Out of the starting blocks

Once courgettes start producing the race is on. Will the courgettes crop so fast that we just can't keep up with the supply?

As I mentioned earlier we planted quite a lot of courgettes partly due to feeling very pessimistic about the plants chance of growing and partly due to the usual packet of free seeds that we couldn't resist sowing.

Actually we are glad that we didn't resist sowing the packet of Tondo di Piacenza as it has proved to be quite a find. It has a good flavour (almost cucumbery) when eaten raw in a salad and the round shape made it an ideal candidate for trying out a stuffed courgette recipe.

The recipe for the ham and mushroom stuffed courgettes was based on the one here. I didn't steam the courgettes first as I didn't really see the need to do this. Neither did I dot the parmesan and breadcrumb mixture with butter.

Last year I gathered together lots of recipes for using courgettes some of which can be found here

Clubbing

Thinking back to my recent post about brassicas. I pulled up a couple more of the poorly sprout plants which confirmed my suspicions (not that I had any doubt) that clubroot was the cause of the sickly looking symptoms.

It's not very pretty is it? Sprouts are hungry feeders and also need plenty of water so it is hardly surprising that when the roots are so badly affected the plants just give up. We do give them a foliar feed but that won't compensate.

Anyway the freebie seeds have confirmed that from now on any sprouts, or cauliflowers for that matter, that we buy will be clubroot resistant varieties.

Moving on to our winter brassicas - we are trying another experiment based on the potential success of this year's carrot experiment.

Last year our carrots were smothered by weeds and we had a crop failure - our fault - we should have weeded more but when crops are being protected under environmesh or netting the temptation is to leave the protection in place. This year you may remember that we covered the carrot bed with weed control fabric. Well if the roots of the carrots are as good as the tops are, we have a success story.

So now we have decided to try covering our winter brassica bed with weed control fabric too. Martyn posted about this on his blog last week.

If nothing else, this will spare our plot neighbours the sight on me scrambling under netting trying to keep the weeds down. It did take longer to plant out the brassicas as we had to cut slits in the fabric to plant through. As the fabric is fairly expensive we are hoping we can reuse it but I am a bit concerned by how much it frayed when cutting. I came up with an idea for a new type of weed control fabric with holes ready cut at the appropriate distance apart with sealed edges. Martyn wasn't too impressed as he reckoned if they developed such a product it would be very expensive! If you ever see such a product on the market - remember you first heard about it here!

Bumbling

I was determined that I would get a shot of a bumble bee to prove that they too love the phacelia and fortunately a less frenetic individual co-operated.

Aren't they just the flying teddy bears of the insect world?

We also have a patch of borage courtesy of some seeds sent to me by Bilbowaggins of Bagend. The flowers are a lovely shade of blue.

They tend to be shy flowers keeping their faces out of sight so I had to coax this one to look at me. The bees love them too and this patch was also buzzing yesterday.

It was more difficult to catch photos of this activity as the bees don't tend to spend very long at each individual flower as they do the phacelia. That's my excuse for the bee below having a bit of a blurry face.