pick from her bushes.
    Beautiful flowers, too!
    Have a great week!

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  2. I have a little blueberry bush. It's in its first year and has only a few fruits. They are about ready to pick.
    My onions were a waste of time. I planted them as sets in the autumn, they needed a lot of watering (no rain for months!) and the number / cost comparison compared with just walking to the supermarket and back made no sense of it at all. Seeds seem the way to go.

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    1. Our blueberries are about 4' tall now.
      I've never grown onions from seed. We usually plant some autumn sets but didn't manage it last year. Usually they do really well and combined with the spring planted ones we are usually almost self sufficient as far as onions go. This year hasn't really been a good onion year though. If we were short of space I think onions would be the first thing to go for the reasons you describe.

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  3. Your giant umbrella extends as far as NE Hampshire! I'm glad to hear that your "Cobra" has been making up for a poor performance by the Runners. Mine have just started a second flush (Cobra, that is). I expect to be harvesting my shelling beans any day now - they are practically dry already, and the plants have lost most of their leaves.

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    1. The beans that the runners have produced, Mark are thinner than usual and the beans inside are swelling very quickly.

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  4. The Aug. 2 harvest photo is lovely! It's better to be safe than sorry when it comes to erratic producers - even if we have a few glut years, like you I will not cut down on the number of plants as you just never know, and I prefer err on the side of too much rather than too little.

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    1. As for gluts, Margaret you don't have to eat everything do you.

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  5. Pretty bouquet Sue! It's composition of red and blue, and one orange dahlia!
    Your courgettes are similar mine, they have thick skin and I have to cut off it before cooking. Sorry about rain, here we had a great thunderstorm sound without any rain drops. But today morning the rain has fallen out finally.

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    1. Our courgette skins are fine, Nadezda. When we were on the moors we had a great crash of thunder directly over the car. It was like an explosion.

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  6. It has certainly been a challenging year for you, weather wise! I tend to plant enough so that if it is a bad year we'll still get something to eat and preserve. This year I guess is a so-so year for most things here. I do hope the onions don't have to be sacrificed to get a good rain!

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    1. Like most years, Dave some things have been far better than others. If we hadn’t been busy watering though I think most things would have been a failure. No rain f=is forecast for this week.

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  7. The last time it rained here (a couple of weeks ago), I'd just lifted onions and left them on a rack to dry in the sun! Sod's Law in action, although I was grateful for the rain, it really perked the plot up. Your apples look so delicious, what variety are they? Rain is forecast for Thursday here with a gloomy overcast weekend to follow. This time I'm ready to bring my onions in!

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    1. Not sure what the apples are, Caro as we didn’t plant them but we think that they are Discovery

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  8. I do hope you get some decent rain, we had a marvelous thunder storm last night with lots of rain. I do feel for you both with all that watering. Your harvests are wonderful especially given the drought, look at those tomatoes and onions! Good to hear the watering helped with the potato harvests.xxx

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    1. We have had some rain, Dina which will have helped and gave us a spell off watering. The radiators even came on this morning,

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